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).
Dr. Richard Carmona, who served as Surgeon General of the United States of America between 2002 and 2006 has gone public with some of the problems he had after his appointment by the Bush administration, and it looks like censorship, control, and politicking were the driving force behind a lot of policies and not medical research and science. Dr. Carmona went before a committee in the House of Representatives yesterday, and went on the record in stating that he was censored in many ways by the current regime, including the editing of his speeches by aides who were idealogically closer …
After work last night, the roads of DC were harrowing, to say the least. Lyssa remarked that there would be a goodly amount of asshattery afoot, but I had no idea of just how right she was.. first of all, while driving Lyssa to dance class last night we came upon an unusual sight for northern Virginia: A white Pontiac at perpendicular angles to the rest of the road. The driver had somehow managed to get the front end of his car stuck in the ditch running alongside the road (they're a bit more common than you might expect for …
With stuff like this going on, you have to wonder if the mainstream music industry has pretentions to replacing the Mafia in its business practices. It seems that the major music licensing bodies (ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC, among others) have been shaking down restaurants, coffee shops, and other places where people can gather to listen to music, either over the radio or played live. Some of the songs played at these places were covers of other songs, which it used to be legal to do so long as you didn't turn a profit off of it, but no longer. Specifically …
Jean and Chandler went home early yesterday morning, something that's taking Lyssa and I a while to get used to. They're almost like family to us, and it feels weird to come home after work and not have anyone there. We're now able to take Lucy out of the office and let her spend the evenings in the living room because Chandler isn't here anymore. He's a good dog, to be sure, but he's also never seen small rodents before and we couldn't take a chance.
Lucy, to her credit, wasn't unduly shaken up by Chandler's presence. She knows that …
