We are leaving ourselves vulnerable to infiltration by those who want to mold the United States into the image of their religion, rather than working within the Judeo-Christian principles that have made us a beacon for freedom-loving persons around the world.

The GOP must not really like this guy. Otherwise someone would have told him to shut up by now. However, I think their silence on the matter also speaks volumes.

Virgil Goode is still a moron

CNN once again shows how easy it is to confuse a Democratic senator and a terrorist.

"Where's Obama?" they asked, over a graphic of Osama bin Laden.

Apparently Fox fired the guy that does their graphics stuff and he got a job at CNN. (One cynically observes that this is exactly how the media kills a candidate it's operators don't like. Yarrr, anyone? I believe they apologized for that too... Posthumously.)

CNN: Obama Bin Lauden?

If the holidays have made you forget how screwed up everything is right now, this photo essay should remind you.

TIME: The Best Photos of the Year 2006

This time there will be working exploits for mostly every critical advisory released, thus there will be less room for drama.

Depends how you define drama. This ought to be a dramatic month for folks running OSX.

the Month of Apple Bugs

If you want a more realistic (read boring) set of predictions for technology trends in 2007 I think this article is fairly accurate. Of course, only one of these 5 things is really new.

For example, radio-frequency identification (RFID), frequently viewed as a standalone tagging technology, will begin to ramp up the data loads IT centers must handle, as the tags become more pervasive. Web services, long touted as the next big thing, is poised to begin presenting workaday challenges, as managers are tasked with integrated Web-based apps into the enterprise. Mobile security is a no-brainer as a hot technology for the coming year, as far flung workforces face newer and more troubling threats.

Most challenging may be two technologies which will begin their ascent in 2007, but may take a bit longer to assume a dominant role in the enterprise. Those would be virtualization and advanced graphics. The latter will get a big boost from the advent of Microsoft's Vista operating system.

5 Disruptive Technologies To Watch In 2007 - News by InformationWeek

I just posted a minor update to MemeStreams. There were a number of circles in MemeStreams that were broken. Many did not have names. These have all been deleted. If you did not have any circles before, you now have three: Co-Workers, Friends, and Interesting People, which are the same three that new users now get automatically. If you had circles before, your circles should not have changed. Please let me know if you observe any problems with these changes.

Happy New Year everyone.

At the start of each year I've traditionally posted the previous year's awstat web server statistics. This year I'm doing something different. There are three reasons.

The first is that posting awstat information contributes to a lot of referral spam. In fact, I'll bet this post will end up getting picked up by spammers in web searches and sent a lot of bogus traffic simply because the text awstats appears within it. I have no idea what these people think they are accomplishing, but they seem quite persistent. Sanitizing the stats information so that it doesn't attract them has become a fair amount of work.

The second reason is that the statistics that are individually important to you probably haven't changed much from last year. Kimbo Slice is still the top search term that brings people in from Google...

What has changed is our Google rank. We've gone from about 40,000 monthly unique visitors in the earlier part of the year down to about 20,000, with a slight bump at the very end of December from people looking for information on the execution of Saddam Hussein. This is about where we were in 2005 prior to a national press incident involving one of our users. Nearly all of this traffic change can be attributed to Google. I'm not terribly bothered about it, as there are still an awful lot of people randomly falling in here from Google, and a reduction in our rank shelters us from link spam to a certain extent.

The third reason is that awstats information hasn't traditionally told us what we really want to know: How many people REALLY read MemeStreams. 20,000 or 40,000 is a heck of a lot of people. Mixed up in those statistics are the Google tourists, web crawlers, spammers, etc... How much of it can be discounted?

Rattle made two changes that help tremendously in understanding this question. The first was improvements to the sessions layer, which provides the information boxes you now see around the site that tell you who is currently online in 15 minute intervals. The second is the addition of Google Analytics, which includes a visitor loyalty statistic that I think provides the most accurate view of the size of the real MemeStreams reader community that we've yet seen. Unfortunately, these statistics exclude RSS readers. Its difficult to make accurate estimates about RSS readership, but we do know that the main page and the blogs of most of the regular posters on MemeStreams are pulled by RSS readers thousands of times a month. Given the frequency of RSS, however, that may represent less than 100 readers. Here are our visitor loyalty statistics for the month of December:

Visit Number Visits
1 14353
2 623
3 169
4 124
5 95
6 76
7 72
8 61
9-14 304
15-25 404
26-50 452
51-100 473
101-200 231
201+ 17

This chart shows how many people have visited the site a particular number of times... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

As an activity, as a state of mind, science is fundamentally optimistic. Science figures out how things work and thus can make them work better. Much of the news is either good news or news that can be made good, thanks to ever deepening knowledge and ever more efficient and powerful tools and techniques. Science, on its frontiers, poses more and ever better questions, ever better put.

What are you optimistic about? Why? Surprise us!

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2007

Funny, but sadly true, dating tips for men and women.

This looks like spam, but it is not... Well, kinda it is... but, it was invited...

Dating tips for men and women. It's hilarious

If an attacker wants to learn the IP address of a hidden server on the Tor network, he'll suddenly request something difficult or intensive from that server. The added load will cause it to warm up.

Because temperature affects how fast most electronics operate, warming up the machine causes microscopic changes in clock skew over time. Now the attacker queries computers on the public internet that he suspects of being the Tor server, looking for the shift in skew over the course of hours.

Wired News: Computer Warming a Privacy Risk