VSC told the students nothing... In the Fall of last year there were rumors that VSC was open to selling the 60-year-old 91.1 WRVU. There was no more news until Monday June 6th. The call sign change to WFCL popped up unexpectedly Monday morning in the FCC database. The DJs on air used the wrong station ID for most of the day because they were not informed.

Then Tuesday afternoon the DJ on air was told that there was "urgent equipment maintenance" and hurried out the door... which they then locked behind him.

Decius writes:

You can listen to the last moments of WRVU at this link.

There is more detail along with news media links here. Its a fucking disgrace. Its transparently obvious that a bunch of people who don't like college radio saw an opportunity here to kill this station and pocket 3 million dollars in the process which they get to spend on their own projects. It a win, win for them and a travesty for music city.

Its hard for me to really express how disappointed and angry this makes me. This whole deal has been shady, from the fact that WRVU has no representation in the governing body of Vanderbilt Student Communications, to the pre-emptive registration of potential protest domain names by Vanderbilt Student Communications prior to the original announcement back in September, to the fact that the final pulling of the plug was not communicated to the public and was done during the summer when the students are away and cannot comment. Why Vandy tolerates such obvious underhandedness from its student communications leadership is beyond me.

Oh wait, its the money.

What a damn shame.

Totally unbelievable. I hope there is a huge fallout due to this. The Vanderbilt community should be enraged.

WRVU Is Dead

1) Privatize the State Department! The market could do a better job.

2) No more corrupt police departments. Instead, bodyguard vouchers!

...

The U.S. Geological Survey reported a 3.6 magnitude earthquake centered in Montgomery County at 5:04 a.m. Friday.

The epicenter was in Gaithersburg near the intersection of I-270 and Route 124 (39.145°N, 77.222°W), USGS reported in a preliminary finding. Its depth was 3.1 miles.

I slept right through it.

Mild earthquake felt across DC region

Rep. Steve Cohen (TN-D) eulogizing Chilton on the House floor:

Alex Chilton on 120 Minutes in 1985:

The Replacements tribute song to Alex Chilton from 1987:

He didn't die in Memphis, that's no so cool.

Hoder watch...

Search Engine video podcast: Free Hossein Derakhshan, even if he's kind of a jerk! Boing Boing

Exploiting Lawful Intercept to Wiretap the Internet

Many goverments require telecommunications companies to provide interfaces that law enforcement can use to monitor their customer's communications. If these interfaces are poorly designed, implemented, or managed they can provide a backdoor for attackers to perform surveillance without lawful authorization. Most lawful intercept technology is proprietary and difficult to peer review. Fortunately, Cisco has published the core architecture of it's lawful intercept technology in an Internet Draft and a number of public configuration guides.

This talk will review Cisco's architecture for lawful intercept from a security perspective. The talk will explain how a number of different weaknesses in its design coupled with publicly disclosed security vulnerabilities could enable a malicious person to access the interface and spy on communications without leaving a trace. The talk will explain what steps network operators need to take to protect this interface. The talk will also provide a set of recommendations for the redesign of the interface as well as SNMP authentication in general to better mitigate the security risks.

//BIO: Tom Cross

Black Hat Technical Security Conference: DC 2010 // Briefings

Earlier in the day we were investigating a possible database corruption problem with MemeStreams. No one found anything definitively, but it's possible there is a problem present... There was a problem we were unable to reproduce that involved double posts appearing in the system. Please let Decius or Rattle (me) know if you see any problems.

At this late hour, the only problem with the site appears to be that no one is using it...

Update: No, this isn't Noteworthy's fault.

Texas Instruments (TI) ultimately failed to stand behind their misguided claim that calculator hobbyists violated copyright law by having public, online discussions about techniques to get more functionality from TI calculators. Yet the company continues to dig itself into new holes by issuing more improper take-down letters...

In fact, TI has sent an identical take-down demand to Mr. Smith's university complaining about the same OS keys having been posted on our client's student webpage, and demanding that the school take the materials down from that URL. Today, Mr. Smith filed a DMCA Section 512 counternotice to continue the fight.

Hey, Texas Instruments -- Stop Digging Holes | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Today I'm launching Zoompf, a new kind of web performance company. We don't deploy sensors, simulate user load, or monitor your application from data centers around the global. We don't try to answer the question "How fast are my web apps?" We answer the next logical and frankly more important question: "How do I make my web applications go faster?"

Zoompf's technology crawls and identifies over 150 specific problems with your web application that impacts web performance. You can learn more by downloading our Optimizing Web Performance presentation. Bu this post is not about what Zoompf does. It's about why I'm doing Zoompf.

Why on earth would I leave an amazing career in a successful industry and resign from an awesome job in a down economy? A lot of close friends have asked whether I'm crazy or not in the last month. But after I've explained the incredible opportunity behind what I'm doing their outlook completely changes and they become very supportive, offering time, funding, and recommendations.

The business case for performance is obvious. Faster apps increase revenue. Using resources more efficiently reduces operational costs. This is why the performance testing market is huge. But there is a gap in this market when it comes to performance testing of modern web applications. Talk to anyone about web performance and they start talking about the usual suspects:

-Refactoring, optimizing, JITing, caching application code and data
-Database tuning, queries, store procedures, indexes, denormalizing tables
-Reverse proxies, memcached, Varnish, load balancers, SSL accelerators, etc.

But recent research has found generating dynamic content accounts for typically less than 10% of page load times. The vast majority of page load time is spent downloading, parsing, and rendering all the components that make up a modern application. It is on the front end, and not on the back end, where optimizations can be made that drop seconds off load times. JavaScript code, CSS, the inner workings of browsers, HTTP voodoo. I am a thought leader in exactly this space.

The majority of widely known web performance optimization practices today focus on the application tier or the database tier. Traditional performance testings tools do no front end optimization testing. And yet the front end has the biggest impact on web application performance in modern applications. Do you see the disconnect yet?

This is an enormous opportunity.

This is why I created Zoompf.

Billy, I wish you the best of luck, and I'm here to help in any way I'm able.

Zoompf: Or, Why Billy Hoffman Left Security To Work On Web Performance

The top two floors of House of Sweden have 19 corporate apartments, ranging in size from 800–2600 square feet (68-242 kvm). The apartments all have an open floor plan with generous living rooms, dining rooms and master bedrooms with their own bathrooms. Floor-to-ceiling windows and spacious balconies offer spectacular views of either the Potomac River or the lush Rock Creek Park. The standard of the apartments is very high, featuring carefully chosen, solid materials composed with Swedish design expertise. Bedrooms can easily be converted into offices and single apartments can also be combined to create even larger spaces if required.

It's well known that the Swedish Embassy in Washington, DC has it's own night club... Apparently it also has apartments you can lease. Yes, it's apparently possible to live in Sweden without leaving North America.

Update: I have not been able to find out if the apartments come with health care...

Life at the Top - House of Sweden