New Scientist has a very nice article about the latest from CoDC, the people who brought us the inimitable BackOrifice.
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this is the week
I’ve sworn off updates until the weekend, because I have a big competition coming up this Friday. Going for the gold 🙂
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Photoshop 7
Photoshop 7 leaked information – the healing brush looks very interesting. I can’t wait to play around with this once it comes out. Thanks to Kel for the tip.
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Many businesses respect me
“It’s a sign of respect that someone sends you an electric business card. It means he wants you as a customer,” – open relays are bad. The people running the ISPs in question do have some valid complaints though, such as the manuals not being written in their language. It should be interesting to see where this story goes and if politics end up playing a part in it.
Arab Americans Call on President to Insist Ashcroft Clarify Offensive Remarks
Given your dedication to tolerance and greater understanding, it is with some concern that we write to you about a matter of serious import. During an interview with syndicated columnist and radio personality Cal Thomas, Attorney General John Ashcroft is quoted as having made anti-Muslim remarks that could only serve to incite the very hatred you have worked so hard to combat. Commenting on faith, Attorney General Ashcroft reportedly said, “Islam is a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for him. Christianity is a faith in which God sends his son to die for you.” This, of course, is a horrible distortion of Islam.
emphasis mine
Last Wednesday something strange happened. The American population was instructed to panic. Place themselves, that is, on a state of highest vigilance. Some cataclysmic act of terrorism would happen – within hours. But nothing terrible happened. Something creepy did. On Thursday there was an inconspicuous news item. John M Poindexter had been appointed to head a new agency “to counter attacks on the US”, such as Wednesday’s no-show. It is equivalent, in British terms, to Jeffrey Archer being made chancellor of the exchequer.
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Safeweb Fix
Hello — Just wanted to inform you that we have completed the patch we promised,
and we have implemented the changes so that PrivaSec users can now turn off JavaScript
on their browsers and still have some functionality when surfing the Web anonymously.
This solves all problems pointed out in the paper by Martin and Schulman.Regards,
====================
Sandra Song
Communications Director
SafeWeb, Inc.
(510) 601-8855 x108
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
Nice followup to a previous entry.
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Programming tip of the day
When evaluating logical operators, put the constant on the left so you have no chance of forgetting that extra =. For example:
if (5 == $id)
{
do stuff
}
Think about it; it’s very logical and if it even saves you a single bug in your code it’s worth it.
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operating systems for dummies
Well at least you can’t say Microsoft isn’t helpful.
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“think outside the pretty box”
Jef Raskin is suprising honest in a Business Week article on how Apple should “Think outside the pretty box”. I think his comments that there hasn’t been many fundemental changes in terms of user interface in too long, but you must admit that Apple has done some pretty cool things lately.
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DOJ releases comments on MS
You may remember the variety of interesting comments the DOJ got concerning the Microsoft case, well they’ve gone ahead and picked 47 from the mess that are relavent to the proceedings. Read on for list, or check out the original.
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i <3 emily
It seems I’ve managed to contract a case of the flu right around the most romantic day of the year. I spent most of the day in Methodist Hospital with a nasty fever, and the rest at home getting a suprising amount of work done. Actually it was probably my most pleasant hospital visit ever, as with the miracles of modern technology they were able to subdue my fever (103+), headache, dizziness, and nausea.
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journalists pounce
It seems yet another journalist/economist/muckraker has decided to attack Paul Krugman for his alleged involvement with Enron several years ago. I think Krugman’s blanket FAQ covers most of the issues reasonably. If you’re interested in more about Krugman, I suggest his excellent article There’s something about macro
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ckone email ads
I faintly remember a year or two ago seeing the ads talked about in this article, but I never actually emailed one of the addresses listed in them. Looking back over the summary of the ad campaign is fascinating, and it has a BMW Films touch to it that it doesn’t directly sell anything, and it doens’t even try to brand, it just is.
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Not-so-Safeweb
Safeweb, the anonymous proxy lauded by analysts and given money by the CIA, is inheritly unsecure. Declan McCullagh has good coverage of the issue at Wired.
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Google Appliance
I haven’t decided what to do with it yet, but I want one.
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Common Sense Copyright
Lawrence Lessig, my favorite lawyer (with Mike Godwin and Mike Wallace), has just launched a new project called Creative Commons that aims to facilitate the creation of legally sound legal that can be attached to creative works, enabling them to be released into the open, so to speak, without the creative author losing all rights to the work. For example from the article:
An artist might, for example, agree to give away a work as long as no one is making money on it but include a provision requiring payments on a sliding scale if it’s sold
It’ll be very exciting to see how this technology is embraced.
Updates? Maybe when school lets up a little. Give me a day or two. There is some really interesting political things going on that I’m going to post about.
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This is worse than SS
In an excellent article, “Check the fine print”, Ed Foster brings up some interesting points about the legalese that most of us blindly agree to every time we install software, in this case Microsoft’s.