Years and years and years ago, when I lived in Pittsburgh, I had an older buddy named Scott.
Yeah, this is sounding like a story that I'd tell my grandkids. Bear with me.
Somewhen in the past couple of years, and I don't know exactly when because life and Time tend to change things, Scott joined the Army, and at some point got shipped to Iraq. Something happened out there (I don't know exactly what - this isn't much of a story, is it?), but it left him paralyzed from the waist down and discharged from the military.
This weekend just passed, Lyssa, Laurelinde, and I journeyed northward to the state of New Jersey to join friends and colleagues at Saloncon, a one day convention (sort of) that celebrates the finer things in life, such as dressing well for the sake of dressing well, refinement, politeness, and a chance to show off all the nifty things that we've been building in our basements all year. I say that the convention is 'sort of' one day because the festivities actually began on Friday night with the steampunk meet and greet at the hotel's sports bar and ended on Sunday …
George W. Bush, while at NSA headquarters yesterday, asked the US Congress to turn the NSA program that allows any and all communications to be monitored without a warrant into a law rather than letting the program expire in February of 2008. While this law does not give operatives carte blanche to break into a home and plant monitoring devices or copy data from computers (that's covered by another set of statutes entirely), it does mean that they can record and analyze telephone calls, e-mails, and other forms of communication without oversight or legal record. As to why he didn't …
The online stock trading and investment company TD Ameritrade announced this morning that a database server holding contact information for approximately 6.3 million customers was cracked and copied by agents unknown. They're saying that the Social Security and account numbers in the database weren't copied, but it sounds kind of odd that crackers would only take names, addresses, and e-mail addresses and leave the good stuff behind. Because the FBI, SEC (Securities Exchange Commission), and FIRA (FInancial Industry Regulatory Authority) are involved they're not allowed to release any more information pertinent to the case. The compromise appears to have …
MC Frontalot is at it again, this time celebrating the release of his new nerdcore hip-hop album, Secrets From the Future. In fact, he's released his first music video, a silly little ditty called It Is Pitch Dark, a tribute to classic pieces of interactive fiction lke Zork and The Lurking Horror. It's goofy. It takes place in someone's basement. MC Frontalot dances better than I do. It's all good.
If you can't reach Youtube for some reason, go to MC Frontalot's homepage, where you can download the video in a number of other formats (including the .mp3 of the …
Some time on Monday, the Bastille Linux project was notified that someone had hijacked their domain, namely, a domain squatter named Mykhaylo Perebiynis who is willing to return use of the domain name for the paltry sum of $10kus. The official announcement can be read here. However, because the Bastille security system has been running on more than just Linux for a few years now (vis a vis HP-UX and Mac OSX), Jay Beale has decided to rename the project to Bastille Unix and acquire a new domain name while his lawyers fight it out with Perebiynis.
Scientists at the University of California-Riverside physics lab have created under laboratory conditions a most unusual form of matter: Positronium in molecular form, which is composed of discrete molecules of electron-positron (anti-electron) pairs.
Now, why they're calling these molecules I have to wonder - technically they'd be an exotic and rare form of atom and not molecule (because molecules are made up of multiple atoms). Maybe the reporter got his or her facts wrong. Still, this is definitely a breakthrough in particle physics because it represents a stable (for a couple of seconds, at least) axis of matter and antimatter in …
Yesterday wasn't so much a wave of mutilation as it was a stormfront of WTF sweeping across the land. While I can't really put my finger on any one trigger event that caused yesterday to go west in a serious way, I can outline more or less what happened. First off, the hard drive in my workstation at the office decided to pack it in while I was working on something, which turned the rest of the day into a mad dash to find a new drive and rescue everything that I could. Finding a replacement drive took somewhere around …
A number of lawsuits and Freedom of Information Act requests filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation have confirmed what people have been saying since the get-go, which is that the FBI's telecommunications data mining program went far beyond what it was supposed to (login/password required, bugmenot.com will hook you up). It's well known and documented that the US government's been leaning on telecommunication companies all across the country (and a few rolled over and bared their throats without even being ordered) to provide them with lists of names and numbers of their customers so that who called whom …
