Posts

Anyone have a favorite SFTP client for Windows? I’m still using regular old FTP a lot and was hoping to move to SFTP. Of course, I’m still using regular old unecrypted POP to get my email, but I’ll address that problem some other time.

I just saw Helen Thomas on CSPAN answering questions at a book reading. First of all, I had no idea that she writes a column these days. I figured she’d retire after five decades in the White House press corpse. Secondly, I think it’s amazing that she is doing so well given her advanced age (she was born in 1920). Anyway, it’s pretty cool to see an old lady excoriate John Ashcroft before an audience of more old ladies. ...

A Connecticut production company is developing a TV show targetted at cats. It seems to me that cats make up a demographic that has an extremely low average income.

Earlier this week Salon’s new tech correspondent (and former Wired Newsperson) Farhad Manjoo wrote a great, sceptical article about the use of steganography by terrorists. One question I have about steganography is where the encoding and decoding software comes from. Are there off the shelf steganography software packages? If not, who’s writing it for al-Qaida. We find bomb making workshops, and chemical weapons workshops, and training videos, but we have yet to find al-Qaida’s IT department. Of course, the software-writing terrorists could be anywhere in the world, exchanging encrypted data (perhaps even using steganography), but it seems odd to me that we have not heard of any proprietary, terrorist-specific software installed on computers that we’ve found in the possession of terrorists. ...

Remember when AOL “acquired” Time Warner? It looks like the shoe is now on the other foot. AOL is now a division run by a Time, Inc executive, and AOL is looking like it’s not doing anything more than dragging down what used to be Time Warner. There’s even talk that Time Warner will wind up spinning off AOL due to its poor performance.

Salon: Deregulation’s big lie (Katharine Mieszkowski interviews Robert McChesney on telecom deregulation).

So, some company called Forgent is starting to seek licensing fees for the patent on JPEG compression they acquired with Compression Labs. The interesting point is buried in the fourth paragraph of the press release: Forgent and a national law firm, who has made and continues to make a significant investment to develop Forgent's IP licensing program, are the sole beneficiaries of the patent license revenue. Basically, a law firm figured out that Forgent had a patent that could turn into a gold mine, and is financing the company’s attempt to seek licensing fees from everyone who’s using JPEG right now. ...

The crappy economy has been affecting me on a personal level for the past couple of days, hence the sporadic updates. No worries, I’m still employed, but things have been rather hectic. You can expect the percentage of posts that are vituperative in nature to remain high until things become more relaxed in these parts. I blog, therefore I vent.

Yesterday, the House approved the CSEA bill (yet another computer crime bill) nearly unanimously. It provides for life sentences for people who do really bad stuff (my description of the level of offense required is about as accurate as the one in the bill).

Harold Evans asks why the media ignored the various Bush business scandals during the 2000 campaign. It’s a great question. I knew of every scandal listed in Evans’ story long before Bush became President – I doubt that’s true of most people, all of whom certainly knew that Gore was a serial fibber.