since people keep hitting my blog looking for info on the g5 supercomputer, here is the link to the research computing site with the info you are looking for.

it appears some people some people are trying to bypass the encryption on some files and it requires a beowolf cluster, now, it seems to me that this is particularly problematic because it does not really matter what they find, it could have all been constructed to be found by someone else. In short there is no way of ensuring the authenticity of this request at all even if it was personal acquaintence. It surely looks like it is a huge problem. However, the point should be clear to all that read it, there are huge questions around voter fraud with these systems and there is reason to believe that if it is a possibility then someone might perpetrate it, and that should be known, so…. well, i don't suggest anyone do anything other than their own will because i could go either way on this type of request. I do think we need external vote auditors and paper trails though.

The Simputer keeps stumbling. We'd be impressed if anyone remembered this, but the very first non-test post on Gizmodo was about the Simputer, a handheld computer designed to be used by the world's rural poor. At the time we reported that the Indian non-profit group which designed the Simputer had been having some trouble finding licensees to actually build them. Now, over a year later, Rediff follows up to see how things are going and finds that there are still some problems getting Simputers, which turned out to cost as much as a desktop PC, into the hands of people who need them. One licensee, Encore, has sold fewer than a couple of thousand, while the other licensee, PicoPeta, has yet to even put their version of the Simputer on sale. Read [Via Slashdot]… [Gizmodo]

A Daily Chronicle of the Bush Administration Distortion. From the fine folks at MoveOn.org, we have Misleader.org, A Daily Chronicle of the Bush Administration Distortion. In addition to the Bush lies, you also get the research behind the discovery of the lie. Click on the image of our… [Eat Your Vegetables]

Oi! *Nix admin, get patching. Sendmail, openSSH and DB2 vulns [The Register]

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i patched my systems the last two days…. and people wonder what i do sometimes:) fixing prollems before they start i suppose.

Verisign: ICANN Raised No Objections. Hiawatha Bray quotes a Verisign spokesperson in the Boston Globe: “VeriSign began work on the system a year ago, spokesman Tom Galvin said. “We began to think of a service that would help improve Web navigation,” he said. Galvin said VeriSign informed a major Internet regulatory body, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), of the Site Finder plan. He said ICANN president Paul Twomey raised no objections. [Lextext]

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This brings in to question, at least for me, what Paul Twomey and really many others imagine the internet and the communities that operate on it to be, do they really think that this is something that would not be an issue for important constituencies there? or do they imagine it as a 90% won't care and the rest are just troublemakers or what?

Colleges Caught in a Vise. If there is a crisis in college costs, it is not due to by price-gouging by universities, as House Republicans John Boehner and Howard McKeon contend. By Stanley Fish. [New York Times: Opinion] [A blog doesn't need a clever name]