Page 72 of 141 (2810 total posts)
10/04 [story] This did happen — PART 1: THE ELDERS Now, such a long time after first contact, it was hard to remember the times, so much earlier, when the elders had established the borders, such as they were, of the terrain, such as it was. The elders, The Elders, were no longer around, or visible even. But their influence certai...
09/29 XMarks is the only thing that will sync Safari with Firefox — And, it’s leaving us: > “The past four years have been a wild ride for us: growing something from nothing to substantial scale, providing a simple service that people love because it simplifies their lives. We’ve learned tons along the way, often by making big mistakes. We’re really sorry that this ...
09/28 Owner of Segway dies in Segway accident — This is just a weird weird happening: > “His body was found late Sunday morning after a passer-by reported seeing a man plummet 30 feet into the River Wharfe, the police said, adding that a “Segway-style vehicle” had also been found. They did not say what had caused the accident.” (from New York Times)
09/25 Google’s servers — From an article about Google’s hardware: > “Google’s big surprise: each server has its own 12-volt battery to supply power if there’s a problem with the main source of electricity. The company also revealed for the first time that since 2005, its data centers have been composed of standard shipping containers–each with 1,160 servers and a power consumption that can reach 250 kilowatts.” (from CNET) There are lots of other choice tidbits about the design of the millions (?) of tiny servers that Google uses to run its data centers. Quite interesting.
09/24 Ok, but what’s a quango? — A BBC Headline says: > “Leaked list suggests 180 quangos to be abolished” (from BBC Web Site) Inquiring minds want to know, what the heck is a quango? Before you look it up, can you guess? First I thought it was a derogatory word for some ethnic group. Then I thought it might be a currency. Who knows?
09/23 This never happened: Russian Spy — This never happened… We were working on some piece of software or something and the Russians invaded our workplace and demanded that we create it for them. We were threatened in big ways. We had a kind of a robot thing small which had a video camera and it was left in the Big room while we were put ...
09/18 How (not) to design a ballot — My head is full of democracy and elections these days. How come, you ask? Well for the last year or so I’ve been working for the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation, on elections technology. This month’s focus is generating ballots for two elections happening in November. So more than usual, I am ...
09/17 Ever heard of the Johari Window? — I came across the idea of the Johari Window during one of the presentations at the Bif-6 Conference. I’d never heard of it before. To me it’s an interesting formalism to think about ones self knowledge. Reading about the Johari Window on Wikipedia (where...
09/09 The Tor Anonymizer — Have you heard of this thing, the Tor Anonymizer? Ok again admittedly another highly geeky system, but pretty fascinating. Makes you think that the handwringing worrying of the security wonks isn’t as over the top as all that. > Tor is a [sophisticated privacy tool](http://tor.eff.org/overview.html....
09/06 Location Proofs — The more businesses reward me for showing up at their establishments, the more likely it will be that a bad guy would want to pretend that they were there to garner those rewards. I came across a very interesting paper that proposes the notion of ‘location proofs.’:  [Enabling new mobile application...
09/04 The Effect of Snakeoil Security: wheels within wheels — As you can imagine I’ve been reading and learning more about security with my work in Elections (http://www.trustthevote.org). It’s a hall of mirrors and I struggle to really grasp when a possible threat is worse than the cure for it — in real world terms, rather than theoretical terms.This article ...