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 [...]

When we put in the massive wall-eating bookcase, I thought that we had enough book space for the next 10,000 years! Or at least the next 10. Unfortunately, things were filling up a bit too fast, so I grabbed some of the books that I know I’ll never use again and will send [...]

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

For a guy who uses computers as much as I do, you would think that I would have better machines at home.  But really, no.  Our last desktop was eight years old before we replaced it.  My laptop was an old Thinkpad X31 – maybe six or seven years old.  So, for a combination birthday/Christmas [...]

With apologies to Terry Prachett, I feel like I being dragged (dragging myself?) into the Century of the Fruitbat.  As I mentioned a long time ago, I don’t care for Facebook.  I prefer my blog.  That said, many of my friends and most of my family use Facebook.  So I’m going to start a bit [...]

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 [...]

In computer security, one of the most difficult and annoying problems is the distributed denial of service attack (DDoS).  The idea behind a DDoS attack is straight forward: the attacker tries to prevent legitimate use of the service by using a large number of other computers.  Usually these other computers have been compromised (hacked) and [...]

I was using my personal laptop at a meeting yesterday and grabbed about a gig of files from someone’s usb key.  While I was taking minutes, I noticed a lovely new icon that popped up… your hard disk drive is failing.  Eeek!  Not cool.  So, last night I got home and started backing up my [...]

… and he and Tim Berners-Lee want you to stop breaking the Internet.
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve had several occasions to be invited into someone’s walled garden on the internet.  You know the places.  Lovely little sites that are entirely self-contained and which you can’t access unless you are a member?  In the [...]