It turns out the NSA has a consent form you can fill out to give the agency permission to monitor your overseas phone calls and e-mail.
The form (.pdf) comes from a procedures manual (.pdf) FOIAed by John Young at Cryptome. It looks like it was crafted for government employees who want to go the extra mile for Uncle Sam. But there's no reason you can't volunteer -- unless, of course, you have something to hide.

NSA spy program permission slip

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The nationwide health scare over bacteria-ridden spinach widened Monday, as the number of states reporting sickness linked to the outbreak increased to 21.

See, spinach is evil.

CNN.com - E. coli spinach scare increases to 21 states - Sep 18, 2006

This is the best video blog I've found so far...this guy is hilarious and smart, every day he's got something worth watching...

the show with zefrank

This blog done by Ryan Singel and Kevin Poulsen is pretty good at covering all the civil liberties stories going on these days...especially the ones involving technology...

27B Stroke 6

Abstract This paper presents a fully independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, including its hardware and software. We obtained the machine from a private party. Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities — a voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab. Mitigating these threats will require changes to the voting machine's hardware and software and the adoption of more rigorous election procedures.

Felten and friends pown e-voting...again

game theory is the shit....that is all...

So recently I've been doing my bi-annual fooling myself into thinking I can/will get back into school and finish my degree...so I'm looking for schools in my area, that means Stanford (heh, yeah right, but I'll give it a shot to even out that chip on my other shoulder), Berkeley (not likely, but worth a try), and then a slew of crap-tastic smaller universities in the area...

At this point all I want an undergrad degree for is so they will let me go to grad school so even a crap-tastic school will do (but I'd rather not)...

anyways, so this has lead to a lot of funny things, like me a grown man (at least in this context) being forced to study for the SATs again (my scores are so old that they are not accepted anymore)...

so the new SAT has a writing component, but aside from that I like my odds (I'm being graded on a curve with high school kids here)...still I'm always on the look out for a way to improve my odds...in this case I've found another good way...sense the last time I took the SAT I've been diagnosed with dyslexia, which really explains a lot (for example I couldn't spell Michael until like the 4th grade)...anyways I can get some extra testing time as a result...

that should be good, historically I havn't tried to use things like this for my disabilities for one reason or another, but I'm through caring about demonstrating that I can compete on an uneven playing field, if they'll give me a legit way to boost my score, I'm doing it...

Getting back into school

So I was chugging along, avoiding doing work (which these days means reading wikipedia) when I deside to do my weekly check to see who has vandalized my wikipedia article when i see a link on the bottom to my blog (on memestreams)...and I'm reminded that I have a blog...

so anyways, I'm here again...

Top presidential adviser Karl Rove was the anonymous source who released a Time reporter from his promise of confidentiality, allowing the journalist to avoid jail, Newsweek says.

In a story published today, Newsweek reveals more details about the celebrated case stemming from the leak of an undercover CIA agent's name in 2003.

The publication of Valerie Plame's name by Chicago Sun-Times syndicated columnist Robert Novak set off an investigation because it's a crime to knowingly identify an undercover CIA official.

This story keeps getting better... I watched none of the sunday shows so I feel quite blind right now.

Newsweek: Rove gave Time reporter OK to testify

] Dimensions change drastically as your clump grows from a
] fraction of an inch to a monstrous freak of nature.

Boingboing keeps talking about this so I picked up a copy. Its only $20. If you were ever wondering what it would be like to take LSD while Japaneese, this is your chance. Its a happy, non-violent game with great music and interesting, funny worlds to explore. I recommend it. That is unless you have a problem with flashbacks.

Katamari Damacy