Alkahest

This just makes me sad.  Two articles, one in the WSJ, the other on CNN, describing how insurgents in Iraq are hacking predator drones and receiving the video feeds that the drones are sending back to U.S. ground stations.   First things first, let’s fix the headlines.  Both are running something like “Iraqi insurgents hacked Predator [...]

Minor notes, none worth their own post.

Traffic management: I get a call from K around 5:30. She’s stuck behind an accident and the cops on the scene, a) don’t tell people to take a detour until they’ve been there for a half hour; and b) once the ambulance has left the scene, don’t direct [...]

and this is why I like cross-posting to facebook from my blog.  It’s a healthy reminder that nothing on fb is actually private.  If it’s online – it’ll be exposed eventually, whether through a new exploit, or just because you “friend” someone in the future that you had written about in the past.

h/t hsarik

I’m not a big baseball fan.  For that matter, there are few ball sports that interest me.  But, this is important.  If you recall, a few years ago (2004), there was a big furor over steroids in baseball.  The government searched BALCO and found evidence of rampant steroid use by baseball players.  Now I hadn’t [...]

A few years ago, I was accused of using the word “interesting” in subtle ways.  Sometimes it means a truly novel idea that I would like to learn more about, other times, it’s a novel idea of which I’m more than a little skeptical.  In both cases, I stand by the description, to me, both [...]

Gee, nobody could have predicted this I suppose:
The FBI improperly used national security letters in 2006 to obtain personal data on Americans during terror and spy investigations, Director Robert Mueller said Wednesday.
Admittedly, Mueller goes on to say that the reports were prior to new policies being put into place, but somehow that doesn’t make me [...]

<thump> <thump> Is this thing still on?
Okay, it’s been about three weeks since I’ve blogged anything.  As I’ve stated before, this tends to happen when I’m too involved in living life to actually write about it.  Fortunately (unfortunately?) it’s nothing terribly exciting.  Let’s see:

Guitar: my guitar playing has been scientifically shown to have 10% less [...]

A couple of weeks ago, Hunter and I were talking about passwords. More to the point, the inadequacy of passwords and why we haven’t moved beyond them yet. This touches on several points that I made last year. Specifically, that a password that is secure enough starts to restrict its usability.
In a [...]

Created by “the Robot Economist,” and for hsarik, it’s Bob Ross and the Joy of Painting Missiles.  Click the picture for the full sized image with rotating scenery.

Sometime in late September or early October of 2001, I received a call from an individual identifying himself as an agent of the FBI and asking for information about the owner of an email account from the place I worked.  He stated that he believed the account was relevant to a terrorist investigation. Of [...]