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From Robert McMillan’s “Security certificate warnings don’t work, researchers say” (IDG News Service: 27 July 2009):
In a laboratory experiment, researchers found that between 55 percent and 100 percent of participants ignored certificate security warnings, depending on which browser they were using (different browsers use different language to warn their users).
…
The researchers [...]
Posted on July 27th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, language & literature, security | No Comments »
From “List of confidence tricks” (Wikipedia: 3 July 2009):
Get-rich-quick schemes
Get-rich-quick schemes are extremely varied. For example, fake franchises, real estate “sure things”, get-rich-quick books, wealth-building seminars, self-help gurus, sure-fire inventions, useless products, chain letters, fortune tellers, quack doctors, miracle pharmaceuticals, Nigerian money scams, charms and talismans are all used to separate the mark from his [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Pat Holt’s “The Ten Mistakes: Ten Mistakes Writers Don’t See (But Can Easily Fix When They Do)” (Holt Uncensored: 17 November 2008):
EMPTY ADVERBS
Actually, totally, absolutely, completely, continually, constantly, continuously, literally, really, unfortunately, ironically, incredibly, hopefully, finally – these and others are words that promise emphasis, but too often they do the reverse. They suck [...]
Posted on April 25th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, language & literature, on writing | No Comments »
From Dan Shelly’s “Former News Radio Staffer Spills the Beans on How Shock Jocks Inspire Hatred and Anger” (AlterNet: 17 November 2008):
To begin with, talk show hosts such as Charlie Sykes – one of the best in the business – are popular and powerful because they appeal to a segment of the population that feels [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Allen Abel And Madeleine Czigler’s “Submarines, bananas and taxis” (National Post: 24 June 2008):
Depicted in frescoes and canvases from the early Middle Ages onward in the robes of the betrayer of the Christ, “Judas yellow” devolved into an imprint of depravity, treason and exclusion.
…
By the 12th century, European Jews were compelled to wear yellow [...]
Posted on March 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, history, religion | No Comments »
From Chapter 2: Botnets Overview of Craig A. Schiller’s Botnets: The Killer Web App (Syngress: 2007):
Christopher Abad provides insight into the phishing economy in an article published online by FirstMonday.org (http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/ issue10_9/abad/). The article, “The economy of phishing: A survey of the operations of the phishing market,” reveals the final phase of the phishing life [...]
Posted on November 22nd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, law, security, tech in changing society | No Comments »
From James Turner’s interview with Dr. Barbara Simons, past President of the Association for Computing Machinery & recent appointee to the Advisory Board of the Federal Election Assistance Commission, at “A 2008 e-Voting Wrapup with Dr. Barbara Simons” (O’Reilly Media: 7 November 2008):
[Note from Scott: headers added by me]
Optical Scan: Good & Bad
And most of [...]
Posted on November 22nd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, law, politics, science, security, tech in changing society | No Comments »
From James Fallows’ “The $1.4 Trillion Question” (The Atlantic: January/February 2008):
Through the quarter-century in which China has been opening to world trade, Chinese leaders have deliberately held down living standards for their own people and propped them up in the United States. This is the real meaning of the vast trade surplus—$1.4 trillion and counting, [...]
Posted on November 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, politics, security | No Comments »
From Barry C. Lynn’s “The Case for Breaking Up Wal-Mart” (Harper’s: 24 July 2006):
Instead, the firm is also one of the world’s most intrusive, jealous, fastidious micromanagers, and its aim is nothing less than to remake entirely how its suppliers do business, not least so that it can shift many of its own costs of [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Barry C. Lynn’s “The Case for Breaking Up Wal-Mart” (Harper’s: 24 July 2006):
Popular notions of oligopoly and monopoly tend to focus on the danger that firms, having gained control over a marketplace, will then be able to dictate an unfairly high price, extracting a sort of tax from society as a whole. But what [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Barry C. Lynn’s “The Case for Breaking Up Wal-Mart” (Harper’s: 24 July 2006):
It is now twenty-five years since the Reagan Administration eviscerated America’s century-long tradition of antitrust enforcement. For a generation, big firms have enjoyed almost complete license to use brute economic force to grow only bigger. And so today we find ourselves in [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From American Association for the Advancement of Science’s “The Effects of Patenting in the AAAS Scientific Community” [250 kb PDF] (2006):
Forty percent of respondents who had acquired patented technologies since January 2001 reported difficulties in obtaining those technologies. Industry bioscience respondents reported the most problems, with 76 percent reporting that their research had been affected [...]
Posted on July 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Noam Chomsky’s “Why It’s Over For America” (The Independent: 30 May 2006):
… the fear, which cannot casually be put aside, that, as Gar Alperowitz puts it in America Beyond Capitalism, “the American ’system’ as a whole is in real trouble – that it is heading in a direction that spells the end of its [...]
Posted on July 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics | Comments Off
From Tony Judt’s “The New World Order” (The New York Review of Books: 14 July 2005):
For there is a precedent in modern Western history for a country whose leader exploits national humiliation and fear to restrict public freedoms; for a government that makes permanent war as a tool of state policy and arranges for the [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Tony Judt’s “The New World Order” (The New York Review of Books: 14 July 2005):
Historians and pundits who leap aboard the bandwagon of American Empire have forgotten a little too quickly that for an empire to be born, a republic has first to die. In the longer run no country can expect to behave [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Tony Judt’s “The New World Order” (The New York Review of Books: 14 July 2005):
The unrepublican veneration of our presidential “leader” has made it uniquely difficult for Americans to see their country’s behavior as others see it. The latest report from Amnesty International – which says nothing that the rest of the world doesn’t [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Tony Judt’s “The New World Order” (The New York Review of Books: 14 July 2005):
[Andrew] Bacevich is a graduate of West Point, a Vietnam veteran, and a conservative Catholic who now directs the study of international relations at Boston University. He has thus earned the right to a hearing even in circles typically immune [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram Newsletter (15 August 2004):
Here’s an interesting hardware security vulnerability. Turns out that it’s possible to update the AMD K8 processor (Athlon64 or Opteron) microcode. And, get this, there’s no authentication check. So it’s possible that an attacker who has access to a machine can backdoor the CPU.
[See http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?action=detail&id=35446&threadid=35446&roomid=11]
Related posts
China’s increasing control [...]
Posted on June 16th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
From Feds Hack Wireless Network in 3 Minutes (Slashdot: 5 April 2005):
At a recent ISSA (Information Systems Security Association) meeting in Los Angeles, a team of FBI agents demonstrated current WEP-cracking techniques and broke a 128 bit WEP key in about three minutes.
Related posts
The NSA and threats to privacy
Quick ‘n dirty explanation of onion routing
Lots [...]
Posted on June 14th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: security, technology | Comments Off
From Sol Terra’s [IP] Use the Dots, Go to Jail – that’s the law (Interesting People: 24 October 2005):
Today, Daniel Cuthbert was found guilty.
Daniel Cuthbert saw the devastating images of the Tsunami disaster and decided to donate £30 via the website that was hastily set up to be able to process payments. He is a [...]
Posted on June 14th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: law, security, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
