Tag: news

  1. Life in a rudderless world

    15 August 2022

    "The truth of the world is that is is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy, or the grey aliens, or the twelve-foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control, the truth is far more frightening; no one is in control, the world is rudderless."
    --Alan Moore

    I've been thinking about that quote a lot lately.

    In the month or so since my last post I've been basically keeping my head above water and trying to live as productive a life as possible. It's easier than it sounds, oddly, but it costs a lot …

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  2. Memetic warfare in America.

    20 December 2016

    The current state of anyone's capacity to get any useful information in the United States these days, which is to say next to impossible due to the proliferation of fake news sites and pro-trolls doing their damndest to lower the signal-to-noise ratio to epsilon, is the logical end result of the following progression of cliches:

    "You can't believe everything people tell you."

    "You can't believe everything you read in books."

    "You can't believe everything you see on TV."

    "You can't believe everything your friends tell you."

    "You can't believe everything your teachers tell you."

    "You can't believe everything you read …

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  3. Turtles all the way down: Introduction

    03 January 2014

    The sum total of the Edward Snowden revelations have pretty conclusively proved one thing: That we can't trust anything. The communications networks wrapped around the globe like a blanket are surveilled so minutely that Russian President Vladimir Putin has openly stated his admiration for the US getting away with it so successfully. Much of the cryptographic infrastructure used to protect our communications and data at rest is known to be vulnerable to one or more practical attacks that, in the end they can't really be called effective if one wants to be honest. The company RSA has all but admitted …

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  4. First workable neuromorphic chip design developed at Intel.

    19 June 2012

    A couple of years back scientists at HP figured out how to make memristors viable. Memristors were first conceived of back in the 1970's and are components that remember (for lack of a better term) how much current passed through them for a particular interval of time. They've been compared to neurons in that the more often they fire, the more likely they are to fire in the future. On the other side of the house, scientists have been trying for decades to figure out the principles (and combination of mechanisms) by which organic brains operate. They're not binary devices …

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  5. 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 …

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  6. It would seem that the universe has other ideas.

    21 January 2011

    A couple of days ago I finally got around to posting about what's kept me offline and not particularly feeling up to doing anything, in a nutshell being inundated with everything going wrong in the world (as if this is different from any other year; with life comes suck and fail. It happens.) Then, during my daily newscrawl in which I keep an eye on happenings in the world and look for things that might be sneaking up behind me (the work of a sysadmin is never done), I noticed some things popping up with synchronistic regularity. A couple of …

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  7. Wikileaks, Cablegate, the media, and you.

    07 December 2010

    I've been waiting to put together an article about Wikileaks and Cablegate (the gradual release of a quarter-million diplomatic cables written and archived by the United States diplomatic corps). Mostly, everyday life has prevented me from doing so: the holiday season is here once again and, all things being equal, work and cleaning up the apartment with Lyssa have taken priority. I also didn't want to vent my spleen on the Net without having a coherent idea of what I was going to say. Turing knows, enough of that is happening right now and I won't fall prey to it …

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  10. Aftershocks from the Afghan War Diary release.

    12 August 2010

    If you haven't been paying attention to the news for a week or so, Wikileaks dropped a major bomb last week by releasing approximately 75,000 classified mission reports from the ongoing yet formally undeclared war in Afghanistan. The staff of Wikileaks has made it known that there is so much data there that anyone and everyone out there with programming skills should at least consider downloading the archived documents and writing software to analyze their contents to find patterns in the information. However, nothing ever happens in a vacuum and blowback is being felt across the Net, and I …

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