Elegant, yet… stupid.

If you’re fortunate enough to live by a theatre that is running it don’t miss the one night engagement of War Games 25th anniversary. It’s this Thursday, July 24th. I can’t wait!!

Here’s a nice article remembering the movie

I regard bike geeks in this town with great suspicion and disdain. They are lemurs with bad attitudes. But at the same time I love bikes.

I’ve reluctantly found myself bashfully intrigued by this idiotic fixed gear fad that is going on. And in the name of tinkering, I may convert a bike to a fixed gear. Dear god I never thought it would come to this.

To aid me in this quest I found this handy blog post on converting old road bikes to fixies.

A few security holes in Mac OS X are already known, such as the unpatched ARDAgent vulnerability. But that’s not where the principal Mac security threat lies. From interviews with security experts and corporate IT managers, it’s clear that security concerns and potential risks are much more quotidian — exactly the kind of bread-and-butter stuff that is easy to ignore, especially for Macs, where IT’s familiarity with the Mac is slight because users have typically managed the computers themselves.

It’s time for IT to figure out where the Mac’s security holes are so that you can plug them before your corporate knowledge starts bubbling out. Here are the six main flaws you should focus on.

Read the rest

I’m sure anyone that bothers to read this blog already reads BoingBoing, but I thought this was important enough to post over here as well.

On the face of it, this new loophole might not seem to be such a big problem, barring the facts of a) retroactive telecom immunity and b) the implication that Bush will never be held accountable for numerous felonies. Unfortunately, it also really is, as far as I can tell, a back door to greatly expanded wiretapping powers. Beyond the obvious fact that it requires only certification and loose judicial review rather than a warrant, it does so in the following way:

1. It Eliminates the requirement that there be probable cause that a foreign target is a suspect of any kind - terrorist, criminal, ore “foreign agent.” They merely need be your French grandmother, as long as they are outside the United States and not a U.S. person, and if the government says wiretapping them is for the purpose of collecting “foreign intelligence information” (e.g., her Pommes Frites recipe)
2. It requires the cooperation of telecoms in these efforts
3. It eliminates of the need to specify a particular email address or phone number to be wiretapped
4. 1-3 together imply that certifications of wiretapping on individuals is not the issue. The point is to use telecom cooperation to target large collections of data on communications between U.S. Persons and foreigners. This implies data mining - where, for instance, because a foreign target has communications passing through a given domestic switch, any communications (domestic or international) passing through that switch are subject to collection, analysis, and storage. There are “minimization requirements” meant to ameliorate this, but it is unclear if they really help.
5. The compromise of domestic communications in (4) is exacerbated by the fact that targets need only be “reasonably believed” to be outside the U.S.
6. It includes only minimal court oversight - who it is that is subject to warrantless wiretapping will not be know to the FISA court; the government can wiretap before it court order is sought and continue to do so even if it is denied - during a lengthy appeal process.

Here’s the full blog entry from KetchupandCaviar.com