bugfox blog

SmartWater is a liquid with a unique identifier linked to a particular owner. “The idea is for me to paint this stuff on my valuables as proof of ownership,” I wrote when I first learned about the idea. “I think a better idea would be for me to paint it on your valuables, and then call the police.”
…
If more people had a security mindset, services that compromise privacy wouldn’t have such a sizable market share — and Facebook would be totally different. Laptops wouldn’t be lost with millions of unencrypted Social Security numbers on them, and we’d all learn a lot fewer security lessons the hard way. The power grid would be more secure. Identity theft would go way down. Medical records would be more private. If people had the security mindset, they wouldn’t have tried to look at Britney Spears’ medical records, since they would have realized that they would be caught.

Bruce Schneier–Inside the Twisted Mind of the Security Professional (via)

This seems a little grim, but it would be a useful counterbalance to the general tendency to enthusiastly embrace any plausible-sounding proposal without thinking through the consequences.

After testing the site with Safari for the first time I ended up making some massive, long-overdue changes to the stylesheet, which hopefully will allow things to display better in more browsers and screen resolutions.

In particular I eliminated the use of pixel metrics, replacing it with logical sizes (inches and points.) I also reduced the dependence on bitmap images for formatting and fixed some malformed relative URLs, which Firefox and IE handled correctly but Safari didn’t like.

If the site now looks WORSE in your browser, let me know what your configuration is and I’ll see what I can do.

Problem: the voting machines report numbers that don’t add up.

Attempted solution: local authorites commision an independent audit of the machines to determine the source of the problem.

Checkmate: the vendor prevents the audit by threatening to sue to protect its “Intellectual Property.”

Story on Ars Technica.

This is exactly why all voting machines should be required to use open source software throughout: to make sure that effective audits will always be possible. Of course no commercially available voting machines actually do this. As always the industry’s motto is “Trust us. Shut up. Just trust us.”

UPDATE: A judge orders the review to proceed, although the report won’t be available in time to do anything about it before the November elections.

“Robert X. Cringely” (Mark Stephens) repeats and debunks the story the Admiral Grace Hopper invented the term “bug” (refering to computer problems.)

Actually I’m pretty sure that she never intended to claim that she invented the term. That is a misunderstanding imposed by others. She just said that she found “the first genuine computer bug,” meaning the first bug that was actually an insect.

Like most people I have been following the unfolding problems of New York governer Eliot Spitzer with a mixture of amusement and disdain. However one detail seems particularly striking:

[Spitzer] arranged to meet with “Kristen,” a prostitute who charged $1,000 an hour, on February 13 in a Washington hotel and paid her $4,300, the court document said.

That would seem to imply that high-priced prostitutes, like high-priced lawyers, bill in six-minute increments.

GoDaddy’s continued willingness to shut down any site that draws complaints makes one thing clear: you should never register a domain with GoDaddy unless you are certain that your site will never offend anybody.

Who elected the registrars to serve as the all-powerful censors of the Internet?

Michael Nygard provides an unexpected reason why you should probably avoid buying the latest and greatest technology: Steve Jobs made me miss my flight.

Wired provides a useful list of standard add-ons: Optimize A Fresh Ubuntu Installation.

Also check out Medibuntu, which automates a lot of this stuff much more safely than Automatix. (Warnings about Automatix.)

Article from The Register. I thought of making a list of all the basic security practices being violated here, but I gave up. It just boggles the mind.