I’m usually an all-out pro-technology guy, but I agree with this completely: no e-voting until it’s provably (and checkably!) secure against fraud. There are too many people who would see the ends (the election of their chosen candidates) as justifying the means (tampering with the voting system) — you’ve got to make it as hard [...]
Archive of entries posted on July 2008
“‘Star Trek’ communicators free up doctors’ time”
Quite interesting…
“Delete Flash Cookies”
I’m very security- and privacy-conscious, so it came as something of a shock to read (on LifeHacker) about a kind of cookie file that I didn’t know existed. I picked up the Objection extension and took a look… there were files from all sorts of places, going back years. I am not happy about this, [...]
“Cybercrooks get faster, further and sneakier”
Although interesting (to me) in and of itself, I’m mentioning this article because of this bit from the last paragraph: In other developments, spammers have abandoned the use of image-based spam, file attachment spam and other such frippery by going back to basics. Nine in ten spam messages now contain little more beyond a few [...]
“Exploit code targets Mac OS X, iTunes, Java, Winzip…”
Lovely. Okay developers, time to get moving — add public-key code-signing stuff, so that your programs can tell whether they’re getting a legitimate update or not. Don’t know how, and don’t have time to learn? Try the GnuPG Made Easy (GPGME) library. I’m happy to say that Ubuntu Linux isn’t affected by this, because it [...]
Wedding Fun
GoddessJ and I attended a friend’s wedding over the weekend, for our friends B and L. It was… interesting. It was held in a very small town. There was only one chain hotel anywhere near, and it was booked solid before the wedding date was even set because there was some other kind of gathering [...]
“NASA uncovers secret of the Northern Lights”
It’s “stressed magnetic field lines that suddenly snap to a new shape, like a rubber band that’s been stretched too far.” Hm… any way to duplicate it in small-scale experiments? Probably not, but it’s an interesting proposition.
“MS products just too cool to comprehend, say MS geeks”
As I’m not an MS geek, I couldn’t refute the headline any better than the article does.
Impatiently waiting for computer repair guy…
I’m on the phone now to Dell, trying to find out about the technician who’s supposed to be here today. Dell’s website is useless; I received an e-mail giving me explicit instructions for getting a status update from it, but when I jump through all the hoops, all it says is “Error retrieving results. Please [...]
The Dark Knight
GoddessJ and I finally managed to see The Dark Knight last night, on our third try (the previous two tries were all sold out by the time we got there, for the entire evening). It’s good — damn good! After watching the scene where Batman wrecks the Batmobile, and then suddenly takes off in its [...]