As you may or may not be aware The Next HOPE was last weekend, and a veritable firestorm of hacker drama broke out (in both of the usual senses of the word) at the con. I won't be writing about the keynote on Saturday, not yet. Instead, I'll be putting some thoughts together about the arrest of PFC Bradley Manning who is charged with leaking the gun camera footage known as Collateral Murder among other things. If you're not aware of what happened Adrian Lamo, known a few years ago as the homeless hacker, was contacted by PFC Manning who …

Forget moblogging. It’s too much hassle to be workable because it never works, and it wrecks my formatting.

I just got back from HacDC, where tonight Peter Singer, author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century presented on the topic of applied military robotics. While it seems a bit cliche’ to say this, they aren’t science fiction anymore, military robots are actually recent history. Drones and teleoperated robots have been in use in Iraq and Afghanistan since the get go, and the last official count has over seven thousand robots in use …

Following battlefield tales that Hezbollah had compromised the IDF communications network during operations in Lebanon last year, defense contractors have developed Meshnet, a hardware and software firewall appliance to protect the data networks of battlefield equipment, on the chance that someone would figure out how to infect them with malicious agents of some sort in the near future. Meshnet is supposedly based upon the Sidewinder Security Appliance from Secure Computing, but includes specialized hardware that deals with the network protocols and connection gear used in the control systems of tanks, armored personnel carriers, or what have you along with anti-spyware …

Years and years and years ago, when I lived in Pittsburgh, I had an older buddy named Scott.

Yeah, this is sounding like a story that I'd tell my grandkids. Bear with me.

Somewhen in the past couple of years, and I don't know exactly when because life and Time tend to change things, Scott joined the Army, and at some point got shipped to Iraq. Something happened out there (I don't know exactly what - this isn't much of a story, is it?), but it left him paralyzed from the waist down and discharged from the military.

Scott now lives …

The troops stationed overseas aren't having a fun time of their hitch in Iraq, let's be honest. They do everything they can to keep their spirits high and burnout rates low, but it's hard having something for everyone. You've got your football games, softball games, even dodgeball games.. but now they have a gaming convention. On 9 June 2007 at Camp Adder, the US military forces in Iraq will have their own con, dubbed ZigguratCon. It looks like they'll be heavy on the D&D, but a few other publishers have stepped up to the plate and are donating books …

The down-low on Hussein's execution.

My new USB audio recorder rocks all known sheep. I'm currently recording the third tape of.. who knows.. and the damage done to the tapes from listening to them so much over the years aside, the recordings are very clear and clean.

Well, there are slightly more than twenty-four hours left in the year 2006 of the common era, and I am still figuring out what in the hell happened to my vacation. No, seriously. I'm not complaining about not getting a vacation or anything like that, I'm really wondering what happened to it. At …