1. Domain seizure just got even more scary.

    18 March 2012

    I remember, once upon a time, when it was said by many that the Internet transcended mere political boundries. A user in the United States could chat with another user in France, read breaking news in Japan, and swap code with hackers in Iceland. Those were the times when it cost beaucoup to register your own domain; Network Solutions was the only game in town and you paid through the sinuses to own smartcards.com or energy-efficient-lanters.org. That began to change around 1999 or 2000 and now anybody with a couple of bucks to spare can register a domain …

    Read more...

  2. Outbreaks of the future: 3d printing.

    15 March 2012

    More and more in the year 2012 of the common era, I find myself noticing what Warren Ellis once called 'outbreaks of the future'. Advances and developments in technology that were once the thoughts of the dreamers of science and are now the fruits of the labor of shapers and makers of novel things. Perhaps it's due to my lack of 3d modeling ability that I tend to focus on the field of 3D printing, which has fascinated me since I helped build a 3d printer several years ago. So it goes.

    The first thing that I noticed was that …

    Read more...

  3. Tor in the Elastic Computing Cloud: Fourteen months later.

    11 March 2012

    Slightly over a year has gone by since I announced that I'd set up a Tor node in Amazon's EC2 to help add some bandwidth to the Tor network. I've been keeping an eye on things since then, keeping tabs on what goes into maintaining a node in Amazon's virtualization infrastructure and tallying up the cost, so here are my results.

    Last month my year of 'free' operation of a micro instance in the EC2 was up; I now have to pay full price for my particular tier every month to maintain my node (though I always had to pay …

    Read more...

  4. Hunt for the Higgs Boson not going well.

    09 March 2012

    It seems that conflicting reports are making it difficult to determine if the Higgs-Boson has been found at last. The four experiments designed to find evidence of the existence of the Higgs boson and possibly solve the mystery of why baryonic matter has mass (an elementary and experimentally provable observation) are returning conflicting results. Two of the experiements in the United States have collected data suggesting that they may, in fact, have spotted the elusive and as-yet hypothetical particle. The other two... not so much.

    I'm on crack.


    Base image: Wikipedia
    Trollface: OhInternet

    Read more...

  5. Stratfor's dirty laundry and open source intelligence.

    02 March 2012

    The latest revelation by Wikileaks of what happens behind the scenes in the twenty-first century began publication on Monday. Called the GI Files (for Global Intelligence), it is said to be made up of approximately five million e-mail messages and associated documentation copied from the e-mail servers of Strategic Forecasting, Incorporated (Stratfor) by adherants of the Anonymous meme and passed on to Wikileaks some time last year. Due to the gargantuan volume of data Wikileaks has opted to release smaller quantities of information every day rather than overwhelm everyone with information. Predictably, spin control efforts on all sides started up …

    Read more...

  6. A bit of a change-up for Project Byzantium this weekend.

    21 February 2012

    Just a quick heads-up about the Project Byzantium development sprint this weekend:

    The development sprint will not be at HacDC this month, but instead it will be held at the Thurgood Marshall Academy in Washington, DC because we'll be at Discotech again. DiscoTech will be held between 12:00pm and 4:00pm on Saturday. Come one, come all, stop by and see what new things are afoot in DC!

    Here is the official website for the Discovering Technology Faire if you'd like more information.

    Read more...

  7. 834 years young and still going strong.

    20 February 2012

    Well, another year has come and gone and it's time to look back once again across the calendar and see how things have changed for the Time Lord. This past year is likely one of the busiest of my whole life and shows few signs of slowing down or grinding to a halt. To put it simply I don't have the time or space on the database server to outline everything from 2011, but suffice it to say that the world is undergoing some profound changes outside of the control of the existing system, and in some small way I've …

    Read more...

  8. We stand with Syria.

    04 February 2012

    I don't have a lot of time.

    All hell broke loose in Syria on 3 February 2012. The city of Homs was invaded by the Syrian military, which then opened fire. Over 400 people are confirmed dead, and I don't have an accurate count of the number of people who were injured anymore.

    Please follow the hashtag #syria on Twitter for late-breaking news. And Twitter, if you even think of censoring this you will make a Time Lord very, very angry.

    To help the people of Syria connect to the Net to continue transmitting video footage and photographs of what's …

    Read more...

  9. Twitter begins censoring content based upon account and point of origin.

    31 January 2012

    Last week, the addictively simple social networking site Twitter announced that it would be adding the capability to selectively censor tweets based upon where the viewer appears to be sourcing from. Like most websites, when handed a properly acquired takedown notice they're pretty snappy about making certain things disappear (note that some of the taken down posts are reprinted in the takedown notices) but this is, as they say, a whole 'nother smoke. This change of policy means that if you post something that the government of a different country doesn't like (like this), they can request that Twitter make …

    Read more...

  10. Implications of the Megaupload takedown.

    29 January 2012

    It came as something of a surprise to those of us following the defeat and subsequent cold storage of SOPA that, just a day later one of the largest file locker websites on the Net, megaupload.com was shut down by the FBI. Data centers in Virginia, Washington DC, New Zealand, and Hong Kong were raided by law enforcement and their cages in those centers were cleaned out. Every last server chugging away in those facilities was seized, and are in the queue for forensic analysis right now. Just a day after Megaupload went dark over a dozen others voluntarily …

    Read more...

73 / 208