Ramblings & ephemera
From Dan Ariely’s “Flying Frustrations” (21 November 2011): Think about these two ways to get your luggage: With the original airport design, you walk ten minutes, but when you finally get to the carousel, your baggage gets there a minute after you (taking 11 minutes). In the other, you walk three minutes, but when you [...]
Posted on November 26th, 2011 by Scott Granneman
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I’ll be giving a talk to the St. Louis UNIX Users Group next Wednesday night about Markdown, a tool I absolutely love. You’re invited to come. Please do – I think you’ll definitely learn a lot. Date: Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2011 Time: 6:30 – 9 pm Where: 11885 Lackland Rd., St Louis, MO 63146 Map: [...]
Posted on November 7th, 2011 by Scott Granneman
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From Stephen Fry’s “Steve Jobs” (The New Adventures of Stephen Fry: 6 October 2011): Henry Ford didn’t invent the motor car, Rockefeller didn’t discover how to crack crude oil into petrol, Disney didn’t invent animation, the Macdonald brothers didn’t invent the hamburger, Martin Luther King didn’t invent oratory, neither Jane Austen, Tolstoy nor Flaubert invented [...]
Posted on November 2nd, 2011 by Scott Granneman
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From Umberto Eco’s “Vegetal and mineral memory: The future of books” (Al-Ahram Weekly: 20—26 November 2003): Libraries, over the centuries, have been the most important way of keeping our collective wisdom. They were and still are a sort of universal brain where we can retrieve what we have forgotten and what we still do not [...]
Posted on September 8th, 2011 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier in The Evolution of a Cryptographer: Computer security folks are always trying to solve problems with technology, which explains why so many computer solutions fail so miserably.
Posted on September 8th, 2011 by Scott Granneman
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From David S. Bennahum’s “Hope You Like Jamming, Too” (Slate): …innovative industrial spies, who have several neat new tricks. These days, a boardroom Mata Hari can purchase a specially designed cell phone that will answer incoming calls while appearing to be switched off. In a business meeting, she could casually leave her phone on the [...]
Posted on September 8th, 2011 by Scott Granneman
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From Robert X. Cringely’s “Stream On“: Mailinator is ad hoc e-mail for those times when just maybe you don’t want to use your regular e-mail address. Say you are snitching on the boss, buying inflatable people, or want 32 different PayPal accounts. Just tell someone—anyone—that your e-mail address is fatman@mailinator.com or skinnykid@mailinator.com, or clueless@mailinator.com or [...]
Posted on September 8th, 2011 by Scott Granneman
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From Robert X. Cringely’s “Stream On“: Yet nearly everything we do to combat crime or enhance safety comes at the expense of reduced efficiency. So we build airports to make possible efficient air transportation, then set up metal detectors to slow down the flow of passengers. We build highways to make car travel faster, then [...]
Posted on September 8th, 2011 by Scott Granneman
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From the L.A. Times‘ “Cyberspace Gives Al Qaeda Refuge“: Simplicity seems to work best. One common method of communicating over the Internet is essentially an e-mail version of the classic dead drop. Members of a cell are all given the same prearranged username and password for an e-mail account on an Internet service provider, or [...]
Posted on September 8th, 2011 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram of 15 August 2003: When I called to activate an American Express credit card I had received in the mail, the automated system told me that I would have to associate a PIN with it. The system told me that other users liked the idea of using their mother’s birthday as [...]
Posted on September 8th, 2011 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram of 15 August 2003: It’s actually easy to fly on someone else’s ticket. Here’s how: First, have an upstanding citizen buy an e-ticket. (This also works if you steal someone’s identity or credit card.) Second, on the morning of the flight print the boarding pass at home. (Most airlines now offer [...]
Posted on September 8th, 2011 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram of 15 October 2003: Precision stripping: criminal steals car, chop shop strips car completely down to chassis, chassis dumped on street, cops tow chassis away, chassis sold at auction, criminal buys chassis, chop shop reattaches parts. Result: legitimate car that can be legally sold used. The VIN has been ‘laundered’.
Posted on September 8th, 2011 by Scott Granneman
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From Russell Nelson’s comment to Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram of 15 November 2003: > A New York detective was once asked whether pickpockets in > Manhattan dressed in suits and ties to facilitate their crimes > subsequent escape. He responded by saying that in twenty years > he had never arrested even one pickpocket in a [...]
Posted on September 8th, 2011 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram of 15 April 2004: Here’s a story of a woman who posts an ad requesting a nanny. When a potential nanny responds, she asks for references for a background check. Then she places another ad, using the reference material as a fake identity. She gets a job with the good references—they’re [...]
Posted on September 8th, 2011 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram of 15 April 2004: My argument may not be obvious, but it’s not hard to follow, either. It centers around the notion that security must be evaluated not based on how it works, but on how it fails. It doesn’t really matter how well an ID card works when used by [...]
Posted on September 8th, 2011 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram of 15 July 2004: There was a single guard watching the X-ray machine’s monitor, and a line of people putting their bags onto the machine. The people themselves weren’t searched at all. Even worse, no guard was watching the people. So when I walked with everyone else in line and just [...]
Posted on September 8th, 2011 by Scott Granneman
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From Howard Rheingold’s interview in “Howard Rheingold’s Latest Connection” (Business Week: 11 August 2004): Here’s where Wikipedia fits in. It used to be if you were a kid in a village in India or a village in northern Canada in the winter, maybe you could get to a place where they have a few books [...]
Posted on September 8th, 2011 by Scott Granneman
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From Howard Rheingold’s interview in “Howard Rheingold’s Latest Connection” (Business Week: 11 August 2004): Then there’s open source [software]. Steve Weber, a political economist at UC Berkeley, sees open source as an economic means of production that turns the free-rider problem to its advantage. All the people who use the resource but don’t contribute to [...]
Posted on September 8th, 2011 by Scott Granneman
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From Lee Siegel, quoted in Juliet Lapidos’s “Overrated: Authors, critics, and editors on ‘great books’ that aren’t all that great” (Slate: 11 August 2011): It was like Herbert Marcuse’s advice to a despairing graduate student who said he had spent days on a sentence in Hegel and still couldn’t understand it: “You’re reading too fast,” [...]
Posted on August 16th, 2011 by Scott Granneman
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From Nicholas Carr’s “(re)framed” (Rough Type: 3 June 2011): I’m reminded of an interesting passage in the book Glass: A World History: As we have seen, one of the rapid developments in glass technology was the making of panes of window glass, plain and coloured, which was particularly noticeable in the northern half of Europe [...]
Posted on June 13th, 2011 by Scott Granneman
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