If we really have become this kind of society, where anything out of the routinely ordinary is grounds for suspicion, the chilling effect on individuality is going to amount to a positive frost.
Yesterday thousands of people lobbied Parliament asking for a referendum on the EU Constitution currently being debated in Parliament.
The BBC hardly mentioned it at all, and on their online site used what can best be described as sarcastic speech marks in the headline.
Growing up in the UK, I like to believe that the BBC is impartial, independent and covers all important news stories in unparalleled detail. Often, I feel that they are testing my faith.
My thanks to my friends at my second favourite place in the universe (you know who you all are) for pointing me in the direction of this rather interesting webpage:
Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?
Updated daily, it seems.
Any security that relies upon the difficulty of producing a paper document is suspect.
Thanks to TLA for pointing out to me that the New York Times technology reviewers have an amazing sense of humour:
Count me among those who thought that RAM lost its contents reliably when it was unpowered. On this basis, I thought that a stolen computer with an encrypted swap file and encrypted home folders ought to be reasonably useless to data-thieves.
Except, it seems that it isn’t true. The gory details are here, courtousy of a group at Princeton University, who claim to be able to hack many forms of hard-disk encryption with little or no exotic technology.
The video is well worth watching, and the research paper itself remarkably readable.
The Register points out that life is about to get tough for ISPs.
What the Reg does not quite put its finger on is this: ISPs have been merrily selling customers ‘bandwidth’ that has been all but theoretical. Now they face the horrible prospect that people other than teens sharing illegal music are going to want to put that ADSL to full use. And unfortunately, they are renting the same bit of ‘pipe’ to hundreds of other people to.
Which is not to say that they are evil, bad or malicious, but just that it is a market where the prices have been low because of spare capacity in the network, and that someone had better start putting down more cable.
The Internet makes some wonderful things possible. Somewhere between art and prank is this five-minute event at NYC’s Grand Central Station. Not only well done, but well filmed.
The event was organised by ImprovEverywhere, according to the Going Underground blog.
In an interesting choice of words, John Edwards “suspends” his bid for the Democratic nomination, so that “History can blaze its path”.
That’s what history always does, of course, though it must hurt to just feel that one is in the way.
Also stepping aside is “They Mayor of America”, now no longer seeking the Republican nomination. Despite his leadership after 9/11, and his record as Mayor of New York, after reading pieces like this one in the N. Y. Times, I’m not surprised.
The remaining Republican candidates are much less complex figures in many ways, and stand a much better chance against a Clinton or Obama campaign, either of whom the Republicans will want to be able to paint as “divisive”. Giuliani, for all his strengths, simply isn’t what the Republican party needs for this election.