followup
Thanks to reader Janet Kagan and bloggers Steve and Mike for writing in
with followup to yesterday’s bit about the
list of organizations and people who got funding cut off.
I blogged that bit before I read the paper (I read the Post in the dead tree flavor),
which also had the list, and I knew I was going to get some feedback
— but I didn’t expect this much. Thanks again!
Curiously, everybody who wrote in had a different link to suggest. I’m
going to use Janet’s, because I think it’s the authoritative link
(scroll down) from the Office
of Foreign Assets Control in the Treasury Department.
excuses, excuses
I taught a class last night, so no surfing was done. No surfing means
no update, sad to say — look for something later this evening.
September 2001 Archives
opiate of the masses
Ever since the day or so immediately following the attack, I’ve
pretty much been avoiding TV news sources. They didn’t seem to have
much actual information to share, and I was having trouble dealing
with the information I had, so I pretty much switched over to
newspaper and web-based sources, where it was easier for me to ignore
what I already knew. But last night, I was watching some Tivo’d stuff
while eating dinner and compiling kdelibs, and the Tivo’d stuff and
food ran out before the compile finished. I knew it was only ten
minutes or so to go, so I flipped over to live TV and found myself
watching Dateline NBC.
Great Ghu, has it gotten this bad, already? Schwarmy
broadcasters, really cheesy metaphors, and absolute tons of
paralogical thinking. No critical evaluation of anything. A
wide-sweeping under-current of “watch out for them Arabs”.
Like Lyn, I’m grumpy and
angry…
crap to be pissed about, part I
People in old guard print media doing dismissive
pieces about the Internet’s response to the attacks without
mentioning a single positive word about the way webloggers and other
voices of the Independent Web pulled together to get real news out
when major media sites couldn’t handle the load.
(Registration is required for that URL to work, but bunging
‘genehackreader’ and ‘password’ into the obvious spots might produce
some results.)
crap to be pissed about, part II
Larry Ellision, CEO of Oracle, wants you to have to carry a “national
ID card”, which, oh yeah, could be driven by the software his
company sells. Presumably the card would have a “Powered by Oracle”
sticker on it, or something. No word on how this would have prevented
the attacks, or prevent others in the future.
(Maybe because it wouldn’t have, and it can’t.)
crap to be pissed about, part III
Yesterday, the Post had an
article which described how the US military used disinformation
during the Gulf War. It contains the following quote, which I
reproduce here (emphasis is mine):
“This is the most information-intensive war you can imagine… . We’re going to lie about things,” said a military officer involved in the planning. “If it is an information war, certainly the bad guys will lie.”
(For those of you in the audience who retain some critical reading and
thinking skills: I am almost positive that the above military officer
did not mean to imply the syllogism: “We lie. Bad guys lie. Therefore
we are bad guys.” But I might be lying.)
I realize the value of properly placed misinformation in ensuring
operational security, but damn, is it to much to hope that they could
just tell the media “no comment” rather than out and out lie?
Random observation #1: any statement by any government official now
(well, ‘still’, really) has to be assigned some sort of reliability
measurement before it can be used in any sort of planning.
Random observation #2: Webloggers, and other people who are swimming
in the deep end of the media stream and who can consequently put
together disparate pieces of info, are really in a better position
than others to do the above sort of evaluation.
Those ideas combine in a very unpleasant way when considered in the
light of the Rand “Infowar” document that was widely linked not too
long ago (and which I can not find a link to this morning — props to
anyone who can help out with that) — webloggers function as
aggregating nodes, and are therefore prime targets for disruption and
misinformation attacks. Imagine the effect if Scripting News had been DDOS’d on
the 11th, or if Dave had been targeted (intentionally, I mean) with
some misinformation-ladden mail.
crap to be pissed about, part IV
Why oh why have none of the many stories I’ve looked at about Bush’s
order to freeze terrorist assets actually listed the
organizations and individuals whose assets are being frozen?
Oh, and while we’re on the topic of “obvious follow-up questions that
ain’t gettin’ asked”, how the hell come the
promised evidentiary document is taking so long to put together?
How can be we be making decisions to go forward if people aren’t
informed? How can they be informed without seeing this document?
crap to be leery of, part I
Under the rather
severe new “anti-hacking” law, basically any sort of computer
intrusion related crime has the potential to put you in jail, “married
to the guy with the most cigarettes” (to borrow a phrase from
Stephenson). So, I wonder — does that include all that jackasses that
have been pounding the network with nimda and CodeRed worms from their
unsecured Windows boxen?
crap to be happy about, part I
Rep. Goodlatte of Virginia is saying
all the right things about strong crypto. Let’s see if he can put his
money where his mouth is, and how well he can convince his colleagues.
meta
I’m almost positive those last two categories should be larger, but
I’ve got to go to work right now. If anybody out there wants to send some stuff in, that would
be appreciated.
don’t make me use my drunken ostrich style!
Urgh. Sorry ‘bout that unscheduled break in updating there, but it
became necessary to take a bit of a mental health day — which
stretched a bit. Didn’t help that a friend sold me a laptop on Friday;
I spent the weekend building a LFS system, which entailed lots
of downloading, a fair bit of CD burning, and a whole ton of sitting
on the couch, watching movies on TV and waiting for one compile to
finish so that I could start another. Oh, and realizing that laptops
make your lap sweat something fierce, which I’d never really thought
about before. Anyway, the base system plus X is up and running; next
step is KDE, and then the real fun starts. But oy vey, my wrists! Ay yi yi…
For you detail-oriented folk out there, this is a Toshiba 4000CDT (233
MHz PII), and it brings the genehack.org computer roster to three:
mendel (Celeron desktop), morgan (PMac 7500), and mcclintock (the
laptop). No points for guessing the naming scheme, although it is
clearly going to have to expand beyond the “M”s in order to scale
effectively.
i (heart) ethel
One of the nice things about going head-down for the weekend was that
I could momentarily put the “recent events” into swap and just Not
Deal with them. That lasted until I did the weblog roundup this
morning. sigh Lots of stupid stuff coming down the pike; none
of it is really going to make erstwhile terrorists lives any harder,
but it will probably make your life suck. Leastways it will
if your life is like my life to any extent.
I’m not going to get into most of it; I’m still getting caught up
myself. If you don’t keep up with Ethel,
that’s a good place to start fueling your outrage. Steve’s been on a
righteous tear here of late…
a completely unrelated web app design mini-rant
I followed a link from More Like This
to a Bruce
Sterling post on the Viridian design list. After reading it, I
thought, “hey, this seems like a cool list, and I can always use more
email, especially if said email contains mega-tasty Sterling verbiage,
of which I can not get enough”. Then I realized that there was no info
about the list on the page, and that in order to subscribe I would
either have to flail around on the site or drop back to Google and
punt. And I formulated Genehack web app design mini-rant #734:
If you’re making a web interface to a mailing list archive, put a $DEITY-damned subscription form ON EVERY STINKIN’ PAGE that gets output by that interface!
Thank you.
out of time
Urp — time for me to get on the move and get my butt to work! I’ve
got a ton more stuff to sift through; it’s going to be a busy time
here at Chez Genehack for the next little bit. More later tonight,
hopefully. Be careful out there.
put down the microsoft and back away slowly
In case you haven’t heard, there’s a new
big, bad worm running amok out on the ‘Net. If you’re running
Outlook or Internet Explorer, you’re on a Windows platform, odds are
you’re vulnerable. If you’re not running that particular combination
of software, congratulations!, but life still pretty much sucks,
because the worm is fairly effectively generating a DDoS on the whole
damn net.
Here, for example, at the end of my tiny wittle wodem wink (what did
you think WWW stood for?), I’ve had over 294 distinct hosts try to hit
me with the Nimda exploit(s). I say “over” because there were only 294
that I could lookup a hostname for; I didn’t bother counting the IPs
that I couldn’t lookup. Here are some samples; do with them as you
wish (although if you’re running IE, visiting them would be a
particularly bad idea):
- bne-vod1.cisco.com
- cancerq.org
- car-covers.com
- comselect.com
- investorstitle.com
- issint.com
- julymorning.com
- mail.speechaccess.com
- sportbikehype.com
- sydneyscatclub.com
- teleglobe.net
- web3.tracent.net
- wildginger.com
- www.humbledigital.com
- www.ipoem.com
- www.ntmail.net
- www.pensiononline.com
If you’re an admin associated with one of the above, SHAME ON YOU! DO YOUR DAMN JOB!
If you’re a stock-holder in one of the above, consider contacting your
neighborhood shyster and arranging to file a due diligence lawsuit
against the company in question. When there are freely available alternatives that don’t
have the extensive, problem-laden track record of IIS, you have to ask
if people are mis-managing your investment by continuing to
pay for it!
I’m normally not an advocate of this sort of nuisance lawsuit, but
damned if I can see any other way to solve the problem. It would be
one thing if it only affected the people who choose to use Microsoft
product, but it’s starting to really fuck up the ‘net for the rest of
us, too. Clearly, Microsoft is not interested in fixing their crap
product; the only remaining alternative is to scare people off of
using it. I have this faint, probably naive hope that lawsuits will
work where crashes and cracks haven’t.
grrrr
I really meant to be back with some more links last night,
but somehow I managed to hose KDE, which meant I got to spend a lot of
time re-compiling stuff. Whee. But I’m here now, so let’s see how much
of this backlog we can work through, hmm?
how it looks from the outside
El Reg on the coming conflict:
Official Washington has been buzzing with the language of belligerence since this weekend. The President, who, incidentally, isn’t authorized to declare war, declared war. He also did something we’ve not seen since the Vietnam era - he promised victory.
When I first heard all the war talkin’, I was thinking along the lines
of the Gulf War, or World War II — you know, “war”, with soldiers and
battles and all that. More and more, however, it’s sounding like a
“War on Drugs” war, with a poorly defined and impossible to achieve
objective that will only cause the most harm to those that had the
least to do with it being started in the first place.
biowar
Aside: I’ve been avoiding linking to the biowar stuff. Most of the
coverage isn’t all that good (mostly because, once you get past the
basic facts, there’s nothing really known). Plus, most people don’t
want to have a conversation about biological warfare agents with their
friendly neighborhood lapsed biologist, because it rapidly gets very,
very scary.
That has a counter-danger: the media can be tempted to downplay the
threat, because, hey, if there’s nothing we can actually do about it,
why needlessly scare people, right? As evidence, I give you this CNN
story entitled Biological
attack threat real, but small. On the plus side, they’re one for
two. On the minus side (and it’s a big minus), if you actually read
the whole article instead of just the headline, you find that they
present zero evidence that the threat is “small”. (Unless you count
unsupported authorial assertions used as justification for wishful
thinking, which I don’t. I know, I know, I’m such a harsh, critical
bastard.)
another very real threat
Looks like the Congress critters are going to be going after crypto
with everything they’ve got — despite the fact that any new laws will
have basically zero impact on the ability of terrorists to communicate
in secret. The Working Group on
Privacy and Civil Rights has a lot of good information about how
encryption technologies impact your life (and they do, even
(or especially) if you don’t think they do).
While we’re on the topic of annoying legislation that needs to be
stopped, I’ll mention the SSSCA and Don Marti’s open
letter to Michael Eisner. You like being able to listen to the
same CDs in your car, your house and using your computer at work? This
bill is the first step towards the music industry making you buy a
separate copy for each, or maybe just making you pay for each re-play.
Debian Planet had a very
interesting piece
of speculative fiction up the other day, projecting some of the
current legislative trends into the future. It ends up being a very
ugly picture.
There’s at least one anti-SSSCA
petition out there, but it will probably be more effective if you call
or write your Congressional representatives directly.
separated at birth?
I note in passing that DC’s own Ratbastard (seen on the right in this photo) and
Wil “You mean the
guy from Next Generation has a weblog?! WTF?!” Weaton,
(the guy in this
photo who isn’t Kevin Nealon) bear more than a passing resemblance to each other.
Conspiracy theorists will note that Wil’s blog started during Ratbastard’s recent hiatus.
i just like saying ‘voles’
Recent
research into pair bonding in voles suggests that a
neurotransmitter called vasopressin plays a critical role. It’s also
ground-breaking in that this is the first time a “complex social
behavior” was trans-genetically manipulated.
Personally, I thought the most interesting part was the observation
that increased vasopressin receptors not only increased pair bonding,
but general levels of anxiety as well… 8^)=
flyin’ the flag
Look, if you’re going to fly the flag in support of whatever aspect of last week’s tragedy you find most moving, take the five minutes to read the damn flag code and display it properly, okay? It doesn’t take any longer to do it the right way, and it prevents people like me from foaming at the mouth in public.
Oh, and one more thing: you can fly the flag on your car, or you can
drive like a jackass. Pick one or the other, but don’t do both, okay?
It’s disrespectful to whomever you’re trying to honor by flying the
flag in the first place.
Thanks to Mike for the flag reg link.
some clarification
I’m still processing last week. I suspect most of us still are, and
will be for a long time. There may be one or two other longer thought
pieces bubbling up here soon, but for right now, I just wanted to
clarify something from last week. When I said:
At the moment, my stance is reluctantly hawkish. Reason seems very unlikely to work with the perpetrators of yesterday’s attacks, so I fear that we will have to fall back on force; we will have to forcefully make the point that while it may be technically possible to do this sort of thing to Americans, on American soil, the final result is a terrible and awful retaliation.
I wasn’t attempting to advocate an “eye for eye” retaliation, or a
“justice demands someone must pay” position. I was trying to
communicate that we’re in a battle to the death with
somebody, and our chances of talking them out of wanting to
kill us, all of us, seem pretty slim. We don’t have to kill whoever it
is that’s trying to kill us, but we do have to track them down, make
them stop trying, and prevent them from trying in the future. Oh, and
we’ve got to do all this in such a fashion that we minimize the
generation of similar homicidal impulses in other people at the same
time, which is going to be the really tricky part. I still don’t have
any idea how to do this, and I haven’t heard any stunners from anybody
else. sigh Just to be to duck at the appropriate times, ‘kay?
faire pictures
Some shots from the Faire (all photos are thumbnails linked to full-size images):
More links later in the day; I’m wandering aronud in a daze this
morning, looking for my weekend. I left it right over there, but when
I turned around, it was gone…
okay, i lied about the friday thing
Meant to do some blogging yesterday, and just plum didn’t get to
it. Might have something later today, if not, then Sunday. You’ll all
deal, I imagine. Here in just a bit, we’re off to the Maryland Renaissance
Festival. I think a big ass turkey leg, a flagon or two of ale and
a calculated and purposeful avoidance of modern life for an afternoon
is just about exactly what the doctor ordered.
Oh, one maybe not-so-minor thing: Based on the way things are trending
in Congress, if you don’t already have a copy of the latest
GPG source laying around, you might
want to grab one now. You might not have the option
here in a little bit, and IMHO, somebody telling you that you can’t
have strong crypto is one of the better signs that you’re going to be
wanting some before too much longer…
And now, off to the Faire! Photos on return, I hope…
I’ve still not fully come to terms with yesterday’s
events. I keep surfing around, poking at CNN for more info,
checking to see if any of the bloggers I’ve been following has any new
information. Occasionally, I scroll down too far, and end up in a post
from the 10th, describing some amusing link, some personal event of
note, or no note, or a news item that would have provoked outrage a
few days ago. Now, it just causes cognitive
dissonance, a buzzing in my head as I try to piece together
the “before” and “after” parts of my world as my jabbing finger hunts
for the “Page Up” button. Periodically, I bounce over to read mail and
Usenet, to read messages of hate and violence, messages of sorrow and
support, calls for revenge, calls for support, and calls for
somebody, anybody, to make sense of it all.
Despite my nominally being “at work”, I produced very little
today. Part of my mind tells me that the best thing I can do under the
circumstances, the right thing, is to carry on, to wait
patiently for the investigators to determine responsibility and to
assign blame, and to try to keep the additional disruptions in my life
to a minimum, to prevent “them” from making any more of an
impact. Most of me, however, keeps roaming the web, scanning Usenet,
reading email, looking for new information, answers, resolution.
I saw a CBS news poll tonight report that 66% of the people
polled would be willing to give up “some basic liberties” to prevent
“this sort of attack” from happening again. Only 24% polled
were “not willing”. (I guess 10% told them “fuck off, you media
vultures”, or something.)
Sixty-six percent. Two thirds of us prefer safety to
freedom. That’s frighteningly high, I think. My primary
concern at this point isn’t catching the responsible parties, or
punishing them, torturing them, sending them on the express route to
hell, or even trying to understand why they’re such miserable nasty
people. I’m sure that some or all of those things will happen in due
course; if Americans are good at anything, it is at making sure the
target of our righteous fury knows that it has been targeted.
No, my thoughts keep turning to the longer term effects that these
attacks are going to have on our society, on the shape of our daily
lives. I’m going to be laying awake at night worrying about the
tradeoffs that we’re going to be forced to make, or bullied into
choosing, or duped into believing in; tradeoffs that will
reduce our personal freedoms for an illusionary and facile
sense of security, a mutually agreed upon fantasy that our
world isn’t really the type of place where somebody can look at a
passenger airplane and think about how good of a weapon it would make
and how much more frightening it would be if the plane was filled with
people as well, and that as long as we carry our luggage inside the
terminal instead of dropping it off at the curb, everything will be
okay, and the boogeymen won’t be able to get us.
It begins, already. Today at work, at the NIH, I had
to display an ID badge to get by a bored rent-a-cop before I could get
on the elevator up to my floor, to my cube. According to the email
that went around early this morning, the rent-a-cop was required to
actually touch my badge, presumably to verify, to somehow
divine that it wasn’t fake. This charade was dutifully
carried out by the morning guard, but by the afternoon, a replacement
guard waved me by with only a cursory glance in the general direction
of my badge. My co-workers all had to run the same gauntlet,
repeatedly, and I’m sure for those of Middle Eastern descent, or even
those having the appearance of Middle Eastern descent, it was
infinitely more uncomfortable that it was for me, a fairly typical
looking white male. This will be continuing “until further
notice”, which I fear is bureaucrat for “forever”.
That security guard had absolutely no effect on the
probability of my building suffering a terrorist attack today. Had he
been there yesterday, he would have had zero impact then as
well. Tomorrow, when I again have to present my badge, it still won’t
make a difference. The difference in badge check procedures between
the morning and afternoon guards today? Meaningless.
I think it’s a fairly safe assumption that the Pentagon, and Logan
Airport, and the World Trade Center all had security guards on duty
yesterday, and they weren’t able to prevent tragedy from striking. I
can only infer that the sole function of that guard stationed outside
the bank of elevators in my building was to make people
feel better, to make them feel less worried, less
like targets.
He didn’t make me feel better. He made me feel
annoyed. Annoyed that I was being scrutinized,
examined, because I went to my workplace. Annoyed and
angry that I was being made to display a small piece of
plastic with a bad picture of myself on it, in order to get access to
a place that I’ve been walking into freely for over a
year. Annoyed and angry and sad that because of the
events of yesterday, my personal freedoms were reduced just that
little bit more, another tiny sliver, whittled away. Annoyed
and angry and sad and dejected, because this is a government
building, a building erected by my government, the American
government, which means that it was bought and paid for, and is
maintained by, the taxes of the American people, and at the moment
(and possibly, even probably, forever) the vast majority of those
people, the owners of this building, aren’t allowed into
it. Annoyed and angry and sad and dejected and bitter
because the reduction in my freedom doesn’t, the reduction in your
freedom doesn’t, the reduction in everybody’s freedom doesn’t
make a damn bit of difference if somebody, anybody, the
shadowy “they”, decide to attack us again.
After work today, walking to a pub to meet with friends from all over
the globe to raise a glass to the fallen, I realized that, in
retrospect, one thing I really wished I had had was an opportunity to
vote for John McCain in a presidential election. The less said about
that, the better, most likely.
What should we do? What is the appropriate response?
I’m not sure. At the moment, my stance is reluctantly
hawkish. Reason seems very unlikely to work with the perpetrators of
yesterday’s attacks, so I fear that we will have to fall back on
force; we will have to forcefully make the point that while it may be
technically possible to do this sort of thing to Americans, on
American soil, the final result is a terrible and awful
retaliation. Of what sort, I do not know; how horrible must we
show ourselves capable of being, to drive home the lesson
that Americans are not good targets, not acceptable targets, not
targets of any sort?
The part of my mind that tells me to go about my business, to strive
to live my life in a normal fashion amidst the unthinkable, that part
tells me that violence isn’t the answer here; that
that path twists into a death spiral of increasing devastation until
someone uses a weapon so terrible that our race, our planet, may be
damaged beyond our ability to heal, beyond our ability to
fix. I have no answers to these questions.
In the meantime, even as I revise these thoughts, life
ratchets back into gear. There is fresh spam in my
mailbox. There are people on the Linux lists asking about getting
their video card to support hardware acceleration, about getting PPP
to work, about printing. Over on the incidents list there are network
admins girding themselves in preparation for DDOS attacks from one
side or another. Blogs are beginning to link to items unrelated to the
attacks, and it is possible to get major news sites to load without
delay. People are reaching out, giving blood, giving money, starting
“everybody check in” threads on smaller, more community-oriented
lists, regrouping, assessing loss, reporting that they’re shaken,
scared, but safe, and still here. Life will go on, is
starting to go on. We’re still here, and maybe that’s
the lesson — that despite the worst attack in our history, possibly
in history, period, we’re still here.
I’m still here, and Genehack will resume normal operations on Friday.
talking about the unspeakable
I seem to have lapsed into an all-input, no-output mode — odd for a
weblogger, I know. My thoughts are all over the place, and I’m sure
this entry is going to be more than a bit disjointed. Apologies to all
the people I should have linked below, but didn’t. Apparently I’ll be
going to work tomorrow; that should be fun (not). Bush’s speech left a
bit to be desired, I thought. We were watching on MSNBC, and they had
their camera displaying for a few minutes before Bush was cued to
start talking. He was just sitting there, not moving, totally blank
affect, and then he got the high sign, turned on, and started
talking. You could almost hear the ‘click’ of the switch on his back
being flipped to the ON position.
Talked to my Mom, who spent most of the day locked in her office
building (she works for the state of Kansas). On her way home from
Topeka, she saw long lines as gas stations — with $4/gal prices. What
do you suppose the odds are of profiteering in the petroleum industry
being pushing appropriately?
This is far from over, kids. Hopefully in a few days I’ll be able to
come up with a more reasoned and rational take on all of this. Mad
props to Steve, Dave, and Cam for the wonderful
coverage. Your work is very appreciated, gentlemen.
I leave you with these words from Hal:
Pray according to your fashion, give aid, and remain calm
weblog updates…
Looks like the New York and DC bloggers that I follow are okay… Cam, Anil, Mike and Dineen,
Lyn, Steve — Fred, give us an update,
ya bastard…
we’re okay
Lor and I are okay; she’s at home, and I’m hanging out at a friend’s
apartment (no point in trying to get home; traffic is awful). Dave is giving good updates; can’t
get to most major sites. Updates as I can…
dear god, monday already?
I’m not ready for this. My weekend somehow vanished into a mess of
furniture return, dinner with friends, hacking, WinModem/Linux madness
(can’t we all just get along?), more dinner, ignored email, pure
liquid CSS, unread newspapers, Band of Brothers, KDE via CVS,
SSSCA
paranoia, and
two
new domain names.
Plus some other stuff, of course. A more substantial update is
forthcoming, probably tonight. In the mean time, if you haven’t heard
about the new Security
Systems Standards and Certification Act, you should stop what
you’re doing and check it out now. Then write your
Congresscritter. This one is bad, folks, real bad, like, move out of
the country to someplace that hasn’t decided to totally fuck over the
citizenry for the benefit of the entertainment industry bad.
gemini day of leisure
I’m taking the day off, from blogging at least. I’m grumpy, vaguely
dissatisfied, and really, really ready for it to be the weekend —
which is at least eight, and more likely ten, hours away. Go read NTK or something.
Back Monday.
discretion beats valor; film at 11
Sorry ‘bout that — I really did mean to post an update yesterday, but
all of a sudden it was midnight, so I went to bed instead. Let’s see
what built up in the queue yesterday…
but was there any of that 2/3/5 thing?
Something I’d never really thought about before: similarities between
the television show Babylon 5 and Tolkein’s Lord of the
Rings — apparently quite the hot topic in certain
circles. Here’s one
sample, and another.
Both miss one glaring similarity: geekish fanboys with space on the
web and too much time on their hands… (Before you start flaming, I’m
grinning when I say that. Plus, I’m a weblogger, so “geekish” and “too
much time on my hands” can only be used in ironically
self-referential ways. It’s in the union code.)
this is a test
Speaking of geeky fanboys (and fangirls too), give yourself 3 points
if you recognize this URL: eruditorum.org. Ten points if you’ve
already been there. Fifty if you checked whois before finishing the
book, and were pissed off when you couldn’t get it.
burned, one man.
Wired has a pictorial
up; I’m holding out for a shot or two of Dan’s costume…
tools to check out
BlogMax: Blogging in
Emacs. drool
CryptoMail: open source
end-to-end secure web mail. I don’t need web mail at the moment, but
you never know…
Mars Simulation
Project: simulation of human settlement of Mars. Not really a
“tool”, per se, but it could be fun to play with.
getting chilly out there…
It really starting to look Cold War-ish out there, isn’t it? Economy
(supposedly) headed into the crapper, a Bush in the White House, silly
“defense” industry pork projects, and poorly supervised
CIA agents playing with germs. Great.
Oh, and we’ve also got elected
officials making psychic contact with the dead. Did I hear
somebody at the back of the room mutter “Crazy Years”?
spin, baby, spin
The biometrics industry is trying
to mount a counter-offensive against some of the bad press they’ve
been getting lately. It’s telling that despite the (I assume) large
amounts of money that they’re paying publicists, the best thing that
they could come up with is:
“The knee-jerk reaction has always been the Big Brother angle, which is ridiculous because it’s not recognizing anyone but criminals,” said Joseph Atick, CEO of Visionics Corporation.
Or, in other words, if you’ve done nothing wrong, then you’ve got
nothing to worry about. If you really believe that, there’s some
people from the “defense” industry outside; they’ve got this thing
that shoots missiles out of the sky, and they’d like to sell it to you.
damn the man, part II
A few days back, I linked
to an item about an international day of action against
surveilcams. World Subjectrights
Day is similar, except instead of unspecified “action”, they just
want people to find a local surveilcam and start taking pictures of
it. This idea really appeals to my monkeywrench nature; now I just
have to find a surveilcam. Given that I’m in DC, this shouldn’t be hard…
speaking of being in dc…
Sounds like Guido van Rossum might be speaking at the next Zope/Python Users Group meeting, on
September 26th. Anybody local up for going?
miscellaneous is always the largest category
The O’Reilly-hosted
bioinformatics mailing list has been blowin’ up lately. Lots of
really good discussion over there; if you’re even mildly interested in
the topic, you really ought to be lurking that list.
Thanks to the link the other day from Dave, I’m significantly more googular. I want some sort of
googularity metric web page, which raises the issue of what units
googularity should be measured in… The obvious answer: “Bogarts”, as
in:
“I’m 482 Bogarts more googular than you!”
“Dude, that’s nearly half a kiloBogart! You r00l!”
Shout out to Hal: I’m not
really a cleric, I just am willing to play one when two good friends
ask me to. There is something ‘bout them Kansas boys with their book
larnin’, though.
> perl -e 'print scalar localtime(1000000_000)'
Anybody havin’ a party? (That’s EDT, BTW.)
Sat Sep 8 21:46:40 2001
Currently on the top of the TODO list: renew genehack.org, which
expires later this month. Two years, already, which makes three since
I started doing this. W00t.
Okay, time to slurp down one more cuppa, and then off to work! Catch
you tomorrow.
buck passing
I’ve got a good sized update written in my head, and I fully intended
to have had it put up here for y’all’s enjoyment — but I’ve spent my
pre-work morning time dealing with yet another outage at my hosting
provider.
I’m now officially researching alternative hosting providers. I’m in
the market for something very much like what Michal’s web hosting company offers as the
“shell” plan — that is, SSH/FTP, full CGI, some sort of SQL-based
RDBMS, *nix, plus all the normal trimmings. Right around that price
point would be good too. Basically, I’m leaning towards sabren.com pretty firmly right now;
so try to steer me away from that if you want to sell me on your
favorite provider.
Real update coming later, after work…
sigh
my weekend
I’ll forever remember this Labor Day weekend as the one when I
married two
of my best friends to each other. It was pretty cool; keep watching Cozy, as I’m sure Lyn is
going to tell you all about it. 8^)=
How was your weekend?
bleeding edge
The first versions of KDE 3 are hitting CVS (see this week’s KDE
KC for more info), and I thought I’d try to pitch in and report
some bugs, which means I’ve got to get the damn CVS sources to
build. I’m about two-thirds of the way through the QT3 build, which is
going okay aside from the totally screwed up include paths that I’m
having to fix one-by-one, as they make the build fall over. Fun fun fun…
keep your powder^Wsoftware dry
Dave “Interesting People” Farber and Dan Gilmor gave an
interview to an Australian IT rag about the relationship between
freedom, privacy and software usage. Probably nothing new for my
regular readers, but it might be useful if you need something to point
your parents to, or something.
our american history
Without
Sanctuary is a collection of post cards featuring photos of
lynchings. These souvenirs were apparently quite common in in the late
1800s and early 1900s, perhaps unsurprisingly. Many, many powerful
pictures here; be prepared to stay awhile and think.
when masks are outlawed…
September 7 has been designated An International
Day of Action Against Video Surveillance. Damn the Man.
one for the work-related ‘to read’ pile
Via Morbus, an article on genetic
algorithms and Perl. Cool.
and now off to bed…
Oh, still so very many things to do…but my pillow is calling my
name. Catch up with y’all tomorrow; take it easy out there.