American Forces Attack Militants on Pakistani Soil - NYTimes.com
Topic: Miscellaneous
12:45 pm EDT, Sep 4, 2008
Helicopter-borne American Special Operations forces attacked Qaeda militants in a Pakistani village near the border with Afghanistan early Wednesday in the first publicly acknowledged case of United States forces conducting a ground raid on Pakistani soil, American officials said.
Hacker News | D.J. Bernstein proposes an almost zero-effort DNSSEC alternative (Presentation)
Topic: Miscellaneous
9:02 am EDT, Aug 31, 2008
D.J. Bernstein proposes an almost zero-effort DNSSEC alternative (Presentation)
Generally speaking, digitally signing DNS *packets* would be helpful even if there was no public key infrastructure, and the idea of encoding the keys in the server names is creative.
Sesamestreet.org is an official Sesame Street website, featuring video clips, games, playlists, and more. Although the site was scheduled for debut on August 11, 2008, it was on the web as early as August 5, 2008. Clips can be found by grouping by character, theme, educational topic, classic clips, or songs.
This is great! This new site has just about every muppet sketch I can remember from childhood. Most of the muppets are listed, but for whatever reason, they chose not to list Lefty (a.k.a. The Salesman) in the character search list, but he's pretty easy to find. Sure, you can find most of these on YouTube, but the quality is hit-and-miss.
"The Air Salesman" (click image) featuring Ernie and Lefty was always one of my favorites. Ernie finally gets the better of Lefty in "The Ice Cream Salesman," though.
A cellphone bill roams to the stratosphere - Los Angeles Times
Topic: Miscellaneous
11:11 am EDT, Aug 28, 2008
Santa Monica resident Aurelie Foucaut traveled last month to Paris with her two kids. During a brief stopover in Montreal, she made six calls on her BlackBerry to friends and family members, each lasting less than three minutes.
Foucaut's wireless bill from T-Mobile arrived a few weeks ago. It included $59.77 in ordinary usage charges. It also included a $2,367.40 "data service roaming charge" for nearly 158 megabytes' worth of Internet access while in Montreal -- the equivalent of downloading about 80 novels.
The international roaming situation with cellular data is out of control.
A few people have recommended these to me and I had chance to catch some on a flight recently and they are quite good... I thought I'd pass the recommendation on.
Too often historical portraits glorify the extremism of the partisans whose goals were ultimately successful in a given conflict. Here a more complicated picture is painted ... the fact of conflict is mourned in victory and in defeat, as a tragedy and a failure, and a course of events which the individual characters don't have the power to turn, but only to manage through.
SSRN-'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy by Daniel Solove
Topic: Miscellaneous
2:52 pm EDT, Aug 27, 2008
In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: "I've got nothing to hide." According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.
