I like John Dvorak very much: He is a completely entertaining fellow, and I’ve had a reasonable amount of correspondence with him in which he is charming, bizarre, and hilarious. He takes up causes. He makes people mad. He writes crazy, contrarian things. And today, he decided to be wrong, wrong, wrong! about metro-scale Wi-Fi.

Wi-Fi Networking News: John, You Ignorant Slut: Dvorak Is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong!

About half of teenage goths have deliberately harmed themselves or attempted suicide, a new study suggests. But joining the modern subculture – which grew out of the 1980s gothic rock scene – may actually protect vulnerable children, researchers say.

The one voice in the MSM actually considering what this study said. Yes, Goths are more likely to have harmed themselves... but that's self-selection, not generally a result of the group. And the study found that joining the group tended to help. But that doesn't stop The Scotsman and the BBC using the evidence as signs that the subculture is wrong.

Neil Gaiman had nice coverage:

(To be honest, the phrase that struck me as the most important was “However, the study was based on small numbers and replication is needed to confirm our results.” )

New Scientist Breaking News - Goth subculture may protect vulnerable children

“409A is the tax law that ate the world. Every day we discover another 12 issues.”
—– Senior US Treasury Department Tax Official, March 13, 2006

Feld Thoughts

Abul Khaer is widely commended as Bangladesh’s most skilled firefighter and diver. He also has among the most difficult jobs in the world: he recovers the bodies of people injured or killed during ferry crashes. But how much of a problem is this?

Abul Khaer -- A Diver With A Job Few Others Would Want - Divester

I thought their choices were pretty good, but they completely screwed up with the reasoning behind the selections. Here's my take on it:

1. Software engineer
Congratulations, no one really knows what you do. As a software engineer you have carte blanche to fuck off. Don't like what you're working on? Tell your employer it'll take two years and 10 people to accomplish. No one will know the difference. Just remember, 10 minutes of inspiration gets more accomplished than a strong work ethic.

Slashdot | Software Engineers Ranked Best Job in America

We have flash drives. Three days after the Los Angeles Times broke the story of the US military secrets for sale at an Afghan bazaar, a reporter for the paper bought ($40) another computer drive sold openly outside the U.S. air base in Bagram, Afghanistan. The 1-gigabyte flash drive holds "what appears to be a trove of potentially sensitive American intelligence data, including the names, photographs and telephone numbers of Afghan spies informing on the Taliban and Al Qaeda, personal snapshots, Special Forces training manuals, records of direct action training missions in South America, along with numerous computer slide presentations and documents marked secret." Most documents are neither locked nor encrypted. But the good news is, some of them can't be opened without a password, and the Army is investigating anyway.

Item in great condition - Would do business again! AAA | MetaFilter

Q: I love TiVo, but why can't I change the name of my saved shows? In the days of the video, I could tape what I want, change the name to "Broncos Highlights -- 1994" and rest assured my wife would never look at it. Now, if I TiVo something she might not like, "Naughty Nurses" is right on the saved list. Has there ever been a better product with such an obvious oversight?
--Brendan Lane, Darnestown, Md.

SG: You're a genius. They should add a special feature called "TiVo Camouflage" for an extra $9.95 a month. Every time you record a movie like "Naughty Nurses," TiVo Camouflage automatically changes the title of the show to something concurrently running on the NFL Network. That can't miss.

ESPN.com: Page 2 : Welcome back, mailbag

Silicon Valley based Zixxo has launched a great service that I asked for last year (#4 on this list) - local coupons via RSS. This is a very big market. Last year, 323 billion coupons were distributed in the U.S., and of those 4.5 billion were actually used

Needs work, but very interesting.

TechCrunch � Local Coupons at Zixxo

"Why Phishing Works" is a recent study (PDF) that examines phishing website techniques. The most visually deceptive website spoof in the study was able to fool 90% of the study's participants. That 90% figure includes the most technically advanced users among the participants. It was the look, not the spoofing of security features that did the job - something that our resident phishing expert found quite interesting.

Crossing disciplines and summing up this article published last summer in the journal Neuron - If you don't see something often, you won't often see it. Perhaps you could also say - If you don't see fakes often, you won't often see fakes. Therefore, many phishers while designing visually deceptive phishing sites count less on technical subterfuge than on the failings of the human brain's power of perception. If it looks like what the brain is expecting, then the brain often won't see that it isn't.

I like their proposal: let the user design a custom login interface. If you personalized it enough, then a spoofer would have much less chance. It would be much more complicated, and leave far more footprints.

Imagine if you log into your credit card online site by supplying a username. The next page has a picture of you, and that's when you enter your password. The only way to spoof this effectively would be some form of man-in-the-middle attack. But now the spoofer has much less control of when and where they apply their fraud (as opposed to passively collecting data through a third-party site... the third-party site is now "hot" and potentially monitored).

F-Secure : News from the Lab

Business Plan Hyperbole

This will be the greatest blog post ever. Its unique content and message has no equal, and we have not heard of any potential competitors The idea behind this post is so important, I'm somwhat afraid of your reading it without signing our ironclad NDA. However, I've been told that most Venture Capitalists won't sign such things, so I'll trust you to keep it quiet. In any case any potential competitor will be deterred by our soon to be filed provisional patent application, with its broad claims.

This post should revolutionize the way in which business plan information is delivered. Rather than just overstating the facts and underestimating any problems, we'll completely ignore both.

WayTooEarly: Business Plan Hyperbole