The thing about cloud computing is that it makes your data and applications someone else's problem. Then you have to wonder if it's still your data...

I've been wrestling with this post for weeks now because, at its heart, transhumanism isn't a simple set of beliefs, actions, or ideas. It encompasses many disciplines, from cybernetics to engineering to computer science to biology and many things in between. I say that not as a cop-out but because practically every discipline is covered in some way and informs the body of knowledge somehow. It is also a deeply personal philosophy, often attracting adherents who attempt to lead by example as well as participating in the research, development, and deployment of the technologies which originally inspired it (such as …

Scarcely one year after the initial appearance of the Storm Worm and its resulting botnet, some heretofore untapped functionality's been pushed out in one update or another in just the past couple of days: Not only is the botnet sending out phishing-related spam but the phishing sites are hosted on the infected machines themselves. The information security community is speculating that it may now be possible for the controller of the botnet to partition it and assign different tasks to different segments of the infected net.population. As if that weren't problem enough, the domains that the phishing sites use …

cryptome.org is back, and from the looks of it has been for a while. Shows what happens when you stop paying attention for a little while...

Cryptome is one of the longest-running websites on the Net for information related to personal privacy, whistleblowing and other sorts of information that make the people we're supposed to trust look bad. On 28 April 2007 John Young recieved a notice from his hosting company that Cryptome's plug would be pulled due to a violation of their terms of service agreement. It should be noted that this has happened many times since the site opened in 1999, and each time Verio has accepted Young's explanation for why a particular document was available. This time, they're accepting no reason at all …