Friday, July 20th, 2007 (
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This guy took personal offense to a virus writer who's stupid prank messed up the computer of one of his friends.
So he decided to hunt the virus writer down using only information he was able to find on the Internet with Google.
He goes through where he looked, what he found, and what it meant.
Important lesson: This is how easy it is to profile you online.
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Tags:
Consequences,
Families,
If You Only Knew,
Police
Friday, July 20th, 2007 (
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Very interesting:
It has long been suspected that there is a silent policy that makes Hotmail automatically delete the majority of attachments to save on bandwidth and internal disk space. Therefore it really doesn't matter if every client has access to 2GB of storage since they don't deliver the attachments to fill that space up anyway. If that truly is the case, then Microsoft may be liable for several hundred million cases of conspiracy and mail fraud
The real question is whether or not they'll actually get away with it if that's what they're doing.
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Tags:
Microsoft
Friday, July 20th, 2007 (
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Because of the
new presidential order allowing for the freeze of assets of anyone that "interferes with Iraq policies", some people are getting nervous and even predicting a
police state.
Most importantly, here's a bit of logic I didn't have the political black heart to think of myself:
Roberts said that because of Bush's unpopularity, the Republicans face a total wipeout in 2008, and this may be why "the Democrats have not brought a halt to Bush's follies or the war, because they expect his unpopular policies to provide them with a landslide victory in next year's election."
That would explain a lot. And this one too:
"Americans think their danger is terrorists," said Roberts. "They don't understand the terrorists cannot take away habeas corpus, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution. ... The terrorists are not anything like the threat that we face to the Bill of Rights and the Constitution from our own government in the name of fighting terrorism. Americans just aren't able to perceive that."
Wow. This guy really says it straight. Remember kids, your real enemy isn't the faceless terrorist, it's the
big eared guy in the big white house.
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Tags:
Congress,
George Bush
Thursday, July 19th, 2007 (
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In the UK,
they're allowing the police to use the toll camera network to track vehicles. The cameras are used to enforce a toll and have software that analyzes license plates to match them with the car's owner.
But they will only be able to use the data for national security purposes and not to fight ordinary crime, the Home Office stressed.
Yeah right. Just like the
FBI and national security letters.
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Tags:
Big Brother,
UK
Thursday, July 19th, 2007 (
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This is actually pretty clever. This kid was making bomb threats to his school and was doing a pretty good job at hiding his tracks until
the FBI got involved.
By sending a small program to his Myspace page, they somehow managed to infect his home PC with a monitoring program that collected evidence of his crime:
...if the Bureau could get the CIPAV installed on the user's machine, it would be able to collect the machine's IP address, MAC address, list of running programs, operating system, Internet browser used, language used, the registered computer name, the currently logged-in username, and more. All of this information would be relayed over the Internet back to an FBI computer in Virginia.
That sounds just like
Windows Vista.
Tags:
Big Brother,
Windows
Thursday, July 19th, 2007 (
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People don't seem to realize that e-voting needs to be an extremely air-tight system with a strong set of procedural controls to work. If you don't treat it like the crown jewels, you're going to have problems
like this.
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Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 (
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I've blogged about how Microsoft has a
wealth of spyware on your computer (Vista) for "piracy" reasons, but this is altogether
far more sinister.
Feel free to read the article itself, but this is bad, bad news. What they're going to do is scan the content of your files, e-mail, music, and system status alerts to profile you and target you with ads. Penny Arcade covered this concept in
one of their comics titled "Advertising in the Future". That was last October.
(For non-gamers, the comic describes a situation where two guys are playing a game, but see different in-game advertising based on the contents of their Internet browser history).
Tags:
Microsoft
Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 (
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This is hardly surprising, but it's nice to see more of this kind of story surface.
Bush has been pressuring the surgeon general to not do his job.
Carmona, whose four-year term as surgeon general expired in 2006, told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform last week that he was constantly at odds with Bush administration political minders. They told him not to speak out on stem cell research, emergency contraception or sex education. They delayed release of a report on the dangers of secondhand smoke. They admonished him to mention the president frequently and favorably in public and not to address a group associated with the Special Olympics - a cause championed by the Kennedy family
...
That's no way to treat a professional whose main job is to help the president, the Congress and the American people make intelligent health decisions. But it's not surprising that in a nation polarized on so many fronts, a president is going to expect any appointee to sing from the administration-approved hymnal.
I can't stand this kind of politics.
Tags:
George Bush
Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 (
No comments yet)
I think that many service contracts are bogus and designed to take unaware consumers to the cleaners. Fortunately,
clever people have found loopholes that actually work against the companies who are themselves so fond of using legalities to their advantage. Whether true or not, someone also suggests that you can cancel the contract while keeping the service (in the comments).
If you want out of your contract, check out the articles on
the Consumerist and see what you find.
Tags:
Good Stuff
Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 (
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This isn't that surprising. Rather than type in every word, someone photographed every page which makes for a hard read, but it can be done.
I'm actually against this practice. I think that leaking TV shows, music, movies, and such
before they're released hurts the authors far more than is tolerable. It also creates headaches for the people who
want to wait and get the real experience (because more and more people start talking about it thus increasing your odds of having the story spoiled).
The reason I bring this up is that I don't want to give people the impression that I'm a copyright hater (due to my hate for the business practices of the
RIAA and
mpaa. Let's keep this in perspective shall we? What I'm against is
DRM and abusive business practices (like the RIAA lawsuits).
