There is a gecko somewhere in my office.
Not sure how he got into the house, but he was spotted in the downstairs bathroom. We attempted to catch him—for his own safety, and purely out of concern for his wellbeing—but he hid behind a box of PC parts and a stationery cabinet.
So mental note to self for tomorrow morning: tread carefully.
Another interesting flaw has been discovered in the Diebold paperless voting machines used in many US states.
The Diebold machines are supposedly secure because they run software from an EPROM, software that has been independently audited and certified for use by election board officials.
Except it turns out that if you change a single jumper inside the machine, it will boot any code you care to supply on a standard flash memory card instead. The jumper switch can be adjustedusing a screwdriver or (better) a pair of needle-nose pliers. Once you’ve booted the machine with your suspect software, simply reset the jumper and remove your memory card. When the machine is turned off, any evidence of tampering will vanish and it will go back to booting from the EPROM.
How ingenious. How…convenient.
Microsoft has announced its new tenets to “promote competition”, so I thought I’d take a look at them. I wasn’t impressed.
1. Installation of any software. Computer manufacturers and customers are free to add any software to PCs that run Windows.
Translation: “Your computer belongs to you, not us.”
Yes, you’re actually allowed to install any software you like on the computer you build or purchase. It’s hard to believe that Microsoft even have to write this down. That they feel it’s some kind of new principle to apply “going forward” is a shocking admission.
US air marshals in Vegas have revealed that they have a quota: they have to report at least one suspicious person a month.
Anyone I know play Animal Crossing on Nintendo DS and want to visit via Nintendo’s Internet service?
Yahoo added this area where people ask (mostly dumb) questions, and anyone can offer their (frequently uninformed) answers.
It’s strangely addictive. It’s a bit like the Internet Oracle, without the stale old traditions said institution picked up over the years.
I tend to alternate between useful and bizarre/smartass answers. Some examples of the latter:
Q: What in your toilet can make the water blue? I haven’t put tabs in for months.
A: Is it an atomic toilet? If so, it could be Cherenkov Radiation.
Q: Is there a differance between the sound of an emergency vehicle in Italy and one in the U.S.?
A: Yes. The one in Italy will sound a lot quieter, because it’s very far away. Unless you’re in Europe, in which case the one in the USA will sound quieter.
Q: My 14 yr old son is always masturbating … I have also caught him with dirty movies. Is he going through a phase?
A: Yeah, it’s a phase men go through. It’ll stop when he hits 65 or so.
Q: Does anyone have chickens?
A: No, nobody does. Chickens are a myth perpetrated by the egg conspiracy.
Q: Is there a way to develop psychic intuition?
A: I think if you concentrate you’ll know the answer.
So, we finally found a builder who was interested in fixing up our decks. He sent waterproof deck coating samples, returned telephone calls, quoted a price, all the things I was naïvely expecting builders to do when I started the quest.
This morning he turned up with 3 friends at 7am to start work. I guess in Texas you have to get the work done early, before the temperature gets too high.
So it was that I came to be awake early enough to see a baby squirrel, the first youngster to visit us. He was exploring next door’s fig tree, learning how to not fall off branches. Meanwhile, a couple of adult squirrels were moving from fig to fig, testing each one to see if it was ripe.
After a while the youngster moved onto the front lawn to frolic. He rolled in the grass, ran around in circles, and practiced leaping from ground to telegraph pole and back. He also tried some gratuitous hole-digging; clearly somewhere in his genetic code is the knowledge that squirrels dig. When he masters food-gathering, he should be ready to learn burying.
For some time now, in place of the usual lorem ipsum text, I’ve been using the following text:
Because the — all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There’s a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those — changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be — or closer delivered to what has been promised.
Does that make any sense to you? It’s kind of muddled. Look, there’s a series of things that cause the — like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate — the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those — if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.
It’s taken from a White House transcript, of course.
Now here’s a funny thing: state agencies are now using the “PATRIOT” Act to obtain private profiles from web sites such as facebook.com, for people applying for any state-related job.
[Redacted]
In other words: don’t count on your “friends only” or “private” postings not ending up in the hands of any government organization that takes an interest in you.
While this example involved Facebook, I’d put money on other social networking sites doing the same and handing over your data with no questions asked—including LiveJournal, Yahoo, Orkut, MySpace and so on.
Two people are walking through a metal detector on the London Underground. One comments to the other that it’s “a piece of shit that wouldn’t stop anyone”.
Result: they are stopped by police, searched, and charged with an offense under Section 5 of the Public Order Act, which prohibits “Using threatening words or behaviour likely to cause alarm, harassment or distress”.
In other words: pointing out stupid ineffective security might distress the sheep, so pass a law and fine anyone who does it.
Meanwhile, last month Mark Thomas took part in a repeat of a previous demonstration, where people turned up wearing T-shirts in support of the PKK.
Since the 2000 Terrorism Act, UK law has classed as terrorism anything which “involves serious damage to property” or “is designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system”, so long as it’s done with the intent of influencing government. That makes for an awful lot of terrorists; and the kicker is section 13:
A person in a public place commits an offence if he-
(a) wears an item of clothing, or
(b) wears, carries or displays an article,
in such a way or in such circumstances as to arouse reasonable suspicion that he is a member or supporter of a proscribed organisation.
So if your T-shirt causes “reasonable suspicion” that you support an organization that has caused damage to property with the intent of influencing government behavior—like, say, Greenpeace—you can be fined, put in prison for 6 months, or both.
There’s more. Under section 19, if you become convinced that someone else has committed such an offense “in the course of a trade, profession, business or employment”, then you are committing a crime unless you tell the police about the suspect “as soon as is reasonably practicable”.