At least I no longer have to carry the record for the smallest... Whew!

Telegraph | News | 425m-year-old penis found

An answer to an age old riddle.

style.org > Estimating the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow

This has been my point for the past year or so:

"Today, software engineers are not required to understand and assess security risks in their products' architecture and design. Security has not been a part of the quality assurance process. To get a degree in architecture for designing and constructing buildings, a professional would be required to understand physical risks and how to reduce those risks -- that is, fire safety, earthquake issues and so forth. "

The rest of the article didn't do much for me: Technology News: The State of Software Security: An Interview with ISS Founder and CTO Chris Klaus

Don't rewrite your pages yet - Eolas may not be able to roll around in their dough after all.

Patent Office Reviews Disputed Web Patent: "In a little-noticed ruling dated Oct. 30, the Patent Office said such arguments were enough to launch a review.
'In view of the admitted prior art ... a substantial new question of patentability is raised as claims 1-3 and 6-8 of U.S. Patent No. 5,838,906,' Kunin wrote in the order.
'We're certainly heartened by the fact that the Patent Office has decided to take a look at the patent,' Microsoft spokesman Lou Gellos said. 'We maintained all along that the patent was invalid.'"

The entire world as we know it may very well be in grave danger:

Ban on Internet access taxes in jeopardy / Bipartisan lobbying sprouts in Congress

"The risk of multiple taxes is huge,'' said a telecom executive. 'If you send an e-mail, even if it's just across town, it could pass through Texas, Texas could claim a nexus, and tax it in any number of ways. They could tax the e-mail itself, or the number of 'bits' downloaded from a Web site, or the cost of Internet access itself, or they could apply gross receipts taxes, sales taxes, excise taxes. "

VeriSign moves to anycast for root servers

"These are important servers, and we didn't want to make any rash decisions about deploying it." -- Ken Silva, vice president of networks and information security at VeriSign

But apparently it is okay to flip the switch one day on wildcards.. Either that "process" wasn't rash - cuz it's the same servers...

My hero. Who wants to push me?

Plunger acted on impulse'Yeah, I jumped in the falls. It's a long way down.'

It's coming...

v6 - There could be more - but how?

A portable Solaris box on your lap - what is the world coming to?!

Forbes.com: Swimming With Tadpoles

Massachusetts thumbs it's nose at Redmond:

"...Massachusetts has instructed its chief technology officer to adopt a policy of "open standards, open source" for all future spending on information technology"

Australian IT - US state embraces open source

First of all: to be the CTO of a state - awesome! California Chief Technical Officer has a fantastic ring to it. I gotta find me a better headhunter (I wonder how Ah-Nold says 'technology'?).

Second: So this tells me that Mass. is opening itself up to a lawsuit by our friends up at SCO, no? I'd love to see that - fighting IBM, SGI, and now Mass. Fantastic.

"A collection of more than 12 million historic photographs, capturing scenes from the Boer War to the D-Day landings, has been published on the Internet."

You can find the archive here: www.britishpathe.com

You can find the article here..

Half-Life 2 Code Ripped Off

Hacker spoils game for software firm:

"In his posting on HalfLife2.net, Newell, said that the source code was stolen by someone who was able to gain access to his e-mail account in September and install keystroke-logging software on several company computers. Around 9/19 someone made a copy of the HL-2 source tree, he wrote."

The best news that I've EVER been able to post here.

VeriSign calls halt to .com detours | CNET News.com

Down with 64.94.110.11

Interesting paper getting thrown around the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA). It looks like it might be required reading...

http://www.ccianet.org/papers/cyberinsecurity.pdf

So if you're a nerd, and have some belief in the "stars" then check this out:

IT Horoscopes - September 2003 - a whatis definition

I give it a 2 on a scale of 1-10, but hey, what do you want from me at 7am.

A good read - as always...

Good thing we have FBI and Gates on case:

"Now, if these geniuses can't scan a document right, how did they ever corner a mastermind like Parson? They had help from Bill Gates. That's how. "

I don't buy the conclusion of this article - that MP3's are distinguishable and traceable back to a machine. Especially when using a digital audio extraction vs. analog sampling. Anyone have an opinion on this?

New Scientist

This is required reading. I haven't gotten through it yet - but it looks pretty promising!

Halloween IX: It Ain't Necessarily SCO

In an article on Salon they have some interesting quotes from Shneier as well as others. I've been preaching this particular little gem of logic for a couple years now:

That's because, according to [Bruce] Schneier, adding strength to your software is not a high-yield proposition: Customers don't go out of their way to pay extra for security, and, as Microsoft's track record has proved, you wouldn't lose much anyway if you shipped software that was hobbled by one or two, or two dozen, major flaws. In the typical software operating license, most software vendors, including Microsoft, disclaim any liability from bugs their software might abet. If Microsoft makes a stupid mistake in its code that makes it easy for someone to come into your home and steal everything you have, Microsoft is not legally responsible for any of your losses. "And until that changes, none of the security will get better," Schneier says.


Get the whole article (you need a Salon Day Pass to read the whole thing - the pass is free):

Salon.com Technology | Dumb software for dumb people

Eventhough the observatory is closed until 2005, this still looks really interesting to me. If you are in the Los Angeles area, I'd suggest checking this out.

“A special Mars party will be held on the night of Tuesday, August 26th to celebrate when Mars is closest to earth. On the night of the closest approach the Observatory will provide all-night (10 p.m. - 1 a.m.) viewing and celebration from the south lawn of the Autry Museum of Western Heritage at 4700 Western Heritage Way - adjacent to the Griffith Observatory Satellite. Telescopes will be provided by Celestron, Jeff Schroeder (11-inch refractor), the Los Angeles Astronomical Society, and the Los Angeles Sidewalk Astronomers.”

Griffith Observatory Mars 2003

This is interesting. Start here, reading the first couple paragraphs only:

http://www.paulhastings.com/ClientAlerts/Content/05-03%20New%20CA%20Security%20Breach%20Law.htm

Verification of this here:

http://www.privacy.ca.gov/code/cc1798.291798.82.htm

Now if we apply this tried-and-true, Schneier approved cryptography:

http://www.marktaw.com/technology/Rot13EncoderDecoder.html

I believe that we have avoided the requirement of full disclosure (via notice) of any compromise as our data is now “encrypted”.

Fantastic. Good work California – good to see that we are on the cutting edge. This is the same body of government that has kept the ferret illegal in the Golden State since the 30’s when they were misclassified as wild-animals. (http://users.1st.net/hammock/ferrets/legal/california.htm)

But hey, it’s 80 in January and the 90’s in the summer are a “dry heat” – so I guess we should stay, eh?

And yes, this is how I lure myself to sleep at 2am lying in bed with my laptop.

cj