For man years I'd always looked somewhat askance at Terrence McKenna's talks about the year 2012, his hypothesis of time having a fractal nature, and Everything Changing in the year 2012 of the common era. That I've taken for myself the name of a certain British science fiction hero (and have a certain interest in Time) aside, it never seemed, well, plausible, to put not too fine a point on it. I even went so far as to ruminate about it a couple of years back to get it out of my system. Then, earlier this year I conceeded …

I think it's pretty safe to say that a lot of us are glad that the year 2010 of the common era is over, done with, and a candidate for erasure from the Time Vortex if it starts getting uppity again. Sure, it had its ups and downs for all of us - they always do - but last year was a particularly bad one on a large scale. There was the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that's destroyed a entire ecosystem, perhaps permanantly. Last January was the earthquake that devastated the island of Haiti, resulting in the …

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 …

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 …

Official Wikileaks document submission URLs:

https://sunshinepress.org/
http://suw74isz7wqzpmgu.onion/ (Tor only)

Source: /pictures/the_next_hope-2010/img_1624.jpg, taken 17 July 2010 at the keynote address. Image taken of Jacob Appelbaum's presentation slide.

Official SHA-256, SHA-1, and MD5 fingerprints of the Wikileaks document submission URLs:

SHA-256:
85:C3:77:8E:7F:BC:96:42:CF:EE:03:B0:AC:4A:2A:26:
15:18:CB:50:41:EC:7A:2A:CC:9F:56:60:67:94:04:7E

SHA-1:
68:C3:4B:3D:05:7A:53:E3:8C:FE:
71:F1:30:3D:8A:AD:8E:33 …

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 …

For several years now, the website Wikileaks (mirrored across the global Net as well as a couple of darknets) has been the first place to go if you wanted to learn about anything shady going on. Founded as a clearinghouse for whistleblowers and do-gooders by Sunshine Press, they make it their business to archive and disseminate sensitive documents that were leaked because they provide proof of dastardly goings-on in the world, from illegal search and seizure to confidential e-mails about screwed up policies and procedures to hit lists of thorns in the collective side of the powers that be. A …

As part of my New Year's resolution to get in better shape I've started to work out twice a week, and discovered once again that my body isn't as young as I wish it was. It's been two days now, and most of the major muscle groups are firing off error messages as fast as they possibly can because they've put in a lot more duty time than they're accustomed to doing for a professional geek. I still can't walk without pain for long periods of time, and let me tell you, maneuvering in this state with a rather heavy …

This morning, after arriving at the Metro station closest to my office and climbing the escalator (I need exercise, what can I say?) to the platform closest the street, I noticed something that you don't hear very often in downtown DC: Swimming through the air thanks to the odd accoustics of the Metro station above the sound of the traffic was music. Live music, replete with the little vibratos and imperfections that come with playing the same particular instrument for many years for hours on end. Pan pipes, a wooden flute, bass, and a drum machine.

After going topside again …