Posts from — December 2004

Happy holidays to you too, Mr. Bush: “

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(Via Inside the Mind of Gloria Brame.)

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yep, the world is a harsh place….

Penn State Tells Students To Ditch IE: “Hoyceman writes “About 80,000 students and staff are being told to use an alternate browser. The Penn State ITS department sent the alert ‘because the threats are real and alternatives exist to mitigate Web browser vulnerabilities.’ InformationWeek is carrying the story.”"

(Via Slashdot.)

i’ve told everyone that reads this blog several times to ditch ie.

Why Was This Middle Eastern Couple Fired?: “Aliakbar and Shala Afshari worked at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. They have been in the U.S. for 18 years, working and raising a family. On May 5, they were fired suddenly–being told only that they had…”

(Via TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime.)

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lets see, as i recall, significant financial need and inability to make ends meet puts one in the position of possibly being bribed or coerced into doing something one might not otherwise do.. this is a significant security threat. no one can hire most college graduates! …. with clear reasons why people are hired and fired over public security, reasons like the above are ‘good enough’. this needs to be fixed.

Make An iTablet From Old iBooks: “MacModder writes “Apple hasn’t taken the dive into pen-based computing, but that hasn’t stopeed MacModder Joseph Deruvo Jr. from developing his own personal iTablet. The mod pieces together parts from two iBooks, a troll-touch touch screen, dual hard drives, integrated bluetooth, additional firewire ports and even an integrated compact flash reader. Read all about it on MacMod.com““

(Via MacSlash.)

cool toy…..

Bureaucracy: ”

This is the geek story of the day. At work, we are going to have a giant videoconference (think nationwide) and we need a registration form for all the sites. Simple enough. Well, we axed most of our programmers because the big IT guys for agriculture didn’t like a department having their own programmers. That’s why I was asked to do it.

Problem: The Ag IT guys are in love with Microsoft and only accept ASP code and I tried to plead that I could do it in ten minutes using Rails. They don’t seem interested in that. Long story short, they are doing some time consuming task to get a simple registration form online and ready to go. Just to prove my point, I made my registration form in Rails. It took ten minutes.

I love Rails. I hate bureaucracy.

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(Via Carpe Aqua.)

rails looks cool….

Would you like bytes with that?: “”Hi, I’m [Catspaw] from the OpenNet Initiative. Prior to the election, I checked the geor…”

(Via Catspaw’s Guide to the Inevitably Insane.)

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Apparently KAT! is up to some good again….. i wonder why they wouldn’t answer the question… of course, they never really answer questions….

retroCRUSH: The barely legal pleasure palace: “One of the great things about toys from a while back was that they were made with one thing in mind, playability.  Sure, they may have had lead paint, or would blow up in a kid’s face, but they sure were fun.  Once the Consumer Products Safety Commission got their mitts on everything, it all went downhill.  Toy guns were spray-painted orange, and the sharp edges of everything have been rounded down to safe boring nubs.  ”

(Via .)

great stuff. i always wanted one of those helicopters.

Ubu Roi Day!: “Great Stories, People, Books & Events in Literary History “On this day in 1896, Alfred Jarry’s avant-garde play, Ubu Roi, opened and closed in Paris. When Ubu came on stage with a large target drawn on his belly, a toilet-brush…”

(Via Words – big ones and little ones….)

wooo hoooo! pataphysics lives….

Today is Human Rights Day: “December 10 is Human Rights Day, so named by the United Nations in recognition of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948. Some thoughts: Don’t forget Darfur. Or Tibet. In Pakistan:…”

(Via TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime.)

happy human rights day, don’t be surprised if your government considers ova or sperm to be human and not full grown adult humans…..

WSJ.com – Trying to Remember
New Passwords Isn’t
As Easy as ABC123: “Before joining Fortinet, Mr. Kwan spent 15 years as an internal techie for three Silicon Valley companies. There, he repeatedly saw human nature defeat well-intentioned computer-security rules. When he was called to work on a computer and the regular user wasn’t there, Mr. Kwan would pick up the keyboard. It was a good bet that he would find a password scribbled underneath. “We found a lot of bizarre passwords being taped all over the place,” he says.

The Sarbanes-Oxley law doesn’t mandate periodic password changes. Nor do the Securities and Exchange Commission rules implementing the law. Nor does the “guidance” issued by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, the nonprofit corporation that Sarbanes-Oxley created to regulate audit firms. Nonetheless, password changes have become a standard feature of management strategies to demonstrate compliance with the law.

One impetus appears to be the IT Governance Institute, a Rolling Meadows, Ill., nonprofit that brings together tech executives from big companies with representatives of major audit firms. The institute’s “control objectives” for Sarbanes-Oxley list regular password changes as an “illustrative control” to prevent tampering with corporate financial systems.”

(Via .)

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you get workers put in near impossible positions. too many passwords ruins security on the human scale and does not increase security at all.