Blog Posts

All my blog posts and articles

Page 73 of 141 (2815 total posts)

September 2010

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....

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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...

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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 ...

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August 2010

Why I now have an email signature

We’ve been on an SEO binge over the last 4-6 weeks. I’ve been educating myself by listening and reading to everything I can find my hands on. What’s SEO anyway? It stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and it refers to the **science and art of getting your site to come up when people are searc...

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High Reactives

What are high reactives? > “Temperament is a complex, multilayered thing, and for the sake of clarity, Kagan was tracking it along a single dimension: whether babies were easily upset when exposed to new things. He chose this characteristic both because it could be measured and because it seemed to ...

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Do you remember “Twin Peaks”?

“Harry, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it,, don’t wait for it, just … let it happen. Could be a new shirt at the men’s store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot, black coffee…”(Dale Cooper, in Twin Peaks) Don’t ask me why, the quote just strikes me as funny! Originally posted on Apr 28, 2007. Reprinted courtesy of ReRuns plug-in.

Rogert Ebert: Ten things I know about the mosque

I bet many of you didn’t realize that Roger Ebert is still writing a fantastic column, with movie reviews yes, but also some excellent written commentary. For example, check this fine post [Ten things I know about the mosque](http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/08/ten_things_i_know_about_the_mo.htm...

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Fun article about faux-physical UI metaphors

Ok, that’s my own curious headline for this interesting article in the New York Times: > “What, after all, is a more recognizable symbol of the capriciousness of life than a deck of cards, out of which your fate is randomly dealt? And yet here the deck icon is only superficial. At heart it’s not a random-card generator but the opposite: a highly wrought program with a memory, an algorithm and a mandate to keep children in the game. An app posing as a spatiotemporal object.” (from The New York Times)

Rhapsody vs. iTunes

I think I might be entering a new phase in my music listening. I listen to a ton of music, on my iPhone, on my computer, in my car, all the time. And up to now it’s always been downloaded (purchased) music that I organize manually within iTunes.  From time to time I’ve had subscriptions to [eMusic](...

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[GEEKY] Too much authentication goodness

It seems like nowadays, to be a cool, 21st century kind of application, you need to allow me to use my facebook, or google, or yahoo, or twitter, or … account to access a site. Ok, sounds like a fine idea, don’t you think? Here’s the problem. I go to one of the zillions of sites out there that I use, and it asks me to log in. Now, not only do I have to remember a username / email, a password, but I also have to remember if I used Google, Facebook, OpenId, or whatnot, to get in. I guess I should set a policy for myself to never use anything other than the built in username/password. That’s probably a better policy for security as well.