Category: Uncategorized
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U.S. Fed Trojan-Horse Technology to Soviet Spies
The U.S. fed booby-trapped technology to Soviet economic spies in the 1980’s, according to a new book by former Air Force secretary Thomas C. Reed. This was reported in a front-page story by David E. Hoffman, in today’s Washington Post. Reed says that the CIA, on discovering secret Soviet purchases of sensitive U.S. technology, decided…
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Great Books vs. Must-Read Books
Dan Simon has an interesting reaction to my post on must-read books in science and technology. I can’t do Dan’s post justice with a single quote, but here’s a sample: [T]he Great Books of science–and they do exist: viz., Euclid’s Elements, Newton’s Principia–simply don’t occupy the same place in the scientific world that the Great…
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Shielding P2P Users' Identities
New P2P technologies are more effectively shielding the identities and net addresses of their users, according to a John Borland story at news.com. This is not surprising given that the past generation of P2P systems did essentially nothing to hide their users’ addresses. Agents of the RIAA exploited that lack of protection to identify people…
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Support the Grey Album
Today many websites have turned themselves grey, to protest EMI Records’ decision to try to block the Grey Album, DJ Danger Mouse’s clever and widely acclaimed musical work, in which he mixed a capella vocals from Jay-Z’s Black Album with backing sounds sampled from the Beatles’ White Album. EMI, which claims copyright in the Beatles…
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Great Books
Arnold Kling points to a recent survey that asked university presidents to name five books every student should read. The top ten books on the list are: The Bible, The Odyssey, Plato’s Republic, Democracy in America, The Iliad, Hamlet, The Koran, The Wealth of Nations, The Prince, and The Federalist Papers. Arnold rightly laments the…
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Want to Know Who's Googling You?
Phil Libin at Vastly Important Notes points out a way to discover how often you’re being Googled. The trick is to buy a Google AdWords advertisement keyed to your own name. Whenever somebody searches for your name, your ad will be displayed. Later, Google will give you statistics about your ad’s placement, which you can…
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Diebold Looking for Help
A reliable source tells me that a headhunter, working for e-voting vendor Diebold, is calling security experts, trying to find somebody to help Diebold improve the security of their systems.
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Monoculture
Lately, computer security researchers have been pointing out the risks of software monoculture. The idea is that if everybody uses the same software product, then a single virtual pathogen can wipe out the entire population, like Dutch Elm Disease mowing down a row of identical trees. A more diverse population would better resist infection. While…
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California Lawsuit Against Diebold
A group of Californians has filed a lawsuit in state court against voting machine vendor Diebold, in advance of the March 2 primary election. The complaint asks the court to order Diebold to do three main things: (1) to refrain from further violations of state election laws and regulations, such as installing uncertified software for…
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Comment Spam
I enabled user comments on this site several months ago, and on the whole I’ve been quite happy with the results. But I’ve had an increasing problem with comment spam, comments submitted to advertise products unrelated to my original postings. Many of these spam comments seem to be trying to leech off of my good…