Last week some very good friends of Lyssa and I (Heron61 and Teaotter) stayed with us for a couple of days, and then we headed out to the Four Quarters Farm for the gather called Walking the Thresholds - camping for three days in the middle of the woods of Pennsylvania, completely off the grid, with good friends and extended family, eccentrics one and all, for company.
Sounds like fun... and it was, for the most part.
Teaotter went to stay with Laurelinde and family around the middle of last week, so there were only three of us who packed up …
Once again, the movie industry in the US is attempting to adapt William Gibson's novel Neuromancerto the silver screen. This was attempted once before, and all I need to say on the topic is this: It went horribly. If you're really interested in what happened back in 1988, it's out there on the Net, and you can search it out yourselves.
I have only four words to say to the announced creative team of producer Peter Hoffman and director Joseph Kahn:
Don't fuck this up.
The projected release date is sometime in 2009, and there are precious few details …
As you've probably guessed, I've been too busy to write at the moment because there are a lot of things happening.
This weekend past, Lyssa and I were going crazy getting the apartment torn apart, cleaned, and put back together in time for Heron61 and Teaotter to fly in from Portland to visit us this week. As one might expect, this was a nontrivial exercise, and involved disconnecting many things, moving them, running the vacuum cleaner, moving them back into place, and starting them back up. This also meant running around to acquire foodstuffs to make dinner for everyone on …
One Gary McKinnon, the cracker known for compromising computer networks in the United States in his search for information pertaining to UFOs has lost a significant fight in his battle to prevent extradition. McKinnon, who ran under the handle 'Solo', is known for compromising a considerable number of data systems run by the United States military in his quest for information about alien contact and reverse engineered technologies. The Appeal Court heard his case yesterday but ruled that the extradition to the US should proceed apace. The best he can do now is appeal to the House of Lords, but …
We now have a flyer for GBLT Kite Flying Day 2007 available for download. Feel free to repost it to appropriate net.communities and print it out to post and distribute.
Mark Nicholas, formerly known as the band Cosmicity, has announced that he'll be playing a live concert next Saturday at In Perpetual Motion net.radio to promote his upcoming east coast tour. Mark's partner in crime DJ Ginger Snapp will be joining him in concert as his engineer and backup singer, which is always a treat.
The show begins at 2030 EST5EDT - hit the 'listen live' link and watch and listen!
A couple of weeks ago, the city of Carson, California discovered that it was a couple of thousand dollars short in its coffers - $450kus, to be exact. As it turns out, the laptop computer used by Karen Avilla (city treasurer) was infected by a keystroke logger installed through unannounced means (probably a website she visited, or a malicious e-mail, though it's entirely possible that the intruders managed to get in some other way, like through a clandestine wireless access point). An unknown group of crackers managed to snaffle the access codes to the bank that the city kept its money …
The genome of Dr. James Watson, who figured out the structure of DNA with Francis Crick, was the first genome to be completely sequenced from start to finish (the results of the Human Genome Project are actually composited from a number of anonymous humans - thank you, HIPAA), which means that each pair of nucleotides in his genetic structure was determined, mapped to a gene, and placed in its proper place in the DNA strand. You can think of it as reverse engineering human DNA because they figured out what everything in there is supposed to do... a copy of his …
Well-known and little-loved spammer Robert Soloway ws arrested by US law enforcement for multiple violations of federal law, including mail, wire, and e-mail fraud, as well as money laundering. It wouldn't surprise me if they got him on violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act because he was actively taking over workstations across the Net to add to his botnet of spam clients, but somehow I think the fraud charges are going to be more effective. Soloway was once near the top of Spamhaus Project's 10 Ten Most Wanted list, but a couple of lawsuits in the past few …
