I didn’t know that The Darwin Awards were still running. But apparently, brave souls are still documenting human evolution in action.
Firewire and USB were designed with a feature called Direct Memory Access (DMA). This turns out to have been a terrible mistake, since it allows a malicious device the possibility of searching the entire memory of the host computer, without the knowledge of the host.
This is how filevault works. As those slides point out, whole disk encryption may be useful since the /tmp/ and log directories are outside the user’s home directory, a point which I should have made here.
Those of us who have been using the internet for a reasonable time used to spend time posting in newsgroups, using a system called “usenet”. This article suggests that usenet’s decline was due to the sudden ease with which it became possible to search the archives:
Usenet is a medium not too dissimilar to many [...]
This is a very interesting attack on attempts to build anonymous computer networks. I remain sceptical of the wisdom or benefit of attempting to deploy such networks, but they are an interesting technological problem.
The US Government has mandated the use of full disk encryption. The benefit of this is that if a laptop is lost or stolen, the data on it (assuming the encryption does its job) should be useless.
Full Disk encryption is probably an overkill, though. Encryption of all user data would probably be enough [...]
Number ten on this list of questionable acts by the Labour government (Linked to by the Adam Smith Institute) seems somewhat surprising:
The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act has also created a secret police force, the Serious Organised Crime Agency. The location of the agencies offices are not to be disclosed. Its officers do not [...]
Previous approaches to globalisation show the problems produced by attempting to create a level playing field, according to the Adam Smith Institute. It seems to have been an Adam Smith sort of day, for some reason.
While it’s difficult to assert that going into Iraq has made the UK safer, refusing to do so has not helped the French.
Economist “blog reviews”
Interesting things are to be found from the Adam Smith Institute’s blog review 90 and blog review 91.