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Tuesday, May 13th, 2008Sometimes you have to destroy the document in order to save it….
Stop Bad Errors
Thursday, May 8th, 2008I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04, which comes with the most recent beta of Firefox 3.0. The new version of Firefox has a number of interesting features, not the least of which is a set of measures to reduce drive-by infection of PCs.
If they wander from the beaten path, people now see a big red [...]
Fix This and Tell Me When You’re Done
Monday, April 14th, 2008[First written in February of 2004. I'm reposting it here for posterity, and because it came up in conversation earlier today. There've been a few serious attacks against expats recently, including a murder and a particularly brutal rape. The perception among some is of a sudden uptick in violent crime. I recounted this story to [...]
Walk Like a Dinosaur
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008Michael Krigsman’s most recent entry in the IT Project Failures blog is an interesting, colourfully-illustrated and upside-down look at the relationship between IT and traditional business.
His question, based on numerous similar postulations, is whether IT is becoming extinct. His answer (you knew it was a rhetorical question, right?) goes like this:
Since the days of punch [...]
Gooooolag
Monday, March 17th, 2008UPDATE: How wrong could I be about the severity of this threat? Very wrong, apparently. I haven’t confirmed it yet, but it’s hard to imagine how this week’s mass server hack could have happened without tools like the one described below. I’ll write more about this in this week’s column….
Heh, cute:
Cult of the Dead [...]
Idea: Personal Navajo
Friday, February 29th, 2008Instead of exposing the painful ritual of public/private key exchange, software developers should instead be using metaphors of human trust and service.
A ‘translator’ service, for example. The user ‘invents’ an imaginary language, then decides who among her friends is allowed to speak it with her. She then instructs her ‘translator’ (e.g. her own personal Navajo) [...]
Ghost in the Machine
Tuesday, November 20th, 2007In the most recent RISKS mailing list digest, Peter Neuman includes a brief article by Adi Shamir describing a method of exploiting minor faults in math logic to break encryption keys in a particular class of processor.
Titled Microprocessor Bugs Can Be Security Disasters, the article makes an interesting argument. In fairly concise terms, Shamir outlines [...]
Seeing the Light
Saturday, October 27th, 2007It looks like Microsoft is finally starting to get over its initial contempt for the One Laptop Per Child project and their XO laptop. I’m not yet ready to temper my original reaction to Microsoft’s approach to international development, though.
Stars in Their Eyes
Monday, September 17th, 2007 In an online discussion recently, I defended the XO laptop by mentioning how impressed people were when I conducted demonstrations of the hardware and software. If the XO is such a mediocre piece of hardware, “why,” I asked, “do people walk away with stars in their eyes?”
I went on to say that in my [...]
Web Standards - A Rant
Monday, May 1st, 2006It’s very common on Slashdot and other, er, technical fora, to see people make assertions like the following:
“IE extensions [of existing standards] have proven to be a very good thing for the web overall. It has always been IE that has pushed the limits of dynamic web pages through the inclusion of similar extensions (primarily [...]