rc3.org

Joi Ito has a post explaining how domain squatters make money.

[Read more →]

Larry Johnson flags an excerpt from a Department of Defense press conference with Donald Rumsfeld and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace. I’ll snip out an even smaller bit of the excerpt, you don’t even need to see the question being answered:

PACE: It is absolutely responsibility of every U.S. service [...]

[Read more →]

It all started when I couldn’t get Movable Type to work properly on my pair.com account. I started thinking about finding another hosting provider, especially when I started doing some stuff with Ruby on Rails and thought I might need a place to host those applications. Sure, pair.com had decent anti-spam software and had served [...]

[Read more →]

Well my current hosting provider, TextDrive, has been acquired. I’m sure the forums will be abuzz with discussion of what this means for customers. The fact that I missed the window for buying a lifetime account due to sheer procrastination is looking more fortuitous all the time.

[Read more →]

I wasn’t able to find the mercenary video that I mentioned yesterday, but Andrew Brown did, and he describes the contents.

[Read more →]

I’ve been thinking a lot about public choice theory lately. Public choice theory attempts to explain why government actions generally work to the benefit of special interests rather than to maximize public good. Here’s a brief description from Wikipedia:

One of the basic claims that underlie public choice theory is that good government [...]

[Read more →]

Mercenaries in Iraq have posted a videos of themselves randomly shooting civilian vehicles in Iraq. The company in question has a contract with the US government worth over a million dollars. Here’s a description of the contents:

The video, which first appeared on a website that has been linked unofficially to Aegis Defence [...]

[Read more →]

Phil Ringnalda discovered a month ago that Bloglines is susceptible to a cross site scripting attack that can expose your entire account to someone who has compromised a feed to which you subscribe. He notified the company a month ago and hasn’t seen any action on that front, so he’s publicizing the problem to alert [...]

[Read more →]

Ben Edelman reports that there is a mechanism in the music player installed by Sony’s rootkit CDs that fetches messages from Sony and displays them when you open it. The mechanism is obviously intended for the distribution of marketing messages, but Sony could use it to tell users that their CD has been recalled and [...]

[Read more →]

O’Reilly Radar is publishing a series on how people got into computers. I’ll try to post my story soon, although I assume it’s probably similar to that of many people my age.

[Read more →]