As the topic line suggests, this causes me great mental anguish this morning.
Warning: Do not read while drinking anything. You will probably spray your beverage through your nostrils, which will only prolong the agony.
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I haven't been writing about the beginning of the presidential campaign season because I've been busy with other things, but I thought that this should be spread around a bit more widely... Barack Obama's security detail ordered on-duty police officers at a rally in Dallas, Texas to stop searching attendees for weapons as they filed in.
You read that correctly, the were told to stop looking for weapons. D.W. Lawrence, Deputy Police Chief of Dallas went on the record as saying that the order 'apparently' came down from the US Secret Service because they wanted to "speed up the …
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Near the city of Panama City, Florida, 14-year old high school student Dakota Gates has been incarcerated in juvenile detention for 21 days following his arrest because administrators of his school are afraid that he was planning to come to school one day and start shooting the place up. Their reason? A note he wrote in a cipher inspired by an anime series by himself and some of his friends. A 'school resource officer' (I guess that's what they're calling the armed guards these days) found the note, sounded the alarm, and picked out the weird kid of the school …
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I feel ever so much safer now that the TSA is requiring travelers at some airports to dump each and every electronic device they're carrying into those damned grey bins for examination. So far commenters on this article over at Boing Boing have reported undergoing this at San Francisco, O'Hare, Milwaukee, San Antonio, Phoenix, and Richmond. As one would expect, this makes me not a bit apprehensive about my flight on Monday morning for another field assignment. The amount of hardware I carry in my field kit is considerable, which makes me feel not a bit like a sitting duck …
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According to two sociologists at Oxford University, Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, the mindset of a professional terrorist and the mindset of a professional engineer are so similar in makeup that there is a strong correlation between being an engineer and being a member of a terrorist group (paper downloadable from here). Their research states that members of the Islamist movement of Muslim culture show a disproportionately high number of doctors, engineers, and practitioners of other scientific fields. Their paper also makes the claim that engineers in particular tend to gravitate toward violent groups, but it isn't so much being …
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Well, I'm the field again, back in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to fight the good fight.
Or get myself so worked up that I'll blow through an incarnation, I'm not sure which. It's too early to tell.
My cow-orkers picked me up around 1000 EST5EDT on Monday morning (so written because it'll be well after midnight when I get around to posting this) - apparently my vehicle is distinctive enough that they found my apartment building without too much trouble. Apparently they like the magnets on my car, something that I find endlessly amusing because so few people mention them. After a quick …
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A major component of cryptographic systems are pseudorandom number generators used to pull values out of thin air for the purposes of generating session keys and the bignum components of crypto keys, among other things. This is done so that an eavesdropping attacker can't predict ahead of time what a particular key is going to be and decrypt traffic as it's transmitted. Another reason is that it's easier to generate a pseudorandom number and check it for certain properties all at once than it is to work up such a number by hand and check it against those properties every …
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation is so hot to uncover dastardly plots of domestic terrorism in this country that, for at time at least, they were mining such fields of data as who bought what from middle eastern grocery stores to determine who might be a religious extremist and terrorist. Yep - they thought sales of falafel might help them generate the results that they're pressured to produce for the people on high. Thankfully, common sense prevailed (did they hire a four year old to check their logic or something?) and they spiked the plan in 2006. The article makes a …
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A land in which traffic in the heart of the city is sparse at high noon, there are restaurants on nearly every corner (woe to my waistline and coronary arteries), and the temperature plummeted from 85 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday to a chilly 55 degrees Fahrenheit by the time C- (cow-orker and metalhead extrodinaire) and I left the site and headed for the hotel.
Yes, this is the Doctor again, writing to you from the outskirts of St. Louis, Missouri. The company I work for has sent me abroad once again on assignment, this time for two weeks straight in the …
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One Jerry Miller, head of the payroll team for the Administrative Knowledge System project of the Ohio Department of Administrative Services screwed up in a pretty major way - he let one of his interns take a backup tape containing, among other things, data on better than 130,000 employees of the state of Ohio, former employees and contractors of same, and sundry Ohio residents. Seeing as how it was payroll information, I'll leave it to you to guess what kinds of information were encoded on that tape. The tape was stolen from the back of said intern's car in June …
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