Politicians that back biometrics (as a way to thwart crime and terrorism) now have reason to be a little terrified themselves: a hacker group has copied the fingerprint of a German politician who has been pushing that technology, and published it in a form that can easily be used to fool fingerprint readers. Fun, fun, fun.
It seems that Microsoft has realized the foolishness of last year’s unsubstantiated assertion that Linux “violates 235 of [MS's] patents.” Failing to scare corporations away from Linux, and failing to scare Linux distributors like Red Hat into paying them extortion money, they’ve backed away from that claim and are making friendly overtures to the open-source community (though I suspect, with a dagger hidden behind their collective back). We’ll see how it goes, though I’m happy to see that people have gotten wise to MS’s time-worn tactic of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.
Yesterday evening, through a bizarre set of circumstances, our front door was left open for about three hours without us realizing it. Our three pampered and indoor cats reacted to this in various ways… Oliver Bert-tholomew Purrington (the youngest and smartest) came upstairs to let us know about it, and when he was unable to make us understand what he was trying to tell us, explored the outdoors until he got cold, then came back in on his own.
The other two apparently stayed in the house, and were visited by at least one of the neighborhood’s several outdoor cats. Predictably, they were traumatized… Winston (”Winnie the Pooh,” an extremely nice cat, but to put it charitably, is as thick as two short planks, as well as being the original fraidy-cat) hid under our bed until we pried him out late last night, and then hid in the basement until we made him come out and eat this morning. His sister Salem, a.k.a. “Fluffzilla,” recovered much more quickly… she was herself before we went to sleep.
All of that is fairly irrelevant to the purpose of this post, which is to point out this Slashdot posting describing recent research that suggests that cat owners are one-third less likely to die from heart attacks. I just wonder whether human ownership by felines does the same for them… for Winston’s sake, I hope so. 
Sorry, but I don’t buy it.
In my work with compression theory, I learned a lot about probability. If any of these doomsday scenarios were possible, they would have happened somewhere in the universe already — probably a lot of somewheres — and science would have seen some evidence of them.
Like most good scientists, I hesitate to categorically deny that anything is possible, but the extremely remote possibility that any of these scenarios has a grain of truth should not stop people from experimenting.
Before automobiles, I understand that there was a firm and widespread belief that going more than fifty miles an hour would cause your head to spontaneously explode — but we all routinely travel at speeds above that now without a single cranium doing an unprovoked firecracker impersonation. Fear of the unknown is both natural and prudent, but you have to learn to identify and handle unjustified fears if you want to make any progress.
If you don’t C-sharp, you’ll B-flat.
Chris Linfoot explains how and why the networking protocol behind the entire Internet (TCP/IP) is broken, by design. Interesting, though fairly technical.
Bill Gates’ Microsoft, long hated by the technorati for its aggressive pushing of inferior technologies, its arrogant attitude toward the standards used by the rest of the industry, the secrecy that it cloaks its own proprietary ways of doing things in (so that no one can interoperate with its products), and its paranoid and monopolistic way of murdering anything that it deems as potential competition, has an apprentice now: Steve Jobs’ Apple.
Ever since the iPod took the MP3-player world by storm, I’ve noticed that Apple has borrowed more and more heavily from Microsoft’s playbook. With that in mind, its latest move, pushing its Safari browser on anyone using iTunes or QuickTime, seems perfectly in character.
Until recently, Apple was seen by many as the computer world’s savior from Microsoft… but maybe we need to be saved from Apple too. Thank goodness that Linux is finally maturing into a decent desktop OS.
Comcast, the ISP-slash-cable company that has been in hot water for the past year for “managing” (i.e. blocking) P2P applications, has thrown down the gauntlet to the FCC. After eight months of denying that they were doing it at all, now they’re basically saying “yeah, we’re doing it, and you can’t stop us. Nyah, nyah!”
If an ISP cannot be legally forced to allow all network traffic through, that opens the door to any ISP arbitrarily blocking any content that they wish — services that interfere with their own offerings, services that compete with a partner’s offerings, even services that someone there just plain doesn’t like. It would change the Internet greatly, and not in a good way.
Fortunately, it looks like Comcast is on legally shaky ground. Let’s hope the courts agree, when (not if) it gets that far.
Test post, seems to be some trouble on the server.
Update: Apparently this version of WordPress has a problem with the letters CC followed immediately by a colon. Every time I tried to publish the next post (with the letters “FCC” followed by a colon), it told me that the post was “not acceptable.” I had to change my sentence structure to avoid the colon in order to get it published.
That’s probably a security thing, to ensure that e-mail addresses aren’t posted or something, but it sure made for a few interesting minutes while I tried to figure out whether my blog had been hacked.
Joel Spolsky has hit the nail right on the head, yet again. This time, he’s talking about Internet Explorer 8 and the decision whether or not to automatically follow web standards, and the eternal flame wars that are going to erupt over it. He also points out that this is the same reason that Windows Vista has gotten such a lukewarm response in the market (I don’t think it’s the entire reason, but it’s certainly part of it). It’s worth a read.