Lawrence Lessig on how blogs may transfer transform presidential politics. Like open-source software, blogs build communities, if the audience becomes vocal participants, as the Dean campaign has fostered. Undoubtedly blogs will color how campaigns work —Dean's fundraising through the web alone would ensure that— but they'll be one more tool of politicking right beside all the others.
It never occurred to me to ask Is Your Dog Fulfilled? Instead I focus on ensuring Sam gets plenty of food, sleep, regular exercise, and some play time. Nothing fancy; his favorite toy is a cheap plastic, nearly flat ball. Besides I like best hanging out with Sam while I'm reading.
Turns out this is just fine. Most need about an hour a day of exercise and do better without constant stimulation:
In natural environments, which almost no dog or owner can find anymore, dogs are like lions. They lie around much of the day, rousing themselves every now and then for food or sex or to chase after something appealing. Dogs don't have human emotions. They don't get bored in the human sense of the word, although they do need some activity. They may get anxious when left alone—they are pack animals and usually prefer company—but loneliness is a human, not canine, emotion. With proper training and acclimatization, sometimes confinement, almost any dog can spend time alone, vegging out, smelling the smells and listening to the sounds of the world, chewing on rawhide, or staring at nothing in particular. One European study suggests that dogs left alone sometimes are smarter than dogs that are smothered by attention: They get the opportunity to solve problems by themselves.
For more on what dogs want, A walk around the block with the new dog literature
Laurent Oudot 's Fighting Internet Worms With Honeypots evaluates the use of honeypots in defending against worms, including the daemon Honeyd. His conclusion:
Technologies from the honeypot domain become an interesting card to play in the fight against Internet worms. They can be used to redirect evil worm traffic to dedicated fake services, safely catch the worms and analyze their behavior, and finally limit their propagation through networks.
These young technologies are therefore very promising, though they probably still suffer of a lack of testing experience when used over wide networks.
In case of attacks coming from a very hostile worm (black worms) that can kill or pester the targets, and can protect themselves or understand if they are deluded, the use of honeypots may be rather limited without a strong technical analysis to understand what is done by the worm and how to play with it. By our luck, so far none of the known Internet worms have been so violent.
Without becoming the principal key allowing total lockdown of computer architectures, honeypots are a valuable additional means in the fight against the Internet worms.
Every administration writes its own history, but now technology permits the redacting in situ: White House site prevents Iraq material being archived. By using its robots.txt file to hide its directories from search engines, the website prevents any revealing comparison of editorial changes made to text.
The Age reports seven percent of American email users have responded to spam, and a quarter of survey respondents say they are not using email as much in response to spam, according to a new Pew Internet Initiative report. In brief, Spam is beginning to undermine the integrity of email and degrade life online.
Good reminder by Phil Windley of the XML Security Gap, which can be closed by using XML-specific firewalls. Must repeat the mantra that it pays to be paranoid: scan everything, assume everyone's a risk.
Bad news: The US government was short a record $374.2 billion in 2003 (the fiscal year ends September 30th).
Good news: The deficit is about 3.5 percent of GDP, not in itself a stratospheric share.
Context: the US national debt today is $6,834,248,759,903.16, or about 63 percent of its $10. 8 trillion economy measured in GDP; in 2003, we paid $318 billion in interest payments on that debt.
It seems those building voting machines are at least recognizing the legitimate concerns about their equipment and are willing to concede the need for paper ballots. As reported by Wired News: "I have no doubt that all systems will offer a voter-verifiable paper ballot,
Bill Stotesbery of Hart InterCivic said. The capability to deliver that functionality exists and will continue to improve.
The paper ballot seems the best way to maintain trust in election results by furnishing an auditable trail to ensure electronic voting databases maintain their integrity and accuracy, so certainly, voters will benefit if the industry is embracing paper verification methods in response to identified weaknesses in deployed systems. Yet, it remains to be seen if the industry's efforts to form a lobbying association will result in standards for voting records, or is an attempt to spin bad news into good. The latter would be a shame, since industry gold standards are good for voters and for the bottom line. And if you are in the business of counting votes, your best interest had better be in doing a credible job.
It seems I was mildly stung by Russian spammers, who apparently went after Moveable Type sites. Specifically an entry about SCO and legal precedent involving a cow, although why anyone thinks the SCO debate might induce lasciviousness, is beyond me.
Appreciated the venting on More Like This that maybe web denizens should be allowed to “garrote spammers.” Agreed. Or at least the electronic equivalent thereof.
We're a Samba office, and have no intention of switching to Windows, but this is indeed a nice bit o' news: Samba 3 runs rings around Windows Server 2003 in file serving performance and in scalability.
One's native language seems inherently logical. Despite its ridiculous spelling, English makes sense to me intuitively; its structures seem, well too obvious for comment, that is until I attempted another language and ran smack into another's set of “obvious” assumptions. For example, in Russian, grandfather is a feminine noun, a joke we beginners all enjoyed. Yet the striking oddities to a foreign speaker are unremarkable to a native speaker. Surely, a good argument for learning another language is to make you question what you hold as obvious and what you assume to be true.
Ah the fun of digging out tasty worms and patching holes. Very necessary of course. We had leased out a subnet to our tenant, which unfortunately supplied its employees with expired anti-virus software. And while our anti-virus is up-to-date, sometimes things get through—probably permissions that I need to correct on the centralized anti-virus system we installed earlier. That and work on a better patch system. That and automate cleanmgr.exe to get rid of unused temporary files on the hard drive.