A Chicken Little approach to computer insecurity
This morning I woke up to read that thirteen students in Kutztown, Pennsylvania will be charged with the third-degree felony offence of “Computer Trespass” for learning and then exploiting the administration password for the iBook laptops their school gave them to use: 13 teens face felonies
According to parent testimony and confirmed by an otherwise vaguely-worded […]
Google captchas and Safari
Tried to log into my Gmail account today and couldn’t (what can I say, I’ve forgotten the password). Turns out that the Google Password Assistance process doesn’t work very well in Safari.
If you can’t read the text it says: “Type the characters you see in the picture below”. There is no picture below.
Proof that the USPTO is broken
Among the software geek crowd it’s generally taken as a given that the US patent office is broken simply by the fact that they allow software patents (software should be held under copyright, not patent law) and often allow really stupid software patents.
However its worse than that. They also allow really stupid physical goods patents […]
Land of the Dead
Thanks to Carman I got to check out an advanced screening of Land of the Dead tonight. If you like zombie movies you’ll be amused by this one, but it ain’t no Dawn of the Dead by any stretch of the imagination.
Thinking zombies just doesn’t work very well and having George Romero direct it was […]
Book meme
For Pony and lilydustbin:
Number of books I own
600+ I haven’t counted them in quite a while and I dumped a bunch of paperbacks the last time I moved but at the moment they cover the entire east wall of my living room. Except for where the TV is. And the liquor. And the shrunken […]
John Cleese vs. the United States
I don’t know if this is actually by John Cleese or not. I could google it but I really don’t care, it’s funny and poigniant regardless: To The Citizens Of The United States Of America
6. You should stop playing American “football”. There is only one kind of football. What you refer to as American “football” […]
Tagged?
So this is what she was talking about today when she said “I tagged you”… I just assumed it was the dental freezing seeping into her brain-stem.
I will follow suit soon, I promise-ish. (Do comic books and junk mail count?)
The English language is making me cranky today
Earlier today while chatting with Adina I almost inadvertently wrote “yesternight” to mean “last night”. Which got me thinking: if “yesterday” is a word, is “yesternight”? And if “last night” is valid, is “last day”?
And then, while we chatted about carpentry, I used the word “carpent” to mean the thing that a carpenter does, yet […]
Jay Pinkerton nails the history of Batman
I haven’t laughed this hard since I accidentally caught my arm in the blender while making mai tai’s: Batman Begins Primer, the definitive Batman chronology.
The premise of Batman has endured to the point of being iconic, so that it’s difficult to step back for a second and realize how incredibly stupid it all is. Even […]
WordPressDash
That last post, about MacOS on Intel, was written using WordPressDash, so far the most useful Dashboard widget I’ve seen yet, next to weather and the one that’s telling me my Apple stock is slowly dropping (wtf?).
Nice job Paniris. (Thanks Adam!)