Topics pertaining to science and technology, current or future.
As described yesterday, I talked someone at the office through the process of punching a hole in our firewall for the secure HTTP port this morning, then changed the SSH server to use that port instead. It didn’t solve the problem; apparently Cox already thought of that, and they’re only allowing legitimate HTTPS packets on …
Continue reading ‘Thou Shalt Not Do Anything That We Can’t Spy On’ »
Everyone has been waiting for Vista SP1 to come out, thinking that surely it will fix all of the problems that Vista has (like running many programs at half the speed on the same hardware). Well, it doesn’t seem to make a lick of difference: Bottom Line: If you’ve been disappointed with the performance of …
I’m in a different hotel today, one that is served by Cox Internet, and I immediately discovered that the SSH redirection which worked flawlessly yesterday completely fails here. I can start the secure shell, and it works for a couple minutes or a certain number of bytes, then I get a “connection reset by peer” …
Continue reading ‘Roadblocks to Secure Internet Usage on the Road’ »
I’m on the road today, writing this from a hotel’s unsecured wireless Internet connection. Call me paranoid if you wish, but I know how easy it would be for someone to snoop on any Internet traffic over such an unprotected wireless connection. Most of my e-mail accounts already use SSL encryption, but there’s one that …
I just don’t get it. Some people put on a perfectly-working watch and it suddenly starts losing time. Technology seems to hate them. This guy is a case in point (and his article prompted this entry), but I’ve known other people who had the same problem, including some of my relatives. On the other hand, …
I was at the store yesterday, picking up a pack of recordable DVDs for backup purposes, when I saw that the MyBook external drives had dropped in price. I’d been drooling over them for a long time, and that proved to be the final straw… I walked out with a one-terabyte dual-drive network-accessible version. As …
Continue reading ‘Western Digital MyBook World Edition II’ »
Joshua Lee pointed out an interesting item on the Terminally Incoherent blog a few days ago, on video game “addiction.” I have an obsessive personality, as well as problems with depression, so I have a good idea why people might think they’re “addicted” to a game. I also know why they aren’t, though I couldn’t …
As I’ve maintained since before the millennium, downloaded music isn’t what’s killing the music industry.
A friend of mine just had hard drive troubles and lost all his data. He had a backup of the important stuff on a DVD-RW — but he’d just re-used the backup disk for something else because he was low on them, and had been planning to buy more to back it up again this …
Photonic tweezers for electronics and microbiology… Star Trek: Voyager’s holographic doctor will have all of his tools available once someone invents him. 🙂