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, …
Continue reading ‘“Get your German interior minister’s fingerprint here”’ »
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 …
Continue reading ‘“All That Got Stolen Was Microsoft’s Thunder”’ »
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 …
Continue reading ‘“Cat Ownership Correlated With Heart Health”’ »
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, …
Continue reading ‘“Doomsday fears spark lawsuit over collider”’ »
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 …
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!“ …
Continue reading ‘“Comcast: FCC lacks any authority to act on P2P blocking”’ »
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 …
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 …