] SHA-1 has been broken. Not a reduced-round version. Not a
] simplified version. The real thing.

All your digital signatures are belong to us.

You have no chance to survive make new keys.

(well, not really new keys, but you get the drift)

Schneier on Security: SHA-1 Broken

] Because nothing says "legitimate" like blog.

Best Slashdot Comment Ever.

AskJeeves Steps Into RSS with Bloglines Acquisiton

Essentially the issue is that you can register domain names using international character sets that look exactly like English, and obtain SSL certificates for them, and it is extremely difficult for the end user to be able to tell that he/she isn’t dealing with the English website. Working example of https://www.paypal.com/ demonstrated.

Shmoo DNS attack

Chopper, sic balls!!

Pet's Mobility - Moble phones for dogs

] When Robert Moran drove back to his law offices in Rome,
] N.Y., after a plane trip to Arizona in July 2003, he had
] no idea that a silent stowaway was aboard his vehicle: a
] secret GPS bug implanted without a court order by state
] police.
]
] A federal judge in New York ruled last week that police
] did not need court authorization when tracking Moran from
] afar. "Law enforcement personnel could have conducted a
] visual surveillance of the vehicle as it traveled on the
] public highways," U.S. District Judge David Hurd wrote.
] "Moran had no expectation of privacy in the whereabouts
] of his vehicle on a public roadway."

Comments from Decius:

Yowzer... The police "could have" visually observed the vehicle, but they didn't. They attached a tracking device to it. A tracking device it a wholly different animal and has wholly different privacy implications. The expense require to visually track an individual car's every movement, without being observed, is extremely high. An individual might have no expectation of privacy with regard to the specific location of his car at a specific time, but there is a reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to the specific location of his car at every time.

One might also inquire as to whether this tracking device stopped working the minute this individual pulled off of a public road and onto private property? Its doubtful.

This ruling implies that as one tracking device has no privacy implications, then presumably 1000 tracking devices have no privacy implications, as 1000*0=0. Moving from the idea that the police have every right to tail your car on a public road to the idea that the police can electronically track the location of every car at every time is a massive leap of logic that has little basis in common sense.

Furthermore, one would think that the process of attaching a tracking device would have some private property concerns. Is it legal for me to attach anything I want to your car? Can I put a audio recording device on your car? (Apparently so, according to one of the rulings in this article!)

Anothing article linked in here discusses a very very tenuous barrier that the courts established to prevent the FBI from wiretapping cars using their on-star systems. Apparently its only illegal if it might interfere with emergency road side services!

We're rapidly approaching a period of time when technologies like these will allow the police to monitor your every movement and record your daily conversations. If we will not properly apply the 4th amendment to this domain the results will be terrible.

No court order required for GPS bugs! (More dumb judges.)

] According to the DREAD Advantages Sheet, "unlike
] conventional weapons that deliver a bullet to the target
] in intervals of about 180 feet, the DREAD's rounds will
] arrive only 30 thousandths of an inch apart (1/32nd of an
] inch apart), thereby presenting substantially more mass
] to the target in much less time than previously
] possible." This mass can be delivered to the target in
] 10-round bursts, or the DREAD can be programmed to
] deliver as many rounds as you want, per trigger-pull. Of
] course, the operator can just as easily set the DREAD to
] fire on full-auto, with no burst limiter. On that
] setting, the number of projectiles sent down range per
] trigger-pull will rely on the operator's trigger
] control. Even then, every round is still going right into
] the target. You see, the DREAD's not just accurate, it's
] also recoilless. No recoil. None. So, every "fired" round
] is going right where you aim it.

According to this, it can basically fire a column of steel, at a operator defined length.

Defense Review - World Exclusive Video! DREAD Weapon System: Devastating, Jam-Proof, and Silent.

This Canadian television show is more funny then anything currently airing in the states. It follows a group of guys who live in a trailer park community as they go about doing crimes in the style of a fake reality show.

Trailer Park Boys

] A few weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, an FBI
] agent called the Whitney Museum of American Art and asked
] to see a drawing on exhibit there. The piece was by Mark
] Lombardi, an artist who had committed suicide the year
] before. Using just a pencil and a huge sheet of paper,
] Lombardi had created an intricate pattern of curves and
] arcs to illustrate the links between global finance and
] international terrorism.

Something to listen to while you look through the year in graphs.

NPR : The 'Conspiracy' Art of Mark Lombardi

] Reenie's head chip woke her by steadily increasing
] the perceived volume of a song by a British comedy
] troupe. Lots of trippy dreams last night. She
] couldn't remember them all this morning, but she was
] sure they were cool. She rolled out of bed and prepared
] for her "Commute" to the adjoining room. Reenie
] loved her job, well, as much as she could love any job.
] She got to work from home as much as she liked.

If you liked "Ownz0red" by Cory Doctorow, which many of you did, you will definitely like this quick little 10 minute read.

Futurismic: Fiction

Since 2002 we've been publishing the httpd log statistics for this site on an annual basis. This gives you some insight into traffic levels, popular pages, and the kinds of search results that bring people to MemeStreams.

From the time we went online (in the fall of 2001) until September of 2003 we saw a fairly constant growth in the number of unique visitors using this site. This year that pattern has changed. The growth, as measured in terms of unique visitors, seems to have leveled off shy of 30,000 people a month, and this year we settled into a static pattern typical of older websites, where more traffic is received in the winter months than in the summer months. As our site is current events focused we also get an occasional boost from popular news stories.

However, while the same number of people are using MemeStreams as were using it a year ago, those people seem to be using it a lot more. In September of 2003 we got 27,825 unique visitors, who visited 101,041 pages on the site. In November of 2004 we got 27,496 unique visitors, but they visited 155,421 pages on the site.

Truth be told, this is probably a more significant change. A lot of those 27 thousand people wash in from a search engine looking for something specific and never return. The vitality of this site is more dependent on the people who stick around a while and actually make use of it. Those people seem to be growing in numbers even as the overall total remains the same.

The main page of the site was hit 259,011 times this year, which works out to about 708 times a day. Thats up from 148,826 last year (which is 408 times a day). Also, in 2003 29% of our traffic came from search engines and 33% came from bookmarks. This year 19% came from search engines and 57% came from bookmarks.

2003 saw the birth of the referrer spammer and they are not going away. The 5 "links from an external page" listed here were the only ones that made the top 20 who I'm absolutely sure aren't spammers. (Honestly, the Netnewswire link may be considered spam, as it is offered by that RSS reader, but its somewhat interesting data and not exactly the same thing as robots that hit your site over and over with no interest in fetching the content.)

If you're interested, you can find the links to older annual statistics here:
http://www.memestreams.net/allabout.html

Happy New Year!

2004 Statistics for www.memestreams.net