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Thomas Yohe, Reqiescat in Pace. Yohe was the creative force behind Interplanet Janet, "Bill" the bill, and all the other denizens of Conjunction Junction. [ Thanks to Cam, via the Girlhacker ]
posted on Dec-23-00 at 12:22 PM

Well, we talked about NORAD a few posts back, I guess now it's time for everyone's *other* favorite agency: the NSA has a logo. That's funny. No, really, the topic of this posting is their release of Security-Enhanced Linux, including Mandatory Access Control and other cool B-1'ish stuff. Ted T'so has some interesting observations in this Slashdot thread on the topic as well.
posted on Dec-23-00 at 11:09 AM

The current RISKS Digest carries a manifesto of sorts from Peter Neumann (of RISKS), Lauren Weinstein (of PRIVACY DIGEST) and Rebecca Mercuri (one of the AT&T voting wonks, if memory serves) on the dangers of electronic and Internet voting in the current technological milieu. Let's fix the problems, yes, but let's not create worse ones in the process.
posted on Dec-15-00 at 12:03 PM

ELECTION: Ethel, on Big Tony and the Supremes. If you're Republican, skip this link; I wouldn't want to be responsible for giving anyone apoplexy or popping anyone's anuerysm... :-)
posted on Dec-15-00 at 9:28 AM

FTC unanimously approves AOL/Time Warner merger. With a couple of restraint-avoidance conditions. Wonder who's gonna enforce those... Aw, crap.
posted on Dec-14-00 at 2:43 PM

FLASH: Gore Concedes. Ok, I guess *now* it's over. Bye, Alec...
posted on Dec-13-00 at 6:17 PM

How the hell did we miss this?

AmIKottkeOrNot?
posted on Dec-12-00 at 1:45 PM

ELECTION: "I'm with the Bush-Cheney Team: I'm here to stop the vote!" That pretty much says it all for me...
posted on Dec-10-00 at 8:48 AM

The Grinch who stole eBay? Here's a weird one; help cheerfully accepted. The link is to a search on eBay for Novatel Minstrel's; I decided I wanted to buy one. Everywhere I run the search from, I get substantially different results. Like, 2 answers vs 12. I'd be interested to know if other people who hit the link see similar behavior... This smells weird... kinda like the Amazon differential pricing think, but I can't see a reason why...
posted on Dec-8-00 at 12:51 PM

FLASH: Iridium Saved. I don't get to write too many two word flashes... The DoD, specifically DISA, signed an 11th inning 2 year $72 million contract with Iridium LLC, saving them from splashing the constellation. [more...]
posted on Dec-7-00 at 10:41 AM

Carnivore sucks. You think so, but did you know that Steve Bellovin, Matt Blaze, Peter G Neumann and Gene Spafford agree with you? Along with David Farber from UPenn, they were asked to identify specific areas of concern by the Chief Scientist at Justice for review by a team from the Illinois Institute or Technology's Research Insititute. They weren't real impressed with the quality of the report that team returned.
posted on Dec-5-00 at 4:51 PM

ELECTION: Supremes remand decision to SCOFL. He may have balls, but his *luck* is running low.
posted on Dec-4-00 at 1:36 PM

Wired News reports on the upcoming DMCA review. Via Linux Weekly News: "When music is streamed, webcasters are required to pay a performance royalty. In order to generate smooth playback of incoming streams, computers temporarily store some of the data in memory in a RAM buffer. Music publishers have stated that the data in this buffer should be considered a physical creation that would require webcasters to pay a mechanical royalty, similar to what they pay for downloads or CDs." Anyone need any more on that? Time to get your congressman on the phone...
posted on Nov-30-00 at 12:02 PM

Greenspun on Neilsen. Damn if that don't sound like the Thrilla in Manila. I just stumbled over this piece on ArsDigita's Systems Journal site, formerly Web Tools Review. If you enjoy watching one so-called expert pick apart the opinions of another, you'll probably enjoy this. If you're sick unto death of both of them... skip it.
posted on Nov-29-00 at 6:19 PM

<drool> Oh boy, do I want one of these. Unless, of course, the idiots at Kyocera/Qualcomm blew it again, and *didn't* make it capable of using CDPD to get to the Internet. [calls, gets wrong answer, screeches loudly enough that everyone on MeFi can hear...]
posted on Nov-29-00 at 5:55 PM

Everquest guide suicides. Or maybe not. No one's really sure. Is this why they call it "Ever-Crack"? [ From Salon via Flutterby. ]
posted on Nov-27-00 at 12:14 PM

Mike Muuss, author of ping(1), dead at 42. Traffic accident, Maryland, tractor-trailer. Half a dozen bad pastiche jokes go here, but I'm not going to do them.
posted on Nov-22-00 at 2:20 PM

ELECTION: Live coverage of (what's left of) the Florida hearing. I heard a solution I could live with: machine recount all the Florida ballots, and hand count anything that bounces. Came from the Bush camp, surprisingly enough.
posted on Nov-20-00 at 1:18 PM

ELECTION: Dan Bricklin thinks the ballots sucked, too. Remember him? He helped write VisiCalc, and now runs Trellix? I'm still wondering why no one's agitating to invalidate that election in PBC.
posted on Nov-20-00 at 10:07 AM

Some of us made jokes in the days after the election about "Gore stealing votes from Nader", to ape those who said the reverse. But we didn't read the Libertarian Party's press release, wherein they said the same thing, and they were both serious, and believable. [quote inside]
posted on Nov-19-00 at 8:45 PM

No, PostgreSQL does not suck. Some of the people who wander into my weblog get there from a page at OpenACS, the site for the Postgres port of Phil Greenspuns' ArsDigita Community System wherein takes place a "MySQL's Better!" "No, it's not!" discussion. Here's a bit more data.
posted on Nov-18-00 at 6:46 PM

When asked, Apple said "Of course we're going to sue them, what sort of silly question is that?"
posted on Nov-18-00 at 5:23 PM

ELECTION RELIEF: Now you, too, can attend Electoral College.
posted on Nov-13-00 at 8:39 AM

Third federal circuit upholds criminality of Childless Pornography. Anyone know a good source for jackboots?
posted on Nov-12-00 at 10:29 PM

Multics, Requiescat in Pace. Wow. What does one say.
posted on Nov-12-00 at 8:25 PM

Bernard Shaw to retire. I guess the election foo-faraw was too much for him. :-)
posted on Nov-11-00 at 7:11 PM

ELECTION: A note of sanity on voting systems from Lauren Weinstein's well-worth reading Privacy Digest; it notes the inherent weak spots in all voting tally systems, and compares manual to machine and electronic ones.
posted on Nov-11-00 at 6:15 PM

ELECTION: Florida SecState declares PBC ballot legal. Like that's her gig, or anything...
posted on Nov-10-00 at 6:28 PM

Wow! Non-election related news. Courtesy of Linux Weekly News (which came out this morning), a picture of the new ".com" version of Monopoly. Did they get the companies in the order of priority you would have expected?
posted on Nov-10-00 at 8:21 AM

US Votes Republican -- except for all the people. Anyone still need an explanation of the Electoral College?
posted on Nov-8-00 at 9:53 AM

Synthetic Jailbait. That's what you get when you demonize attraction to sexy little 16 and 17 year old Britney wannabees. [parental advisory: explicit lyrics] [from Flutterby, which walks this beat more often than me.]
posted on Nov-3-00 at 7:19 AM

"Search. It's all we do. Test our results." So, is that braggadocio... or insecurity? Given the spate of "how [they] scammed Google" pieces lately, I find the newest addition to their home page... interesting.
posted on Nov-3-00 at 6:42 AM

Asshole of the year? G.W. Bush, who is expected to use opposition to Roe v Wade as a litmus test for new Supremes... got a 15 year old girl preggers in the 70s and paid for the abortion? Ethel seems convinced... make up your own mind.
posted on Nov-1-00 at 6:26 PM

I'll take great jobs for $100, Alex. My favorite quote: "I used to joke that I mentioned how I collected caps, so I wind up getting a lot of caps. I should have mentioned that I collect Rolex watches and see what happened." Fluffy, but fun.
posted on Oct-30-00 at 10:41 AM

Are you really in favor of who you should be? Not having seen this in a quick scan, I'll point you to SpeakOut's VoteMatch quiz. It correctly pegged me as a Browne voter, but I was surprised that Bush came in second, Gore fourth, and Nader 7th. Hmmm...
posted on Oct-26-00 at 12:08 PM

Are taxonomai copyrightable? This topic isn't new; West Publishing stole their legal referencing system from the government, then copyrighted it and successfully sued a couple people out of business. But should it be possible? [Hint: Hell, no!]
posted on Oct-26-00 at 7:49 AM

We didnt' start the weblogs... They were always thinking of good sites for linking. Found in my referer log. *Very* well done.
posted on Oct-21-00 at 9:39 PM

A spec for a really impressive new website service. I especially liked the design comments on the Flash intro; I think you will to.
posted on Oct-10-00 at 11:03 AM

Wondering when and where your favorite band is playing? Musi-cal is sort of the Internet Concert Database; a collaborative scheduling information site. To make it even cooler, it runs the Insanely Great™ Zope.
posted on Oct-5-00 at 5:41 PM

I don't recall having heard from anybody that the consumer experience of getting online required redefinition.
posted on Oct-5-00 at 7:27 AM

Google expands advertising options... and still doesn't appear to have blown their rep.
posted on Oct-4-00 at 4:09 PM

FLASH! Sanity breaks out in Congress! Doesn't sound like grandstanding to me; sounds like these guys have a clue on software and business method patents. "Healthy skepticism" sound like real friendly words to me.
posted on Oct-4-00 at 1:18 PM

A large collection o' more on the CueCrap. Some very nice points in this one... "I don't want it, how do I send it back?" "You can't send it back; keep it and do whatever you want with it." "You threatened me for 'doing what I wanted with it'."
posted on Oct-4-00 at 12:10 PM

Oh, my god! They sell stuff concerning sex in that store! Stone them! So, why is it again that sex is bad? [Courtesy of Dan Lyke's excellent Flutterby.]
posted on Oct-2-00 at 9:29 PM

More than half of the public opinion survey firms in the US have no idea what they're doing, and 57% of *those* have never even heard of the Internet.
posted on Sep-22-00 at 10:23 PM

The Adventures of Lacey Brazeer. [Yet Another] Feminist comic strip. Courtesy, unsurprisingly, of Charlotte. I found this screamingly funny; YMMV.
posted on Sep-22-00 at 8:26 AM

That 2-way satellite Internet service that we were all musing about a few weeks back may be this offering from Gilat2Home, who prudently decided that that was way too...
posted on Sep-17-00 at 3:25 PM

I'm blogging Tropical Storm Gordon. If you live on the West coast of Florida, or know someone who does, I'll try to help you keep an eye out. If you don't, well, ignore this, ok? ;-) [Flames to /meta/talk.]
posted on Sep-16-00 at 2:52 PM

All Hands On Deck. If you're an engineer for IBM OZ or Telstra, don't expect to get a day off for the next three weeks. Here comes the Olympics!
posted on Sep-9-00 at 9:15 AM

Proof that Upside reporters read MetaFilter.
posted on Sep-8-00 at 6:46 AM