A couple of days ago it came to light that Microsoft, everyone's favorite software powerhouse took out a patent on what very well could be the spyware to end all spyware - a system which scans information stored on a workstation and sends it Someplace Else for analysis... to generate advertising specifically geared for the person logged into the box. The patent describes a system integrated not only into the operating system and user interface, but all of the applications linked against this functionality that would look at every document on the machine, every e-mail sent or recieved, multimedia files' metadata …
Lyssa and I changed our plans last weekend because a) there weren't nearly as many RSVP's for the Starcraft LAN party we were organizing, and b) because there were some things that we had to take care of because we'd been putting them off for too long. That morning we sent out word of the cancellation, had a quick breakfast, and then set out for Maryland to take care of things.
There. Nice and fast, so that nothing else has a chance to crash on me.
Late last month, a bill snuck through the Virginia general assembly that adds considerable fees onto even trivial traffic violation tickets. If you are convicted of a driving misdemeanor (say, driving ten miles over the speed limit, which if you don't do in northern Virginia you run the risk of being rear-ended by a bored commuter) the bill can add up to one thousand dollars onto the fee. If you get nailed for something really egregious, such as driving while intoxicated, you may as well sell your car because the civil remediation fees alone will be over $2kus, never mind …
Someone Out There has set up a new wiki on the Tor network for exchanging and cataloging links. It's admittedly a little thin right now on content, but the more that word gets out, the bigger it'll hopefully get. You can check it out here: http://mihfrbaf562yakt2.onion/wiki/
No, I'm absolutely serious: Somebody in Japan has been going into men's rooms of government office buildings in Japan and is leaving envelopes of 10,000 yen bills in the stalls for people to find since April of 2007. Nobody knows who's doing it (because the bathrooms there are the only rooms that don't have securicams) or why they're doing it, but the bundles of notes are left neatly wrapped in paper with the houshuu ('remuneration') written on each of them, along with a carefully handwritten letter stating that whomever is leaving the packets of money will find the cash …
At some point in the past year or two, twenty-five undercover CIA operatives traveled to Italy to abduct one Abu Omar, an Islamic cleric suspected of involvement in an act of terrorism in Milan back in 2003. However, they didn't follow secure communications procedures (or those same procedures need to be updated badly), and they were rumbled by Italian law enforcement, who are now trying the agents in absentia for kidnapping. Like many people these days, the operatives used cellular telephones to keep in touch with one another through the course of the op. Unfortunately, the prosecutor was able to …
It has come to the attention of the news media that documents that really shouldn't be getting out (like blueprints of high-security military installations) are being stashed on publically accessible web and FTP servers around the net, sometimes on the networks of the subcontractors themselves where anybody with the time and patience to go digging has a chance at finding it. During research for this article, reporters working for the Associated Press found dozens of sensitive documents that weren't even protected with a basic password. Moreover, sometimes you …
Ever since 9/11, the US government has been an informational vacuum cleaner that sucks up information on just about everyone in this country, or who happens to enter or leave the country (as some people with laptops have discovered). What they do with it and where they put it all is a matter of some speculation; suffice it to say that the network attached storage system companies are making a killing selling RAID systems to them... at any rate, it's come to light that they're mining more than just terrorism-related information to generate profiles on people. In fact, there …
I love books. Chances are, you love books, too. The problem with that is that there is never enough room for all of the books you've read, and never enough for all the ones that you want to get around to reading because physical space is at a premium, and pesky structures like doors get in the way of building bookcases. That is, unless you do what this guy did and build a classic-style "door hidden behind a hinged bookcase". Rather than buy bookcase kits from a furniture store, kenbob@instructables designed his own bookcases and figured out how to …
If you've been on the Net for a while, you've probably seen buttons or tags for Digg, which is a community-based news management and relay website. The idea is that news articles are submitted by users, and everyone else on the site votes on how interesting, relevant, or helpful the articles are. Articles deemed popular through this method rise to the top (theoretically) while unhelpful articles sink to the bottom and are lost (again, theoretically).
