I am a hacker and you are afraid and that makes you more dangerous than I ever could be.
Obey Giant
Topic: Miscellaneous
12:22 pm EDT, Jul 2, 2009
I wish more of these prints were available for sale, or at least in a large format image for printing. I love this style of art.
The final image especially reminds me of Todd McFarlane's artwork in Pearl Jam's Do The Evolution Video (which contains one of my favorite guitar riffs of all time).
Schneier on Security: Security, Group Size, and the Human Brain
Topic: Miscellaneous
1:18 pm EDT, Jul 1, 2009
The smallest, three to five, is a "clique": the number of people from whom you would seek help in times of severe emotional distress. The twelve to 20 group is the "sympathy group": people with which you have special ties. After that, 30 to 50 is the typical size of hunter-gatherer overnight camps, generally drawn from the same pool of 150 people. No matter what size company you work for, there are only about 150 people you consider to be "co-workers." (In small companies, Alice and Bob handle accounting. In larger companies, it's the accounting department -- and maybe you know someone there personally.) The 500-person group is the "megaband," and the 1,500-person group is the "tribe." Fifteen hundred is roughly the number of faces we can put names to, and the typical size of a hunter-gatherer society.
Interesting look at group dynamics. Explains why I feel most of "the company" are soulless whores whose job is to tell me "no." ;-)
The main goal of Content Security Policy is to prevent malicious code from being injected into a website and executed within the context of that site.
This could be huge. At the fullest implementation the only JavaScript that will be allowed to execute is external JavaScript files that are specifically white listed by the server. Good bye attribute injection, javascript URIs, and plain SCRIPT tags. No dynamic code execution either! no eval(), no setTimeout() or setInterval() with a string of code. Goodbye obfuscated JavaScript problem. Thanks to native JSON parsing functions, we don't need you anymore.
Some excellent innovation coming out of these Browser wars...
Who Needs Clip Art? OffiSync 2.0 Integrates Google Image Search Into Microsoft Office
Topic: Miscellaneous
10:46 pm EDT, Jun 29, 2009
The biggest addition to the plugin is integrated text and image search. While Office comes with a directory of clip art, it leaves something to leave desired — I almost always find myself just going straight to Google Image search. Now, using OffiSync, you can search Google Images directly from within Office. The plugin supports advanced searches, like sorting by color, size, and usage rights. Once you’ve found an image you like, simply hit ‘Insert’ and the picture will appear wherever your text cursor was. There’s also an integrated browser: just navigate to the page you’d like to quote, highlight the text, and hit Insert.
It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.
csima wrote: No but you would say 'Heavens to betsy!' and 'Oh! Lordy'
Acidus wrote:
"We saw what was coming out with HTML 5 and these browsers, and the question was how far can we push this?" says Hoffman, who manages HP's Web security research group. "We started digging in and said, 'Oh my goodness, this might actually be possible.'
I would never say "oh my goodness" ;-)
"Matt and I know, it's not just us presenting something and saying, 'Look how cool this is,' " Hoffman says. "The cool stuff is not going to come from us, it's going to come from everybody taking the idea and running with it."
The issue isn't that insurance companies are evil. It's that they need to be profitable. They have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit for shareholders. And as Potter explains, he's watched an insurer's stock price fall by more than 20 percent in a single day because the first-quarter medical-loss ratio had increased from 77.9 percent to 79.4 percent.
The reason we generally like markets is that the profit incentive spurs useful innovations. But in some markets, that's not the case. We don't allow a bustling market in heroin, for instance, because we don't want a lot of innovation in heroin creation, packaging and advertising. Are we really sure we want a bustling market in how to cleverly revoke the insurance of people who prove to be sickly?
I have a problem with the concept of medical insurance companies. The goal of a corporation is to maximize share-holder value. Officers and employees of the corporation are negligent if they are not pursuing that goal as rigorously as possible within the confines of the law. Only we are not talking about using market forces to drive innovation to make the best, cheapest, yet acceptable widget. We are talking about the lifespan and quality of life of a human. Can you imagine the concept of Planned Obsolescence applied to healthcare?
A more chilling (and often overlooked) point is that the entire purpose of insurance is to protect you from the effects of rarely occurring but catastrophic events. So you have in place a system whose function is to be as profitable as possible when its customers are struggling with the most damaging and life altering events that can occur. Yet the needs of the medical insurance corporation seem completely perpendicular to the needs of the patient.
Technology Review: Privacy Requires Security, Not Abstinence
Topic: Miscellaneous
5:06 pm EDT, Jun 24, 2009
Gold Star!
Don't be put off by the first page as the rants of a paranoid, technical Luddite. This is a well written examination of American privacy and the laws and regulations attempting to protect it. From the creation of companies like Equifax (in 1899 to help grocery stores in Atlanta track who paid their bills and who didn't) to the 4 four distinct kinds of invasion and the legal safeguards around each (embodied today in regulations like HIPAA), to the digitization of records in the 1960s and the Fair Credit Reporting Act of 1970, to the effects of 9/11 and beyond.
An excellent read to privacy advocates and the lay-person alike.
