GranneBlog

Archives

• ▼2010 (1)
  • ▶January (1)
    • Poetry: Johnny Mercer's "Early Autumn"
• ▶2009 (174)
  • ▶December (5)
    • The dangers of loyalty based on personality, not policies
    • Refusing a technology defines you
    • A solution to two-way task list syncing on a Mac & iPhone
    • The Irish Church lies in creative - and evil - ways
    • Lovely - Microsoft will let companies create ad-filled desktop themes
  • ▶November (11)
    • Linux Phrasebook in Russian
    • Big security problems with the current way Firefox handles extensions
    • SMS gateways you can use to get around high texting charges
    • Why we laugh
    • David Foster Wallace on what's wrong with memoirs, celebrity profiles, & academic writing
    • David Foster Wallace on the impossibility of being informed & the seduction of dogma
    • Ambient awareness & social media
    • The Kraken botnet
    • David Foster Wallace on serious vs. commercial art
    • Religion, God, history, morality
    • Bernie Madoff & the 1st worldwide Ponzi scheme
  • ▶October (7)
    • Programmer jokes
    • Australian police: don't bank online with Windows
    • Nicholas Carr's cloud koan
    • Malware forges online bank statements to hide fraud
    • Coppola on changes in the movie industry
    • Why we get disoriented in malls
    • Malcolm Gladwell on training to be a journalist
  • ▶September (3)
    • COBOL is much more widely used than you might think
    • How to tell if someone is a good writer
    • Why Picasso charged a million dollars
  • ▶August (3)
    • Apple's role in technology
    • Who would ever think that it was a good idea?
    • Grab what others type through an electrical socket
  • ▶July (17)
    • Warnings about invalid security certs are ignored by users
    • Girls & boys & brain chemicals
    • What Google's book settlement means
    • Some reasons why America hasn't been attacked since 9/11
    • A beheading in Saudi Arabia
    • RFID dust
    • RFID security problems
    • You need to know if your product is a luxury or a premium
    • Huck Finn caged
    • Various confidence scams, tricks, & frauds
    • The future of news as shown by the 2008 election
    • Cell phone viruses
    • How security experts defended against Conficker
    • David Foster Wallace on postmodernism & waiting for the parents to come home
    • David Foster Wallace on the importance of writing within formal constraints
    • David Foster Wallace on the problems with postmodern irony
    • David Foster Wallace on being a tourist
  • ▶June (16)
    • All about freezing to death
    • Stolen credit card data is cheaper than ever in the Underground
    • 80% of all spam from botnets
    • The light bulb con job
    • Storm made $7000 each day from spam
    • Quanta Crypto: cool but useless
    • Famous "Laws" of Business & Technology
    • What it takes to get people to comply with security policies
    • Small charges on your credit card - why?
    • Outline for an Unpublished Linux Textbook
    • Mine fires that burn for 400 years
    • 7 tools of propaganda
    • How to deal with the fact that users can't learn much about security
    • Could Green Dam lead to the largest botnet in history?
    • Green Dam is easily exploitable
    • The limitations of Windows 7 on netbooks
  • ▶May (22)
    • Meeting expectations, no matter how silly, in design
    • The Uncanny Valley, art forgery, & love
    • Taxi driver party lines
    • David Foster Wallace on rock, the rise of mass media, & the generation gap
    • David Foster Wallace on minimalism & metafiction
    • David Foster Wallace on the familiar & the strange
    • David Foster Wallace on TV, loneliness, & death
    • David Foster Wallace on fiction's purpose in dark times
    • Avoid toxic people
    • Al Qaeda's use of social networking sites
    • The watchclock knows where your night watchman is
    • A better alternative to text CAPTCHAs
    • A story of failed biometrics at a gym
    • Now THAT is fantabulous!
    • A fix for Apple Mail's inability to search Entire Message
    • What dogs give us
    • What's wrong with the Republicans
    • Van Gogh on death
    • Roger Ebert on death
    • Immortality, poetically
    • Interviewed for an article about mis-uses of Twitter
    • Steve Jobs on mediocrity & market share
  • ▶April (30)
    • Newspapers are doomed
    • Extreme male brains
    • German twins commit the perfect crime
    • Fossils are the lucky ones
    • David Foster Wallace on moving mountains
    • Criminal goods & service sold on the black market
    • Mistakes to avoid in writing
    • Some facts about GPL 2 & GPL 3
    • Open source & patents
    • Another huge botnet
    • David Foster Wallace on leadership
    • Why did Thomas Jefferson bring a stuffed moose to France?
    • From Philip Larkin's "Aubade"
    • The hard truths science reveals
    • Totalitarian regimes adopt the trappings of religion for themselves
    • 4 sources of tension between science and religion
    • Intelligent Design? How about a flat earth?
    • How right-wing talk radio works
    • David Foster Wallace on David Lynch
    • David Foster Wallace on Kafka
    • A homogenized religion for America in the 21st century
    • Michael Pollan's rules for food
    • Microsoft Exchange is expensive
    • Things to say instead of cussin'
    • Things we do that are legal, yet wish to remain private
    • How to increase donations on non-profit websites
    • More on Google's server farms
    • Why we cuss
    • Google's server farm revealed
    • Why David Foster Wallace used footnotes
  • ▶March (24)
    • Reasons Windows has a poor security architecture
    • Vista & Mac OS X security features
    • $9 million stolen from 130 ATM machines in 49 cities in 30 minutes
    • Now that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has switched to the Web ...
    • Why we can easily remember jingles but not jokes
    • Social software: 5 properties & 3 dynamics
    • Kids & adults use social networking sites differently
    • The importance of network effects to social software
    • 35% of adults have a social networking profile
    • MySpace/Facebook history & sociology
    • Defining social media, social software, & Web 2.0
    • DRM fails utterly
    • Why everyone wants a computer: socializing
    • The future of TV is the Internet
    • Facebook & the Dunbar number
    • What passwords do people use? phpBB examples
    • New Zealand's new copyright law
    • A history of the negative associations of yellow
    • Why do Marlboros have red tips?
    • The cochineal insect's gift of red
    • The conspiracy mindset
    • Should states track cars with GPS?
    • How the fundamentalist thinks
    • Add houseplants to your home & office
  • ▶February (31)
    • Crazy anti-terrorism plans that worked
    • Why cons work on us
    • The color of the TV you watch determines the color of your dreams
    • Chemically remove bad memories
    • Word of the day: Sitzfleisch
    • Conficker creating a new gargantuan botneth
    • How easy it is to clone "unbreakable" RFID passports
    • What happens to IP when it's easy to copy anything?
    • CCTV in your plane's cabin?
    • Give CLEAR your info, watch CLEAR lose your info
    • Socioeconomic analysis of MySpace & Facebook
    • US government makes unsafe RFID-laden passports even less safe through business practices
    • The end of Storm
    • The end of Storm?
    • Three top botnets
    • Largest botnet as of 2006: 1.5 M machines
    • Why botnet operators do it: profit, politics, & prestige
    • Srizbi, Bobax, & Storm - the rankings
    • Number of bots drops 20% on Christmas
    • 1/4 of all Internet computers part of a botnet?
    • Prices for various services and software in the underground
    • Criminals working together to improve their tools
    • Wikipedia, freedom, & changes in production
    • How ARP works
    • Bush, rhetoric, & the exercise of power
    • The Yakuza's influence in Japan
    • Gottman on relationships
    • ODF compared & constrasted with OOXML
    • The future of security
    • My new book - Google Apps Deciphered - is out!
    • A single medium, with a single search engine, & a single info source
  • ▶January (5)
    • Old botnets dead; new botnets coming
    • A definition of cloud computing
    • Social networks can be used to manipulate affinity groups
    • Real-life superheroes
    • DIY genetic engineering
• ▶2008 (162)
  • ▶December (17)
    • A one-way ticket to crazyville
    • Social networking and "friendship"
    • Many layers of cloud computing, or just one?
    • Problems with airport security
    • Business models for software
    • Bruce Schneier on wholesale, constant surveillance
    • Those who know how to fix know how to destroy as well
    • Bruce Schneier on security & crime economics
    • Bruce Schneier on identity theft
    • Preserve links after a website move with mod_rewrite
    • How it feels to drown, get decapitated, get electrocuted, and more
    • How the Storm botnet defeats anti-virus programs
    • Hallucinating the presence of the dead
    • But we've always done it this way ...
    • A Russian man with perfect memory
    • A woman who never forgets anything
    • Ted Williams' fishing story
  • ▶November (75)
    • Students, schools, civil rights, & the f-word
    • One group files 99.9% of all complaints about TV content
    • American courts and government and the f-word
    • Taboo acts and language and how they work together
    • Etymologies & the dictionary definitions of the f-word
    • FCUK, a special trademarked logo
    • Denver International Airport, home to alien reptilians enslaving children in deep dungeons
    • CopyBot copies all sorts of items in Second Life
    • Online criminals pay the most for bank account details
    • An analysis of Google's technology, 2005
    • Why people "friend" others on social networks
    • Richard Stallman on why "intellectual property" is a misnomer
    • Richard Stallman on proprietary software
    • Richard Stallman on the 4 freedoms
    • Debt collection business opens up huge security holes
    • Mac OS X settings to reduce PDF sizes
    • More problems with voting, election 2008
    • Matthew, the blind phone phreaker
    • Luddites and e-books
    • Asheron's Call had no mechanism for secure trade between players
    • How con artists use psychology to work
    • A botnet with a contingency plan
    • 1st label with more than half of sales from digital
    • Why American car companies are in trouble
    • The NSA and threats to privacy
    • Blue for girls and pink for boys
    • The importance of booze to the Pilgrims
    • Chinese folklore and the colors green, white, red, yellow, and black
    • George Clinton and the sample troll
    • George Clinton and the sample troll
    • Presidential campaigns, campaign bios, & history
    • How Obama raised money in Silicon Valley & using the Net
    • 50% of people infected with personality-changing brain parasites from cats
    • Steve Jobs has changed 4 industries
    • The purpose of the Storm botnet? To send spam
    • Microsoft's programmers, evaluated by an engineer
    • Offline copy protection in games
    • How movies are moved around on botnets
    • Money involved in adware & clicks4hire schemes
    • The various participants in phishing schemes
    • Earn $750,000 per month sending spam
    • Rainbow Tables crack passwords
    • 1st criminal case involving a botnet
    • Usernames that botnets try
    • The life cycle of a botnet client
    • Social engineering a bank robbery
    • Biometric photo watermarking using your iris
    • Cloned trucks used to commit crimes
    • How the Greek cell phone network was compromised
    • 9 reasons the Storm botnet is different
    • The Chinese Internet threat
    • The latest on electronic voting machines
    • Tracking children who might commit a crime later
    • Craigslist "everything is free!" scams
    • Cheating, security, & theft in virtual worlds and online games
    • How the settlers changed America's ecology, radically
    • The X Window System defined
    • An analysis of splogs: spam blogs
    • Lots of good info about the FBI's far-reaching wiretapping of US phone systems
    • Matching voters with their votes, thanks to voting machines
    • San Francisco surveillance cameras prove useless
    • Synchronization attacks at fast food drive-through windows
    • Serial-numbered confetti
    • Trusted insiders and how to protect against them
    • A collective action problem: why the cops can't talk to firemen
    • A wireless router with 2 networks: 1 secure, 1 open
    • Anonymity and Netflix
    • If concerts bring money in for the music biz, what happens when concerts get smaller?
    • China's increasing control over American dollars
    • Details on the Storm & Nugache botnets
    • Google PageRank explained
    • Surveillance cameras don't reduce crime
    • Virtual kidnappings a problem in Mexico
    • Abuse of "terrorist" investigative powers
    • 10,000 hours to reach expertise
  • ▶October (11)
    • Tim O'Reilly defines cloud computing
    • Denise-ism #95
    • 6 reasons why "content" has been devalued
    • Thinking like an engineer; thinking like a security pro
    • His employer's misconfigured laptop gets him charged with a crime
    • Bush's Manicheanism destroyed him
    • Denise-ism #62
    • How technologies have changed politics, & how Obama uses tech
    • Correcting wrong info reinforces false beliefs
    • An elderly Eskimo & his unusual knife
    • How to run a command repeatedly
  • ▶September (10)
    • Bruno's memory structures
    • John Berryman's suicide note
    • Interesting psychological disorders
    • Why you should not run Windows as Admin
    • Amazon's infrastructure and the cloud
    • The rules of conspiracy
    • To solve a problem, you first have to figure out the problem
    • The 6 stages of political scandal
    • I for one welcome our new OS overlords: Google Chrome
    • Dropbox for Linux is coming soon
  • ▶August (4)
    • A domain name reserved for examples
    • MTV's global reach
    • The Elizabethans and their love of booze
    • The Aztecs and their New Year's Festival
  • ▶July (6)
    • Fat footers
    • Flush your DNS cache
    • Synchronizing Outlook & Google Apps
    • Remove EXIF data from JPEGs
    • Russian music sites
    • A grammarian's haiku
  • ▶June (1)
    • Robin-ism #6
  • ▶May (3)
    • Obama, Clinton, Microsoft Excel, and OpenOffice.org
    • Web design contrasted with graphic design
    • What Dell learned from Wal-Mart
  • ▶April (27)
    • Energy-efficient washing machines
    • 1/2 of all bots are in China
    • Denise-ism #601
    • Scott-words #17
    • How Google motivates employees
    • Denise-ism #37
    • Why brands are declining
    • Lost her ability to play piano after she regained sight
    • After a stroke, he can write, but can't read
    • Modern piracy on the high seas
    • Language shapes thought
    • A cheap, easy way to obfuscate license plates
    • What actions change MAC times on a UNIX box?
    • What in our brains invest memories with emotion?
    • Do's and don'ts for open source software development
    • Scarcities and the music, movie, and publishing businesses
    • Like music, authors will make more money from personal appearances
    • The Internet makes (sloppy) writers of nearly everyone
    • The shift from interior to exterior lives
    • People being rescued run from their rescuers
    • World distance reading WiFi and RFID
    • Micro-nations
    • Chinese attacks on government and business networks
    • The NSA's cryptographic backdoor
    • Graveyard shifts and torpedo coffins
    • Earliest recorded autopsy
    • The Ellsberg Paradox: People prefer definites over ambiguity
  • ▶March (6)
    • Bots on campus!
    • Jughead's weird hat
    • 50 years of change due to senior citizens
    • Rich and poor drug users
    • How to open a physicist's briefcase
    • My new business idea
  • ▶February (2)
    • The most popular commands in Word
    • Test of MarsEdit
• ▶2007 (53)
  • ▶December (1)
    • Firefox: Open diverted links in background tabs
  • ▶October (1)
    • My new book - Podcasting with Audacity - is out!
  • ▶September (1)
    • Sneaky advertising
  • ▶August (1)
    • The importance of escalators in shopping
  • ▶July (9)
    • How to delete stuck files on Amazon's S3
    • Notes on getting into well-guarded events using social engineering
    • A quick tutorial on writing a program that accepts plugins
    • All stories have the same basic plots
    • Find out a hard drive's UUID
    • 2 New TV Interviews, Both on Cell Phones
    • 2007 Summer Vacation, Day 5: 3 July 2007
    • 2007 Summer Vacation, Day 4: 2 July 2007
    • 2007 Summer Vacation, Day 3: 1 July 2007
  • ▶June (2)
    • 2007 Summer Vacation, Day 2: 30 June 2007
    • 2007 Summer Vacation, Day 1: 29 June 2007
  • ▶February (1)
    • Out now: Microsoft Vista for IT Security Professionals
  • ▶January (37)
    • Retrieve CD Key from Windows 95 or NT
    • 1 Henry VI: Lucy lists Talbot's titles
    • 1 Henry VI: inhearsed
    • 1 Henry VI: giglot
    • Talbot describes his son's valiant death
    • 1 Henry VI: mickle
    • 1 Henry VI: Talbot says farewell to his son
    • 1 Henry VI: buckled
    • 1 Henry VI: moody-mad
    • 1 Henry VI: Talbot's deer metaphor
    • 1 Henry VI: Talbot threatens Bourdeaux with destruction unless it capitulates
    • 1 Henry VI: division in the English court
    • 1 Henry VI: confutation
    • 1 Henry VI: repugn
    • 1 Henry VI: churlish
    • 1 Henry VI: capital punishment for fighting in the king's palace
    • 1 Henry VI: disanimates
    • 1 Henry VI: reguerdon
    • 1 Henry VI: pestiferous
    • 1 Henry VI: Gloucester castigates Winchester
    • 1 Henry VI: lavish tongue
    • 1 Henry VI: pursuivants
    • 1 Henry VI: quillets
    • 1 Henry VI: misconster
    • 1 Henry VI: bruited
    • 1 Henry VI: subverts
    • 1 Henry VI: contrarities
    • 1 Henry VI: captivate
    • 1 Henry VI: servitor
    • 1 Henry VI: an urn ... rich-jewel'd of Darius
    • 1 Henry VI: Astraea
    • 1 Henry VI: an example of euphuism
    • 1 Henry VI: contrived
    • 1 Henry VI: espials
    • 1 Henry VI: sirrah
    • 1 Henry VI: contumeliously
    • 1 Henry VI: Joan of Arc on glory
• ▶2006 (514)
  • ▶December (10)
    • Word of the day: Froschmäusekrieg
    • 3 problems with electronic voting
    • USA owns 74% of IPv4 addresses
    • Microsoft executive sets self up for hubristic fall
    • The final moment of tragedy
    • Ubuntu Edgy changes to fstab
    • Conversation with Robert
    • Take over a computer network with an iPod or USB stick
    • Spimes, objects trackable in space and time
    • Russian bot herders behind massive increase in spam
  • ▶November (14)
    • Somehow I don't think she had
    • Bad passwords for SSH
    • Syrian-style torture via family connections
    • More on Fordlandia
    • Henry Ford's debacle in the jungle
    • Clarke's three laws of prediction
    • My reply to those "You sent a virus to me!" emails
    • A great poetic opening to a novel
    • My late May, 2004
    • Best comment I've seen on New York Minute, the Olsen twins movie
    • Best headline ever
    • Great email sig about operating systems
    • Best Denise quote ever
    • Overheard at home, 20031110
  • ▶October (20)
    • Portable music turns life into cinema
    • Average iPod has just 500 songs on it
    • Great, wonderfully-designed consumer products
    • Incompetent & they don't know it
    • Living in a cave behind your house
    • Dead five years before he was discovered
    • What can we learn from Scooby-Doo?
    • A little Latin
    • Teach people not to want a camera, but photography itself
    • Maintaining control in a subdued country
    • MI5 & MI6 backgrounds
    • Imagining a future of warring balloons
    • The escape of Mr. Flitcraft
    • 1st book written to be filmed
    • The military's 8 P's
    • That'll work too
    • More on Slab City
    • The end of days in Slab City
    • Thoughts for a Lovecraftian tale
    • More on memory
  • ▶September (3)
    • It takes 10 years to develop expertise
    • A prison completely run by the inmates
    • Quote by me
  • ▶August (15)
    • What's a blogject?
    • What is Web 2.0?
    • Warning signs of an incipient serial killer
    • Types of open source licenses
    • A coup in Equatorial Guinea for fun
    • The airplane graveyard
    • How to wiretap
    • Info about the Internet Archive
    • The real solution to identity theft: bank liability
    • Two-factor authentication: the good & the bad
    • The HOLLYWOOD sign as multi-user access-control system
    • When people feel secure, they're easier targets
    • Examples of tweaking old technologies to add social aspects
    • Clay Shirky on flaming & how to combat it
    • Word of the day: creative destruction
  • ▶July (128)
    • Why the US toppled Chile's government
    • Why the US toppled Guatamala's democratic government
    • Why the US toppled Iran's government
    • 14 governments the US has overthrown in 110 years
    • Politics as pathology
    • The neutron bomb as the most moral weapon possible
    • The Cold War as game theory
    • 3 English words with the most meanings
    • Language & grammar types: inflected, agglutinative, & analytic
    • What bots do and how they work
    • Different types of Bots
    • Uses of botnets
    • Who runs botnets?
    • An analysis of botnets
    • Prescription drug spending has vastly increased in 25 years
    • What patents on life has wrought
    • 1980 Bayh-Dole Act created the biotech industry ... & turned universities into businesses
    • What is serious news reporting?
    • Neil Postman: the medium is the metaphor for the way we think
    • "Have you ever been admitted to a mental institution?"
    • Wal-Mart's monopsony power damages its vendors
    • Antitrust suits led to vertical integration & the IT revolution
    • The mirror of monopoly: monopsony ... which may be worse
    • Corporate consolidation reigns in American business, & that's a problem
    • AACS, next-gen encryption for DVDs
    • How DVD encryption (CSS) works ... or doesn't
    • Where we are technically with DRM
    • Apple iTunes Music Store applies DRM after download
    • To combat phishing, change browser design philosophy
    • 1% create, 10% comment, 89% just use
    • Open sources turns software into a service industry
    • Differences between Macintosh & Unix programmers
    • The first movie theater
    • The day FDR was almost assassinated
    • The date Silicon Valley (& Intel) was born
    • Where we are now
    • The origin of broadcast journalism
    • DRM converts copyrights into trade secrets
    • Writers take a while to attain full power
    • Macaulay in 1841: copyright a tax on readers
    • Macaulay in 1841 on the problems on the copyright monopoly
    • The real purposes of the American school
    • The birth of Geology & gradualism as a paradigm shift from catastrophism
    • Why structureless is not only impossible, but counterproductive
    • America the aggressive
    • The differences between language in art & politics
    • Why software is difficult to create ... & will always be difficult
    • Paradigm shifts explained
    • Ridiculous trademark and fair use stories
    • The CIA's 'black sites' hide terror suspects around the world
    • Just how big is YouTube?
    • Origins of the interstate highway system
    • What kinds of spam are effective?
    • Ban USB devices or glue USB ports shut
    • Favelas, the slums of Rio De Janeiro
    • How to exercise your brain
    • NSA spying: Project Shamrock & Echelon
    • Transcendence, described by the East & West
    • Religious moderates legitimize fundamentalism
    • A private espionage company for businessmen
    • What should one study in college as an undergraduate?
    • Learn by working on hard problems
    • How to start a startup
    • Which is better: products or services?
    • Education teaches people how to solve problems, not choose the good ones
    • Business, work, and good ideas
    • Patenting is hurting scientific research & progress
    • Conservatives are more ruthless than liberals
    • Conservatives cannot govern well; reason #1: Medicare reform
    • The contradictions of conservatism
    • How conservatives are like communists
    • OnStar: the numbers
    • The power of PR
    • How to get 1 million MySpace friends
    • California's wide-open educational software reveals personal info
    • The feeling of being watched causes greater honesty
    • Microsoft: only way to deal with malware is to wipe the computer
    • Why the color-coded threat alert system fails
    • A big benefit of open source: better learning & teaching
    • 'Thomas Crown Affair! Thomas Crown Affair!'
    • The Piraha language of Brazil
    • Checking papers does no good if the papers are forged
    • America, the failed state
    • How doctors measure what percentage of your body is burned
    • Spy on no-good boss and lose your job
    • FBI used OnStar for surveillance
    • PATRIOT Act greatly expands what a 'financial institution' is
    • A definition of stress
    • Camouflaged weapons
    • A new fraud: faking an entire company
    • Some surprising data isn't encrypted in ATM transfers
    • It's alright to fail at a startup when you're young
    • Why big co's are bad are creating new products
    • Jobs are unnecessary - just build something valuable
    • It's hard to judge the young, but the market can
    • The real vs. stated purpose of PowerPoint
    • Why did it take so long for blogging to take off?
    • Fairchild Semiconductor, 1st VC-backed startup
    • Why is American design so often terrible compared to Japanese design?
    • Who made money during the era of railroads
    • Protective incompetence
    • What successful startups need
    • Spinoza's conception of God
    • Neal Stephenson on being Isaac Newton
    • Asian languages invent new characters
    • The politics & basics of Unicode
    • Media & culture's emptiness encourages cynicism
    • Media-induced fear & its effects
    • Another answer to "I have nothing to hide"
    • Government-created viruses for surveillance
    • What RFID passports really mean
    • Surveillance cameras that notice aberrations
    • 2 years that changed the pr0n industry
    • Cultural differences between Unix and Windows
    • The US is becoming less democratic
    • An empire cannot be created by a republic
    • Illegality practices by the US in the "War on Terror"
    • America, a militarized society
    • International Law in the modern world
    • Wikipedia defines fascism
    • Who was saved in the storming of the Bastille?
    • Napoleon's losses in the invasion of Russia
    • Fouche's blackmail of Napoleon
    • Fouche proud of terror, expanded
    • Fouche's daily list for Napoleon
    • Fouche proud of terror
    • Fouche praised with parallelism
    • Joseph Fouche the atheist
  • ▶June (88)
    • My new book - Linux Phrasebook - is out!
    • Japanese nuclear secrets revealed on P2P network
    • 5 reasons people exaggerate risks
    • India's transgendered folks
    • Why no terrorist attacks since 9/11?
    • Why disclosure laws are good
    • Why airport security fails constantly
    • L.A. police using drones to spy on citizens
    • 4 ways to eavesdrop on telephone calls
    • Employees willingly installed CDs handed to them by strangers
    • A new way to steal from ATMs: blow 'em up
    • Microsoft's BitLocker could be used for DRM
    • THE answer to "if you're not doing anything wrong, why resist surveillance?"
    • Exploits used for corporate espionage
    • Ways different cultures view technology
    • Change the AMD K8 CPU without authentication checks
    • 1st 2 questions AOL tech support asks
    • Quick 'n dirty explanation of onion routing
    • Unix specs vs. Windows specs
    • AT&T's security tv station
    • DIY worm kits
    • Why Microsoft is threatened by open source
    • Search for Microsoft Money data files on P2P networks
    • Remote fingerprinting of devices connected to the Net
    • A profile of phishers & their jobs
    • Spammers causing problems to DNS
    • Ubuntu Hacks available now
    • Do it yourself phishing kits
    • Al Qaeda hijacks web server to distribute video
    • Providing an opening for criminals without realizing it
    • Friendster doesn't get security
    • Windows directory services
    • Unix vs Windows: NYC vs Celebration
    • Offshoring danger: identity theft
    • Evil twin hot spots
    • Most PCs are rife with malware, & owners don't know it
    • Cracking a wireless network in 3 minutes
    • Identity theft method: file false unemployment claims
    • Arrested for directory truncation
    • Rainbow cracking is now a public service
    • Banks have more to fear from internal attacks than external
    • How virtual machines work
    • Virtual-machine based rootkits
    • The inventor of UNIX on its security ... or lack thereof
    • The math behind Flash Worms
    • An overview of Flash Worms
    • Lawyers playing childish games
    • Weegee at work
    • The Vitruvian Triad & the Urban Triad
    • Beauty and software
    • Joan Didion on writing & narrative
    • Prices for zombies in the Underground
    • Library book returned 92 years late
    • Ballmer says Windows is more secure than Linux
    • Joan Didion on life in Los Angeles
    • ISO definition of software quality
    • Vitruvian Triad terminology
    • Wynton Marsalis on recognizing your place
    • Steve Ballmer couldn't fix an infected Windows PC
    • Credit cards sold in the Underground
    • Search for "high score" told them who stole the PC
    • Hacking principles
    • The origins of 2600
    • It's easy to track someone using a MetroCard
    • Tracking via cell phone is easy
    • Kids forcibly sent to re-education programs
    • Japan's 99.8% criminal conviction rate
    • The way to trick smart people
    • Social network analysis by the NSA
    • TV signals passing through the Stone Age air
    • Colonialism at its most obvious
    • Lost tribe hoaxes
    • How to travel to the most isolated human settlement on earth
    • How to grade or judge water
    • How Europeans & Americans view water
    • Smallest state park in the USA
    • Soviet-style society & the US
    • Google's number tricks
    • Why so many Google projects & betas?
    • Google's data trove tempts the bad guys
    • Why it's hard for prisoners to sue prison systems
    • History & numbers on prison rape
    • Why courts don't use legal-size documents any longer
    • Newspaper readership declining
    • A history of the public notice
    • The Mann Act as problematic law
    • Bird in Flight, Brancusi, & US Customs law
    • Arnold Rothstein, criminal kingpin
  • ▶May (72)
    • US SSN = Canadian SIN
    • iSee: online map of CCTVs in Manhattan
    • In Britain, you can see footage of you captured by CCTV
    • Your job? Waiting in line for others.
    • The history of solitary confinement
    • Alcatraz: reality & Hollywood
    • The tyranny of HOAs
    • Road rash, fender vaults, & root vaults
    • Poems dug up from the grave
    • The 80/20 rule
    • Modern mercenaries
    • James Jesse Strang, Mormon King of Michigan
    • Posse Comitatus Act
    • Henry Wirz, the Demon of Andersonville
    • Number of 19c American medical schools
    • A brief history of American bodysnatching
    • The difficulties in establishing time of death
    • Court acceptance of forensic & biometric evidence
    • Gender, murder, & knots
    • When newspapers began to cover trials
    • Success of The Shawshank Redemption
    • More movies made from Stephen King's books than anyone else
    • The history of the Poison Pill
    • 60% of Fortune 500 incorporated in Delaware
    • Kaspar Hauser
    • Word of the day: Synecdoche
    • Clarabell the Clown's final - and only - words
    • Notes on The Strength of Weak Ties revisited
    • Failure every 30 years produces better design
    • The TSA acts outside the Constitution
    • 5 reasons people exaggerate risk
    • The most volatile compound known to man
    • Weldon Kees, polymath
    • One of the benefits of LASIK eye surgery
    • Matching identities across databases, anonymously
    • Killer search terms
    • Problems with fingerprints for authentication
    • Why infosec is so hard
    • Windows Metafile vulnerability
    • IE unsafe 98% of the time
    • Even worse spam is coming
    • The Flash Worm, AKA the Warhol Worm
    • A technical look at the Morris Worm of 1988
    • A short explanation of moral rights in IP
    • Paul Graham's lessons for startups
    • Human life & wasted time
    • Brin's Transparent Society explained, briefly
    • Surveillance tools to detect drowning swimmers
    • CCTV in the UK deters crime
    • Tragedy in film
    • Fundamentalism as limited reading
    • From P2P to social sharing
    • The value of Group-Forming Networks
    • Bruce Schneier on steganography
    • Good description of Fair Use & 1st Sale
    • Developing nations stand up to US/UN bullying on copyright
    • Copyright stupidity: arguments & numbers
    • The Witty Worm was special
    • What can we use instead of gasoline in cars?
    • Recover sounds from the ancient world
    • Flow defined
    • Why are some people really good at some things?
    • Word of the day: pareidolia
    • Malware focused on theft above all
    • Clay Shirky on why the Semantic Web will fail
    • The structure & meaning of the URL as key to the Web's success
    • The 1st software patent
    • How patents ruined the Wright brothers
    • OmniPerception = facial recognition + smart card
    • Face recognition software as an example of "function creep"
    • Smart World of Warcraft Trojan
  • ▶April (116)
    • 3000 ravers, dancing in silence
    • Projecting a murdered woman's image on a building
    • Gam Ze Yaavor
    • Word of the day: disemvoweling
    • What's a socio-technical system?
    • Thoughts on tagging/folksonomy
    • Bring down the cell network with SMS spam
    • Subway's frequent-eater program killed because of fraud
    • The difficulty of recovering from identity theft
    • Israeli car theft scam
    • Open source breathalyzers
    • Bruce Schneier on phishing
    • Laws & enforcement in virtual worlds
    • The American Revolution: led by elites, sold to the masses
    • A game completely controlled by the players
    • Computer commands as incantations
    • The Creative Class & the health & growth of cities
    • A basic Japanese cultural trait
    • Our reasons for giving reasons
    • Magruder fools the Federals
    • Jefferson Davis, the Hill Cats, & the Butcher Cats
    • Beauregard's dislike for Davis
    • Beauregard fools Halleck & escapes
    • Troops like sugar soaked in water
    • Grant's optimism
    • Wearing the wrong color to a battle
    • Walke describes the Battle of Island Number 10
    • A burning quilt brings revenge
    • The aide has to try as well
    • Stonewall Jackson's respect for Sunday
    • Recognizing futility
    • Stanton the uber-lawyer
    • Users know how to create good passwords, but they don't
    • The Sumitomo Mitsuibank bank heist
    • 10 early choices that helped make the Internet successful
    • Early attempts to control phone usage
    • Flat local calling rates in US helped grow the Net
    • Monopolies & Internet innovation
    • Railroads & tolls
    • Turnpikes, roads, & tolls
    • Canals & tolls
    • How Venice protected its glassblowing industry
    • Big companies & their blind spots
    • Paul Graham on software patents
    • Douglas Adams on information overload
    • Risk compensation & homestasis
    • The diamond scam
    • The history of tabs (card, folder, & UI)
    • Why businesses want RFID for inventory
    • Arguments against the Web's ungovernability
    • Security will retard innovation
    • Word of the day: lucubration
    • Terrorist social networks
    • How terrorists use the Web
    • When to use XML
    • The growth in data & the problem of storage
    • Number of PCs doubled from '95 to '99
    • Denise-ism #92
    • Pickup truck commercial
    • Better in command of the enemy than a prisoner
    • When to have your name in the newspapers
    • Ulysses Grant & the torpedo
    • Slavery & whiskey; Foote & Grant
    • How he liked being tarred & feathered
    • The conspirer
    • Good will to everyone ... with a few exceptions
    • Jefferson Davis, seeker after discord
    • Jefferson Davis replies to Joseph Johnston
    • Word of the day: cunctative
    • Too much tail to that kite
    • Lincoln's 1st political speech
    • Cameraphones are different cameras & different phones
    • 30 seconds to impress
    • Russian anti-tank dogs
    • Dead for 3 years
    • The great divider
    • Respecting religion
    • The sky-god as origin of evil
    • Familiar strangers
    • Culture, values, & designing technology systems
    • Nice pun #4
    • The botnet hunters
    • John the Ripper makes password cracking easy
    • Google on the Google File System (& Linux)
    • The original description of Ajax
    • Google ad advice
    • Embarassing email story #1056
    • Bruce Schneier on what we should do
    • Religion & evolution
    • Phishing by altering the bank's server
    • Architecture & the quality without a name
    • A very brief history of programming
    • Bertrand Russell on writing well
    • Free markets need visibility to work
    • How much does stolen identity info cost?
    • Some thoughts on strong & weak social ties
    • Why we don't have rights from the ground to the sky
    • Identity production & sharing during adolescence
    • Social capital: subcultural vs cultural
    • Intel: anyone can challenge anyone
    • Intel's ups and downs
    • Zombie ships adrift off the shore of Africa
    • Trusted Computing: security for whom? from whom?
    • Thieves use Bluetooth to find laptops in cars
    • Hear someone typing & know what was written
    • Tracking terrorists with Unintended Information Revelation
    • Unpatched Linux, 3 months; unpatched Windows, 20 minutes
    • Water that uniquely identifies its owner
    • Don't fly where we won't tell you not to fly
    • Brandeis on openness in business, society, & government
    • How to fake an anthrax scare
    • Zombies from China attack Internet
    • A living story, tattooed on flesh
    • To counterbalance that last one
    • Greatest 1st sentence of any blog post, ever
    • Commanding the waves to stop
  • ▶March (15)
    • Global secrets are poor security
    • Four principles of modernity
    • Funes the Memorious, for real
    • The incompetent don't know it
    • How to really practice to get better
    • 3500 forgotten cans
    • A 4000 year old ship in the desert
    • Interesting way to acquire someone's signature
    • Pi to unfathomable places
    • An interesting way to look at DRM
    • What is a socio-technical system?
    • DRM Workaround #18: HP printer cartridges
    • More distribution channels = more viewers
    • Did plague cause the Little Ice Age?
    • Better technical security increases personal risks
  • ▶February (13)
    • The secret plans of Libertarians revealed
    • Create web sites with PONUR
    • 30 years without sleep
    • A historical 'what if'
    • Jans on vagueness
    • Which wires match the mouse test?
    • A cared-for mummy
    • The last remaining Stone Age tribesmen
    • Why can't we remember our early childhoods?
    • Scottism #43
    • Blogs as patio space
    • New communication, new art forms
    • Paypal's numbers
  • ▶January (20)
    • Wordsworth's "spots of time"
    • The past, echoed now
    • What would it be like to feel no pain?
    • IBM tops "most patents" list in 2005
    • Good instructions on creating a podcast
    • The new American community: affinity vs. proximity
    • Blogging at IBM
    • Why people don't use firewalls
    • Forced to commit suicide by brain parasites
    • Night terrors
    • How a 75-year-old jewel thief did it
    • 1,000,000 miles in 30 days
    • How actors remember their lines
    • Edward R. Murrow on the business of news
    • New technologies & the urge to control
    • MTBU: Maximum Time to Belly Up
    • My new book - Hacking Knoppix - available now
    • kanso and shizen and presentations
    • More validation of the Long Tail
    • Risk management
• ▶2005 (197)
  • ▶December (5)
    • Denise-ism #49
    • Good advice re: contracts
    • How to know if you should worry
    • Shoehorning drivers licenses
    • Confidential, Secret, Top Secret ... and SSI
  • ▶November (96)
    • With the energy of tree sloths on barbituates
    • Robot on the run
    • Still accessible after 1000 years
    • How many people die each year in the world?
    • Cybercrime more profitable than drug trafficing
    • Tim O'Reilly's definition of open source
    • The inevitability of taxation
    • Professions and clubs
    • A brief history of backdoors
    • The innovation of the margin
    • A definition of fascism
    • The late great Hungry Buddha
    • Hulk, Willie, or Peter?
    • Now that is one good insult
    • Best entertainment news headline ever
    • Dead for a while
    • Sleazy books
    • A library of imaginary books
    • The mystery of the Voynich mss
    • A repulsive jumbo shrimp
    • A horrid legal conundrum
    • Greetings from beyond
    • More proof of time travel?
    • Time travelers on the NYC subway
    • Terrifica, a superhero for our times
    • Greatest last line ever
    • Nothing fails like excess
    • Japan's shut-ins
    • A programmer's poem
    • Obsessed by gnomes
    • Borges' animals
    • Practical considerations of teleportation
    • Why I stick with shih-tzus
    • Scottwords #9
    • Scottwords #42
    • Cave or community
    • The Forbes Fictional Fifteen
    • Another awful poet
    • Nothin' like nerdy Microsoft humor
    • Denise-ism #890
    • Movies in the night
    • Early winter morning with my father
    • The spirit of the real Texas Rangers
    • Ben's crazy dream
    • Incompetent people don't know it
    • One of my favorite ideas: flow
    • Denise-ism #65
    • The strictest of teachers
    • Perfect Score Achieved on Pac-Man
    • Great story about Shaw
    • She's a poet and don't know it
    • Word of the day: aposiopesis
    • A wonderful postmodern joke
    • Jans clarifies it for us
    • Man, I lived a lot of this
    • A beautiful Indian song
    • Denise-ism #631
    • A man who loves his feet
    • Breaking up is like a cold
    • Larry's synaesthesia
    • Ben contemplates fatherhood
    • Ben Jones sands his floors
    • Denise-ism #356
    • Denise-ism #90
    • Ben Jones on primal fears
    • Incommunicado
    • Denise-ism #234
    • Great Freudian slip story
    • Some anagrams of 'Scott Granneman'
    • Love those pamphlet titles
    • The social perils of immortality
    • That poor polish sausage
    • DRM ratchets up, but never quite works
    • Black Friday, now Cyber Monday
    • Some numbers about General Motors
    • One powerful metaphor!
    • Problems techies are good at solving
    • Longest domain name
    • Famous domain name sales
    • Definitions of extranet
    • Test of Flock's blog editor
    • CNN's innovations & insights
    • Serial killer apps
    • 4 basic functions of knowledge management
    • 4 kinds of eductional institutions
    • The value of learned experience
    • Get rid of high schools
    • Learning drops quickly over time
    • Number of programs installed, number used
    • Most expensive computer error ever
    • How much the Net will change things
    • TV changes a society ... in its image
    • My brother Gus and I, #12
    • A museum I definitely want to visit
    • 15 fundamental desires and values
    • Failure vs. Losing
  • ▶October (38)
    • Our eye seeks the novel
    • Strange mental conditions
    • Symbolic sight
    • Will a technology become revolutionary?
    • The Little Rascals and copyright absurdity
    • Movie studios and their genres
    • French policians and French writers
    • The French character
    • Relativism in political institutions
    • Lowbow vs. highbrow
    • Amongst family and friends
    • Unsure of himself
    • The mercurial man
    • Painter of kitsch ... and security
    • Closed vs. open source
    • Mom's spoonerisms
    • You always remember your first time
    • Clay Shirky's Thinking About Networks syllabus
    • I did not tow your car
    • Willie Nelson in New York
    • Gershwin the prodigy
    • Getting over it
    • Tools vs. tasks
    • Science, secrecy, & mysticism
    • The network is central
    • Feral cities of the future
    • Malapropism #600
    • The ACLU on monopoly control by ISPs
    • 6 distinct food consumers
    • Drunken sailors
    • Memory memories
    • Bringing up the rear
    • He stopped in time
    • Responsibility vs accountability
    • Oh, so that's why #8
    • Denise-ism #92
    • Timelessness, eternity, god
    • The history of =
  • ▶September (15)
    • What makes a great hacker?
    • Cuchulain fights the ocean waves
    • The printed book results in more handwritten mss
    • The first printed English books
    • Haber's dead wife
    • Walking dead man
    • Scratching an itch
    • Self-sacrifice in plague time
    • Absolute integrity
    • How to sell your book ... 200 yrs ago
    • Dalton, father of chemistry ... & meteorology
    • Cringely on patents, trademarks, & copyright
    • TIPpies 'n flow
    • The wise ol' Texas gambler
    • A new way to see commercials
  • ▶July (5)
    • Zombies! 100s of 1000s of zombies!
    • Social engineering via celebrities
    • Generate your own hobo porn film title
    • Denise-ism #103
    • Denise-ism #98
  • ▶June (18)
    • Short story idea #43
    • A few of my own portmanteau words
    • What are portmanteau words?
    • The largest library fine ... ever.
    • My high concept Hollywood movie
    • High camp ... or horror?!?
    • A CNN for security?
    • Your typical phisher
    • Unthinking employees
    • The Queen buys an iPod
    • Geeking out vs vegging out
    • The difficulties of Arabic
    • 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense
    • Articles read on 25 November 2003
    • Articles read on 20 November 2003
    • Demolishing time via the Net
    • How to add value to information
    • How willingly we fool ourselves
  • ▶May (19)
    • How to add menus to Radio Userland
    • Tech & the humanities
    • The broken-wand ceremony
    • Solving the unsolvable problem
    • Brian Eno on the MSFT Windows 95 sound
    • Word of the day: larboard
    • Edward III & the 6 worthy men of Calais
    • Peter the Great's disguise
    • The pinata syndrome
    • Great band names, part 24
    • Sinatra's footprints
    • Secret movies in the Paris underground
    • Measuring weight
    • How many variables can we track?
    • David evaluates Jans
    • Why are we bad at estimating risk?
    • Do you like sentences?
    • A walkway of the dead
    • For a mystery
  • ▶April (1)
    • My first book - Don't Click on the Blue E! - is out!
• ▶2004 (4)
  • ▶September (3)
    • SSL in depth
    • Crack Windows passwords in seconds
    • Mozilla fixes a bug … fast
  • ▶August (1)
    • BSD vs. Linux