Friday 30 March 2007 at 11:43 pm
Rialian has arrived safely in Colorado after driving cross-country for about two days to join the Gildowan family. One of the first things he did when he got there was jack the donated eMac into their network and start installing Mac OSX Tiger for them so that they could get back on the Net (after all, there are three forms of death: brain death, heart death, and dropping off the Net).
The physicians taking care of Ashran are amazed at the speed with which he is recovering. What they thought were
third degree burns were downgraded to second degree burns about a day after he was taken off of the respirator. As of today, he's been moved from the burn unit into the less-specialised hospital (is there a word for what amounts to the general population of a hospital?). Rialian says that Ashran looks more sunburned than anything else, though the nerve endings don't know what to make of this, either, and so are misfiring rather frequently. One of his legs is in a painful state, and he has difficulty putting any weight on it (he's in physical therapy right now).
The children have seen their father, and are doing well. Unfortunately, Rialian's taught them to boodle people.
All good things. Well, mostly. The boodling's pretty scary.
Friday 30 March 2007 at 1:08 pm
This is one of the neatest art hacks I've seen in a while. Let me explain:
Books are ultimately tools for storing information in a non-volatile manner for ease of transportation and reference. They're a relatively low bandwidth medium, limited by how fast the reader can turn the pages and the rate at which the visual cortex processes the characters, but are remarkably stable. Diskettes, on the other hand, are a more informationally dense storage medium, weigh less, and take up less space. They are more vulnerable to mistreatment, however: A fingerprint in the wrong place can wipe out large quantities of data by corrupting the file system, and they are sensitive to forces in the environment (such as magnetism) that the printed word ignores.
Somebody named James Downey figured that the best of both worlds would be
a book that contains a diskette drive and floppy disk, and so combined the two. The 5.25 inch floppy drive he used is fully operational, it only needs to be connected to a computer, and the disk is capable of storing data.
Maybe I'm just being parochial, but this sort of thing brings a smile to my face.
Thursday 29 March 2007 at 2:16 pm
Billy Hoffman of the security outfit SPI Dynamics unveiled the fruits of his research at Shmoocon last weekend (which I'm still miffed about not being able to attend),
botnet software written in Javascript that runs on any modern web browser. His prototype botnet agent is called Jikto, and it searches for
cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in websites after beginning execution when the user looks at a malicious website or e-mail message. Periodically, it will phone home with vulnerable URLs and details of same. This means that even Net-capable cellphones can unwittingly be turned into botnet members.
Javascript can hypothetically be dropped in anywhere on the web - comments in a weblog can contain Javascript unless the engine has a JS scrubber. HTML e-mail and newsgroup posts can contain live Javascript code. Compromised websites can silently have Javascript code dropped into them. All of these tactics have been spotted in use in the wild.
There is also no reason that a Javascript malware agent can only scan for XSS vulnerabilities as the user browses the Net. JS is a very flexible language, and someone somewhen will find other things to do with it - website flooding is just the beginning.
Hoffman changed his plans at the last moment, and did not release the source code to Jikto at Shmoocon because it would be put to abuse almost immediately. When interviewed later, Hoffman was quoted as saying "I'm not that smart a guy. If I'm talking about it at a conference, you better believe somebody else has figured it out. Those people have not told people about it."
Given some of the stuff I've heard coming out of Europe lately, I'm inclined to think that he's right.
Thursday 29 March 2007 at 1:11 pm
Windows XP, let me be clear. And they won't let you download it unless you're using IE on a known valid (by WGA) copy of Windows, but there are ways around that (thanks, cow-orker!).
Microsoft has released
a utility for Windows XP that parses the System Restore data and shows you everything that's changed for a specified period of time to aid in debugging. It can show you what software has recently been installed, what hotfixes and Windows Components have been installed, what BHOs (browser helper objects - read 'call it spyware and be done with it') have infected IE, what drivers have been added or changed, ActiveX controls, and a code structure I've never heard of before called an Auto-Start Extensibility Point, which the KB article says lets a programme start without a user requesting it.
Is anyone laying money on ASEPs being used in next-gen malware?
Anyway, this seems like a useful tool to add to your troubleshooting toolbox.
Thursday 29 March 2007 at 11:33 am
No, really. He's autographed and donated
the keyboard he wrote most of The Sandman with, along with a bunch of other things to
the Open Rights Group, a grassroots organisation dedicated to setting up a sane digital rights infrastructure and bringing to light abuses of same.
Tuesday 27 March 2007 at 11:26 pm
Long-time readers of my website know that I've been a fan of the band
Information Society for years on end - ever since their first big single (
What's On Your Mind? (Pure Energy) hit the airwaves. The band has been through this, that, and the other thing over the years, and now they're back together and have a new album coming out. Last week the first single from their upcoming album (entitled
Oscillator) was released on the Net only to downloadable online music stores like
iTunes.
Now, I've got a pretty big chip on my shoulder about downloadable music stores because so many of them restrict what you can do and where you can listen to the songs you download with
DRM, digital rights management, which happens to be anything but. I'm kind of quiet about it because I'd rather let my dollars do the talking for me. Contrary to what the RIAA might say of most of the people on the Net, I don't have any problem with paying for music but I'm always on the lookout for good music that doesn't suck.
More under the cut...
Tuesday 27 March 2007 at 10:15 pm
While browsing one of my e-mail accounts today I came across a rather worrisome notice:
Home electronics superchain Best Buy bought out Speakeasy.net.
Speakeasy is known for being a geek-friendly DSL provider - their tier-one tech support is extremely knowledgable, and if you know your stuff they'll listen to you and help you figure things out. Best Buy purchased them because Speakeasy has one of the better developed VoIP networks of any ISP in the US today, and they're always angling for another chunk of the market. The announced purchase price was $97mus. They claim that they're not going to be changing anything, but I'm holding my breath, just in case....
As if that wasn't enough...
More under the cut...
Tuesday 27 March 2007 at 10:03 pm
Because Bladeless Axe was in town for
Shmoocon this weekend just past, we gave it our best shot to hang out while she was around here, which wound up in a couple of near misses culminating in Lyssa and I spending the evening hanging out with her last night until rather later than any of us had hoped. To the tune of finally going to bed at 0200 EST5EDT today because we went out for rather a late dinner...
I'm getting old. I can't get by on four hours of sleep anymore. My ass, and most of the rest of me, was dragging on the ground all day today. So much so that even coffee wasn't enough to get me anywhere within spitting distance of my game.
After dinner tonight I curled up for a nap with all of the windows open (high temperature in DC today: 81 degrees Fahrenheit) and slept for about three hours solid. I'm probably going to go back to bed soon after I finish writing this. And do the laundry. And pay a couple of bills. And and and...
Yeah, I need to go to bed.
Tuesday 27 March 2007 at 12:30 pm
Geneticists at the University of Nevada have spent the past seven calendar years working on producing viable chimaerae, hybrid organisms of human and nonhuman natures. The project's most remarkable success to date was announced yesterday:
A sheep that is 15% human by cell count. That's right - one tenth of its cellular makeup is from an unknown specimen of homo sapiens sapiens. During gestation, cells from an adult human were injected into the peritoneum of a sheep fetus, which allowed the cells to be integrated through the course of foetal development.
The purpose behind these experiments are the eventual development of transplantable organs for people - rather than hunting to find a suitable donor, an animal could be bred and harvested for replacement internal organs. The key is making sure that the animal cells won't trigger an immune response, a problem which at this time has not been worked out.
Still, here's hoping.
Monday 26 March 2007 at 7:59 pm
Not much time for writing or posting - sorry. Maybe tomorrow, when things calm down.
Monday 26 March 2007 at 11:17 am
Wireless networking is a neverending headache for system and network admins, and not just because some makes and models of access points are so flaky, the could have come out of a box of cereal. When you crank up an RF transceiver, the signals go everywhere, which means that people outside of a building can at least see some traffic beyond the walls, and sometimes beyond the property line. I don't think that I have to go into what a security threat this is... normally, you can use a
Faraday cage to contain the signals, but building such a construction from scratch is not only expensive but prohibitive in complexity and PITA factor when you're talking about an entire building.
An outfit called EM-SEC Technologies has perfected
a Faraday cage in a can, a metallic paint that blocks RF emissions in the part of the EM spectrum used by wi-fi devices. When securing a facility from wi-fi leakage, you just repaint the walls with this stuff and it helps mitigate the risk of someone cracking a network from the outside via a wireless access point, either one set up and administered by the organisation in question or a clandestinely installed AP.
Word has it that the US government has been using this stuff for a while, and they like it so much that EM-SEC Technologies has put it on the open market because it'll be profitable to sell it.
Saturday 24 March 2007 at 10:09 am
Season 29/3 of
Doctor Who will start
1900 local time, 31 March 2007, which works out to about 1400 EST5EDT.
Gentlemen.. start your BitTorrent clients.
Friday 23 March 2007 at 11:01 am
Am I alone in thinking that
wearing a shoulder holster designed for your techno-toys is a bad idea these days? Sure, it reduces your
batman factor by redistributing the gear, but these days security guards (especially in office buildings) are much more aware of possible threats, including weapons. At a glance, one shoulder holster looks pretty much like another, and no matter what that bulge under your arm might be, a bulge under the arm is still suspect, and any police officer or security guard worth the name is going to check it out. At the very least, airport security will want to take a good look at what you've got slung under your arm.
Friday 23 March 2007 at 08:04 am
Subject: anti-spammers are lamers
subj
regards, spammer.
Cute. How very cute. Thank you, Shaw Cable.
Thursday 22 March 2007 at 10:49 pm
Summer and the kids are holding up as well as they can.
Ashran has second and third degree burns covering about 20% of his body (figure extracted from the last medical report). He was upgraded to stable condition earlier tonight. He's also been taken off of the respirator but is under sedation most of the time for the pain.
Things for a care package: Stuff for kids. Toiletries (the ones they give you in hotels are
crap). Instant meals that can be made in a hotel room.
Ashran will need clothing when he gets out - XL shirts, size 36-38 long pants, size 17 shoes and socks. Word has it that this takes priority because Summer and the kids are all right for clothing, but he's down
everything.
Thursday 22 March 2007 at 10:43 pm
We lost Eris tonight.
His hatred was apparently used up the last time he resurrected himself (!), and subsequently mellowed out over the past few months.
Thursday 22 March 2007 at 7:17 pm
No, not for me. For
Ashran and Summer Gildowan and their children, whose home was taken from them by a fire on the 20th of March, just a couple of days ago. Ashran was in the house while it was on fire, in the shower, as coincidence would have it. Still, he is hospitalised at this time, and burned over 20% of his body. He's not going to be in shape to start his new job in April, and due to the slightly mangled state of his shell he can't work at his current job.
Camp Cambodia has put out the word for assistance while they work to help their friends and family, and thus do I repost the information to all of you: They need money, clothing, housewares, and computer components for communications.
Rialian has volunteered to collect everything and drive it out to them as soon as possible.
Lyssa and I are collecting stuff to give to them - I've got some clothes to donate, but I don't know if they'll fit Ashran or not because he's quite a tall individual. I have a couple of pairs of boots and such like that I'm going to throw into the mix, along with a few pre-paid credit cards from Visa that can be used like a regular charge card. I've also given Tori the run of my spare parts bin to help out however I can on the frankenputer.
Rialian has graciously volunteered use of
the Walking the Thresholds registration form for donating funds to the Gildowan family - put 'Gildowan' (the family's surname) in the Paypal notes to make sure that it gets to them.
Thursday 22 March 2007 at 3:24 pm
Translation: "You have an extra nerve that I didn't find last time!"
Yes, once again Gallifreyan physiology strikes, and I wound up rolling sour cherries in the dentist's chair.
Last week I had the first stage of a root canal done, and I've been in a holding pattern ever since while the last of the nerve tissue dried up and was flushed away, so that the core could be implanted and sealed.
Well, as it turns out, things are never quite that simple...
More under the cut...
Wednesday 21 March 2007 at 12:26 pm
Tor,
The Onion Router is a well-known net.privacy project that has been the subject of a grassroots development project for a couple of years now. The EFF has made room for a couple of student developers through Google's Summer of Code programme and
posted an official announcement to the NoReply wiki. To apply for a position in the project you have to have a code sample and be at least somewhat familiar with how Tor works and how the code works. Knowledge of crypto is a major plus, seeing as how it encrypts traffic between nodes for privacy. You might also be called upon to present on the topics of privacy and freedom in your area because you'll be one of the public faces of the tor project. Nick Mathewson and Roger Dingledine, the project's core developers, have signed up to act as mentors to accepted applicants.
More information is available at the wiki page, along with links to the mailing lists that you can use to sign up.
Wednesday 21 March 2007 at 08:55 am
What better time to invade Earth then
when everyone is pigging out on candy and ham? (note: safe for work)
Tuesday 20 March 2007 at 3:19 pm
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Tuesday 20 March 2007 at 2:50 pm
Always double-check what machine you're working on. And always, always make sure your backups are good!
In the state of Alaska, a sysadmin at the department of revenue accidentally reformatted a hard drive that contained information pertaining to a oil fund account worth roughly $38bus.
Yep - billions of US dollars.
For an encore, rather than restore the data for the account from a backup hard drive, he then reformatted
the backup drive on top of that - he probably hit the up arrow, changed the device name, and touched it off again. By this time, any sysadmin worth the name would be sweating bullets and praying to any pantheon that was on call that evening.
Then, as common sense would dictate, he went to the backup tapes to try to restore the last known good copy of of the account data.... and the backup tapes were bad. Such is the stuff of nightmares that sometimes result in the dreamer never awakening again.
Ultimately, they had to call in contractors to key in by hand 800,000 pages of hardcopy to reconstruct the account data.
Tuesday 20 March 2007 at 12:07 pm
Fnords about as
the FBI announces that terrorists might be getting jobs as bus drivers because foreigners, some with ties to extremist groups, are getting licenses to do so. They also say that they have no information whatsoever about a plot, and so we have nothing to fear.
Which is it, guys? Should we start driving our kids to school because They are getting bus drivers' licenses, or should we "go on with our lives"?
Tuesday 20 March 2007 at 10:59 am
Embedding a programming language's interpreter in firmware all but assures that someone out there will find ways to abuse it.
Abuse it to the point of rendering the hardware utterly inoperable.
Monday 19 March 2007 at 8:50 pm
Last night on
Sci Fi was episode eight from season one of
The Dresden Files, the long-awaited adaptation of the first novel,
Storm Front
. This was supposed to be the pilot episode of the series but the Sci-Fi Channel execs decided to change the order that the episodes would be shown in, and instead opened the season with
Birds of a Feather some weeks ago.
Beyond this link lie spoilers....
More under the cut...
Monday 19 March 2007 at 11:56 am
As I've been talking about lately (probably to the point of annoyance), I underwent my second root canal last Friday, and I've been laying low to give myself a chance to recover. Dental work always knocks me on my six for some reason, probably due to elevated levels of stress hormones and my body trying to deal with all of the unusual chemicals that winds up in it. I've been cutting back on the amount of Motrin I've been taking, in particular - for over a week I'd been taking twelve to sixteen 200mg tablets every day to keep the pain in abeyance so I'd be functional. The last thing I needed was a migraine on top of my body's sinister trigeminal nerve firing constantly. On the other hand, my stomach and liver probably didn't appreciate having to process all of that ibuprofin, so I'm trying to give them a break. Still, there's a little tenderness in that tooth - I can't really chew on that side of m y mouth, which I have to be careful of, so when I absolutely need to, I limit myself to six tablets of Motrin every day and no more. I don't touch the Vicodin unless there is no other recourse, but I haven't had to do that since Friday night, just before going to bed.
More under the cut...
Monday 19 March 2007 at 09:12 am
I love my girlfriend.
I love
Home on the Strange, too - read this story arc for the explanation.
Saturday 17 March 2007 at 12:38 pm
Headache. Upset stomach.
Maybe going cold turkey after taking 12-16 tablets of Motrin a day for ten days wasn't such a good idea.
Friday 16 March 2007 at 6:43 pm
At 1000 EST5EDT I drove into the endodontist's office for the root canal procedure that I've been dreading for the past week-and-some.
The waiting's always worse than anything else, or at least that's what I've decided now that I've had two such procedures done so far. I showed up a couple of minutes early and was immediate greeted by Dr. Dellork and the attendant. Their manner is quite friendly, and immediately put me at ease, which is something that I very much needed at that point in time. Once room #1 was free, I was lead back to the.. you know, I'm not entirely sure what to refer to that part of the office as, so I'll just keep calling it an office.. office, sat down, and waited for Dr. Dellork to come in.
I'm glad that I brought a book with me, because I had something of a wait until he had reached a stopping point with another patient and walked over to get me set up for the root canal. First things first, he scooped up a goodly amount of benzocaine gel and placed it on my gum, way in the back, where the largest nerve trunk runs. Presently, I could feel the parts of my mouth that I was most concerned about lose sensation.
Better living through science and chemistry.
More under the cut...
Thursday 15 March 2007 at 9:46 pm
On 16 June 2007 Mark Nicholas (formerly known as Cosmicity)
will be playing the Depot in Baltimore, Maryland with Red This Ever and The Case of Gretta Conners. Tickets will be available at the door for $5us.
Thursday 15 March 2007 at 1:03 pm
Maybe CERT-FI is following in the footsteps of US-CERT (free tip for you guys: 300 bps is obsolete!), which is why it's taken them eight months to say anything about this, but
there is a particularly interesting worm that attacks Windows crawling around on the Net called
Allaple-A which is remarkably subtle for an infectious agent. First of all, it's polymorphic, meaning that it rewrites parts of itself whenever it spreads, which makes it difficult for antivirus software to find and kill it. At first, it spread by bruteforcing passwords against the Radmin service and open network shares, but there are versions that use other attack vectors extant at this time, usually a package of remotely exploitable vulnerabilities.
More under the cut...
Thursday 15 March 2007 at 11:18 am
If you need to generate flash archives of a Solaris 9 or 10 machine but you can't seem to find the
flarcreate utility, make sure that you have the following packages installed:
- SUNWinst
- SUNWadmfw
- SUNWadmc
- SUNWadmfr
Install in reverse order.
Thursday 15 March 2007 at 09:11 am
Last evening television viewers in Arizona were treated to an unexpected bonus cable show:
Soundless hardcore porn in lieu of Tom Brokaw. It seems that someone zipped the cable feed of KPPX-TV (carried by Cox Communications' cable net) and replaced it with a pornographic movie.. Cox says that it was a 'source issue'; ION Television (the parent company of KPPX-TV, Mesa, Arizona) says that someone sabotaged their feed, and they've started hunting for the perpetrator.
If nothing else, zipping's come a long way from a guy in a rubber mask being spanked with a flyswatter.
Thursday 15 March 2007 at 08:47 am
Looking over my entries for the past couple of days, I haven't been writing nearly as well as I would have liked, nor about the things that I've been concerned about the most lately. Frankly, I've just been trying to get through the day in one piece, with enough energy left over after I get home to throw a couple of loads of laundry in and relax a bit. You could say that I've had a lot on my mind this week.
More under the cut...
Wednesday 14 March 2007 at 1:59 pm
3.14159... take a right at the decimal point, and bring your hiking boots.
Wednesday 14 March 2007 at 12:12 pm
...Lyssa and I headed out to Rialian's place last night for the return of open study, stopping at our local
Five Guys burger joint for dinner en route.
Five Guys reminds me a lot of the O in Pittsburgh - it's homey and cozey, the food is tasty (only they serve hamburgers made to order instead of hot dogs), and when you order a large fries, they give you
a large order of fries. A large fries is easily enough for two people so it's safe to halve your order if you go there. The hamburgers were made on site and not shipped over frozen, and it showed. Please bear in mind, they are a burger joint only, so if you're looking for more you won't find it, but what they do have is excellent. I give them two flareguns, only because your heart will despise you afterward.
After dinner Lyssa and I got lost on our way to Rialian's due to the traffic construction that seems to have turned Rockville into a maze of temporary roads and orange cones. It was almost like Pittsburgh.
More under the cut...
Wednesday 14 March 2007 at 11:02 am
The RIAA, in its effort to sue everyone and everything it can on the face of the planet because it thinks they've been pirating music
has filed suit against a retiree who is paralysed on the left side of his body, nevermind the fact that he is probably unable to use a computer because he is medically disabled. John Paladuk is also largely unable to speak due to the stroke which paralysed him.
On top of that, his sole means of income is his disability check.
Wednesday 14 March 2007 at 08:08 am
Since announcing their plan to start offering systems with Linux pre-installed, Dell has opened
a survey site at which you can vote for what systems you'd like them to offer and what distribution of Linux to support. I ask everyone to participate in this effort to help them get this project off the ground.
Tuesday 13 March 2007 at 1:56 pm
The article says that so-called bedouin workers,
who don't work out of offices or their homes, but from restaurants and coffee shops all day on laptops seem to be indigenous to San Francisco, California, but I think I've seen them in DC, Virginia, and New York City in my travels (and come to think of it, I was probably one of them during my last job in Pittsburgh). Rather than pay by the square foot for office space or work out of someone's bedroom, basement, or garage (which seem to be the traditional birthplaces of companies), people are paying by the scone, muffin, and/or cup of coffee. Due to the proliferation of wireless net.access, buying a few cups of joe is a small price to pay.
What I want to know is, what's keeping their competitors from staking out the coffee shops and stealing code and ideas? Industrial espionage is an industry growing by leaps and bounds these days, and to be frank, computer security from the user's end of things really needs a lot more work.
Tuesday 13 March 2007 at 12:54 pm
I'd like to post congratulations to J.C. Hutchins, the podcaster behind
7th Son. In
this week's episode he announced that he'd been contacted by an agent about getting the
7th Son trilogy published. Not long after this, what J.C. described as 'a major science fiction publisher' contacted him through his agent about the manuscript for the first novel,
Descent.
Congrats, J.C.!
Tuesday 13 March 2007 at 08:34 am
Yesterday Intel announced
the first few models of its new line of solid-state hard drives based upon NAND gate technology. Rather than using spinning metal platters that use a lot of electricity ('a lot' is a relative term - when you consider the power consumption of a laptop running off of battery power, hard drives are power hogs) they use flashchips similiar to the ubiquitous USB key that just about everyone has one of these days. The Z-U130 line will come in 1, 2, 4, and 8GB capacities, read 28MB and write 20GB per second, which isn't bad for a flashdrive. The solid-state hard drives will initially be aimed at servers and embedded devices (such as PoS terminals). I'm hypothesising that early adopters will buy them for their homemade firewalls (you can get a lot of functionality out of a gigabyte of storage) and other homebrew devices. You can expect that they'll be appearing more and more often in laptops and PDAs as capacities climb and prices fall.
Monday 12 March 2007 at 9:12 pm
Todd of
A Different Drum was nice enough to post
a YouTube playlist of music videos of some of the synthpop acts his label works with, such as Leiahdorus, De/Vision, and Cosmicity. Check 'em out.
Monday 12 March 2007 at 10:48 am
It wasn't really like that, but it's my attempt at a silly subject line for today.
Despite the large amounts of antibiotics and analgesics running through my biosystems in the past week or so, somehow I managed to get kicked between wind and water by the first cold of the season. Waking up with a sore throat and burning sinus drainage should have been my first clue, but it didn't actually sink in until yesterday afternoon, when my nose started running. But now I have to back things up a little bit..
More under the cut...
Friday 09 March 2007 at 11:19 pm
David and Eileen Wetzel converted a 1986 Volkswagon Golf to run on vegetable oil as fuel a couple of years ago, and have been driving around with it for a while now. The Illinois Department of Revenue
is investigating them for criminal charges, mostly for not paying tax on fuel that the car doesn't even use, retroactive to the point at which he re-worked the car's engine. The couple (who are in their late 70's) had to post a $2500us bond (no mean feat when living on a fixed income, as many retired people do), and have to pay $244us in taxes that are five years retroactive. David Wetzel, because he collects used vegetable oil to run his modified car, also had to apply for licenses as a "special fuel" reciever and provider and must stop driving his car until such time as the two licenses are granted.
Friday 09 March 2007 at 12:34 pm
Somebody built a stone circle
out of old cars.
Friday 09 March 2007 at 12:31 pm
Yesterday I linked to an article at Heise Security about
Windows Genuine Advantage phoning home to tell Microsoft that you refused to install it. When word of this got out, supposedly an insider at Microsoft
leaked that Windows Update phones home every time it installs an update. Supposedly, it is only to confirm that an update took to control retransmission and reinstallation from the Windows Update servers; while this makes sense, I would personally feel better if packet captures of this would be posted to confirm or deny his statement.
Which, in fact, I think I'll do tonight while I work on Hummingwolf's new computer...
Friday 09 March 2007 at 11:25 am
Back in 2003, the US Government formed a project called TIA - Total Information Awareness, with a logo that made about half of the country cringe in fear, anger, and disgust, and sparked off a firestorm in the news media because it constituted a major violation of the right to privacy of US citizens. The project was very publically shelved for the edification of the public, though it wasn't actually terminated.
As with many government projects are are shelved due to public outcry,
it was renamed, reclassified, and worked onapace - the data mining software that TIA was supposed to be based upon is now called ADVISE (Analysis, Dissemination, Visualisation, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement). Again, the software's impact upon the right to personal privacy has come to light, and hearings are being held. ADVISE is designed to analyse records of someone's movements, credit transactions, bank transactions, phone calls, e-mail traffic, and other sorts of information, determine who and what they are affiliated with (not necessarily what they are a member of), and cross-reference those results with databases of threats both suspected and known to help analysts decide how much of a threat someone poses to this country.
The ADVISE system is supposedly in beta at this time and merrily chewing on data.
Friday 09 March 2007 at 10:54 am
Windows OneCare is Microsoft's all-in-one personal security suite, encompassing everything from malware removal to virus scanning on your average personal workstation. The latest release has a particularly nasty glitch, though: When scanning your Outlook .pst files, if it happens to come across an infected e-mail
it'll move the whole file into quarantine or delete it entirely depending upon how you've got it configured. It doesn't treat a file that is a legitimate part of a Microsoft app any differently from a trojan executable on the hard drive.
Oops.
Thankfully, there is a workaround for this problem outlined in the article.
Thursday 08 March 2007 at 11:25 pm
I had originally titled a post about last weekend
"''I'm tryin' ta think, but nuttin' happens!'' --Curly, _The Three Stooges_", but a bit of poking around inside the index file generated by my weblogging application revealed that putting a pair of dashes into the title of a post does something that HTML4 doesn't expect - it thinks that they either start or end a comment in a block of HTML. Carefully looking at the frontpage, I could see where the string of posts was broken because there was a post, then part of a post without the headers, then another part of a post without the headers, and then plain HTML text for the rest of the page, and nothing else. If there are no tags that suggest that something is a comment, (like <-- or >--) at least Firefox will barf and go nondeterministic, thus breaking the page. It stopped trying to use the CSS settings when it got to the b0rken wannabe HTML tag.
Note to self: Don't use my usual double-dash character string to credit a quote in the titles of my posts.
I'm going to bed.
Thursday 08 March 2007 at 10:47 pm
Parts of the CSS file aren't being read in, which is why the frontpage looks broken. The individual entries' pages seem intact, and everything looks operational from their side of things.
Anybody know anything about CSS? Comment here.
