Ramblings & ephemera
Froschmäusekrieg: Literally, “war between the frogs and the mice”, a poem attributed to Homer (Batrachomyomachia), a satire about the pointlessness of war or feuding.
Posted on December 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Avi Rubin’s “Voting: Low-Tech Is the Answer” (Business Week: 30 October 2006): Unfortunately, there are three problems with electronic voting that have nothing to do with whether or not the system works as intended. They are transparency, recovery, and audit. … Electronic voting is not transparent – it is not even translucent. There is [...]
Posted on December 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: law, politics, security, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
From Stephen Ornes’s “Map: What Does the Internet Look Like?” (Discover: October 2006): The United States owns 74 percent of the 4 billion available Internet protocol (IP) addresses. China’s stake amounts to little more than that of an American university. Not surprisingly, China is championing the next wave of the Internet, which would accommodate 340 [...]
Posted on December 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Scott M. Fulton, III’s “Allchin Suggests Vista Won’t Need Antivirus” (BetaNews: 9 November 2006): During a telephone conference with reporters yesterday, outgoing Microsoft co-president Jim Allchin, while touting the new security features of Windows Vista, which was released to manufacturing yesterday, told a reporter that the system’s new lockdown features are so capable and [...]
Posted on December 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Northrop Frye’s “The Mythos of Autumn: Tragedy” (128): The moment of discovery or ‘anagnorisis’, which comes at the end of the tragic plot, is not simply the knowledge by the hero of what has happened to him … but the recognition of the determined shape of the life he has created for himself, with [...]
Posted on December 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, language & literature, on writing | Comments Off
I upgraded my Ubuntu Linux desktop today from Dapper to Edgy. It appears that in /etc/fstab, LABEL= no longer works, and you must now use UUID=. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=278652 So my fstab now looks like this, for instance (these are all external drives): UUID=a3d8a126-a7fc-4994-9675-748ed62c3109 /media/music xfs rw,user,noauto 0 0 UUID=e6e83a83-7487-4f22-a7ac-42cb100dfe24 /media/music-copy reiserfs rw,user,noauto 0 0 UUID=99198c52-3f9e-4255-9326-7891a90223ac /media/temp [...]
Posted on December 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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So a bunch of us are talking at the Central West End Linux User Group meeting. Somehow the topic of surgery during World War I comes up. Robert: What was really bad was that those guys were operated on without any anaesthetic. Me: Huh? Doctors had anaesthetic then. Robert: They did? What? Me: Ether. Robert: [...]
Posted on December 10th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “Hacking Computers Over USB” (Crypto-Gram: 15 June 2005): From CSO Magazine: “Plug an iPod or USB stick into a PC running Windows and the device can literally take over the machine and search for confidential documents, copy them back to the iPod or USB’s internal storage, and hide them as “deleted” files. [...]
Posted on December 10th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Sterling’s “Viridian Note 00459: Emerging Technology 2006” (The Viridian Design Movement: March 2006): When it comes to remote technical eventualities, you don’t want to freeze the language too early. Instead, you need some empirical evidence on the ground, some working prototypes, something commercial, governmental, academic or military…. Otherwise you are trying to freeze [...]
Posted on December 10th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security, social software, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
From Ryan Naraine’s “‘Pump-and-Dump’ Spam Surge Linked to Russian Bot Herders” (eWeek: 16 November 2006): The recent surge in e-mail spam hawking penny stocks and penis enlargement pills is the handiwork of Russian hackers running a botnet powered by tens of thousands of hijacked computers. Internet security researchers and law enforcement authorities have traced the [...]
Posted on December 10th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Timothy Noah’s “Bush’s Fart-Joke Legacy” (Slate: 2 October 2006): Legend has it that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, once farted in the presence of Queen Elizabeth I, whereupon he went into exile for seven years. On his return, the queen reputedly greeted, “My lord, we had quite forgot the fart.”
Posted on November 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, language & literature, politics | Comments Off
From Christian Seifert’s “Analyzing malicious SSH login attempts” (SecurityFocus: 11 September 2006): First, we analyzed the login names that were used on the login attempts. During the sample period, there were 2741 unique account names ranging from common first names, system account names, and common accounts to short alphabetical strings captured by the system logger. [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From D. Ghirlandaio’s “Comment to Stephen Griffin’s ‘Torture and the Ticking Time Bomb’” (10 October 2006): The Syrians had a technique for the ticking bomb scenario. Give the man who knows where the bomb is a cell phone. “Call your mother.” At the mother’s house, a man picks up the phone.
Posted on November 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, law, politics | Comments Off
From Mary A. Dempsey’s “Fordlandia” (Michigan History: July/August 1994): Screens were just one of the Yankee customs transported to Fordlandia and Belterra. Detroit physician L. S. Fallis, Sr., the first doctor sent from Henry Ford Hospital to run the Fordlandia medical center, attempted to eradicate malaria and hookworm among Brazilian seringueiros (rubber gatherers) by distributing [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Alan Bellows’s “The Ruins of Fordlândia” (Damn Interesting: 3 August 2006): On Villares’ advice, [Henry] Ford purchased a 25,000 square kilometer tract of land along the Amazon river, and immediately began to develop the area. … Scores of Ford employees were relocated to the site, and over the first few months an American-as-apple-pie community [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Wikipedia’s “Clarke’s three laws” (2 November 2006): Arthur C. Clarke formulated the following three “laws” of prediction: 1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. 2. The only way of discovering the limits [...]
Posted on November 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
On Saturday 17 April 2004, I received the following email from someone I didn’t know: > Hello, > > I am not sure who you are but our security detected a Netsky virus in an > email that you sent. Whether a personal message or a spam, please make > attention to the fact that [...]
Posted on November 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: security, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”
Posted on November 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, language & literature | Comments Off
From the email archives: On Sunday 30 May 2004 11:32 pm, Jerry Hubbard wrote: > How is everyone? Hope the storms did not harm anyone. My basement flooded twice, my tenant’s kitchen had water streaming in through the window frame, our backyard fence was blown down, the umbrella on our deck was blown off the [...]
Posted on November 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, true stories | Comments Off
From Roger Ebert: “Because the movie all takes place during one day and Roxy is being chased by a truant officer, it compares itself to “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” It might as reasonably compare itself to “The Third Man” because they wade through sewers.”
Posted on November 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, language & literature | Comments Off
