hiding in plain sight

Tor: An Anonymous Internet Communication System is based upon NRL research, used by the Federal Govt. and hosted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"Individuals use Tor to keep websites from tracking them and their family members, or to connect to news sites, instant messaging services, or the like when these are blocked by their local Internet providers. Tor's hidden services let users publish web sites and other services without needing to reveal the location of the site. Individuals also use Tor for socially sensitive communication: chat rooms and web forums for rape and abuse survivors, or people with illnesses.

Journalists use Tor to communicate more safely with whistleblowers and dissidents. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) use Tor to allow their workers to connect to their home website while they're in a foreign country, without notifying everybody nearby that they're working with that organization.

...

A branch of the U.S. Navy uses Tor for open source intelligence gathering, and one of its teams used Tor while deployed in the Middle East recently. Law enforcement uses Tor for visiting or surveilling web sites without leaving government IP addresses in their web logs, and for security during sting operations."

bruce schneier on sony rootkit

You may or may not have heard of Bruce Schneier, but suffice to say he is a world recognized digital security expert.

Bruce's take: Real Story of the Rogue Rootkit

"What happens when the creators of malware collude with the very companies we hire to protect us from that malware?

We users lose, that's what happens. A dangerous and damaging rootkit gets introduced into the wild, and half a million computers get infected before anyone does anything.

Who are the security companies really working for? It's unlikely that this Sony rootkit is the only example of a media company using this technology. Which security company has engineers looking for the others who might be doing it? And what will they do if they find one? What will they do the next time some multinational company decides that owning your computers is a good idea?

These questions are the real story, and we all deserve answers."

learning with FOSS

What Business Can Learn from Open Source is another one of Paul's essays I find insightful.

My pal Kevin says: "The thing I got from this article (which is pretty obvious, but I don’t always see it happening) is that when people love what they are doing, they work harder and produce better quality things (software). We all "love games", but people have different specialties and areas they love (fanatically) more than others. This is an important consideration when staffing and tasking out an expected AAA quality project…"

oh, the pain (of scheduling)

Joel Spolsky's Painless Software Scheduling

Although he describes this article as "obsolete", I think it was a good article then and it is still a good article now (particularly if you don't use FogBugz)

not quite dishonest

Yeah, I'm on a big Paul Graham kick lately... this one is about the mysterious world of PR called The Submarine.

"PR is not dishonest. Not quite. In fact, the reason the best PR firms are so effective is precisely that they aren't dishonest. They give reporters genuinely valuable information. A good PR firm won't bug reporters just because the client tells them to; they've worked hard to build their credibility with reporters, and they don't want to destroy it by feeding them mere propaganda.

If anyone is dishonest, it's the reporters. The main reason PR firms exist is that reporters are lazy. Or, to put it more nicely, overworked. Really they ought to be out there digging up stories for themselves. But it's so tempting to sit in their offices and let PR firms bring the stories to them. After all, they know good PR firms won't lie to them."

the latest 'new strategy'

Mike Stephens (aka. Bob Cringely) has two new articles on the latest "new company strategy" from Microsoft:

It's Deja Vu All Over Again
"Welcome to 1996 as history repeats itself. What was happening at that time with Microsoft, Sun, and Netscape feels a lot like Microsoft, Sun, and Google today."

Paper War
"Looking deeper, though, we see that the only way Microsoft can achieve its vision is by continuing to own the platform. They want us to be GRATEFUL, in fact, that such an enlightened outfit is running the store. And this will work to an extent, but only to an extent. Then what happens? All hell breaks loose as Microsoft again changes the game."

As always, Mark doesn't disappoint...

what's a 'scotus'?

My nominee for the SCotUS: Ninth Circuit Federal Appeals Court Judge Alex Kozinski. Here's a sample from one of his judgments.

Judges know very well how to read the Constitution broadly when they are sympathetic to the right being asserted. We have held, without much ado, that "speech, or . . . the press" also means the Internet, and that "persons, houses, papers, and effects" also means public telephone booths. When a particular right comports especially well with our notions of good social policy, we build magnificent legal edifices on elliptical constitutional phrases--or even the white spaces between lines of constitutional text. But, as the panel amply demonstrates, when we're none too keen on a particular constitutional guarantee, we can be equally ingenious in burying language that is incontrovertibly there.

It is wrong to use some constitutional provisions as spring-boards for major social change while treating others like senile relatives to be cooped up in a nursing home until they quit annoying us. As guardians of the Constitution, we must be consistent in interpreting its provisions. If we adopt a jurisprudence sympathetic to individual rights, we must give broad compass to all constitutional provisions that protect individuals from tyranny. If we take a more statist approach, we must give all such provisions narrow scope. Expanding some to gargantuan proportions while discarding others like a crumpled gum wrapper is not faithfully applying the Constitution; it's using our power as federal judges to constitutionalize our personal preferences. . . .

All too many of the other great tragedies of history (Stalin's atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few) were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. See Kleinfeld Dissent at 5997-99. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars. My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history.

Thanks to my man, Michael Bane for that quote.

someone who "gets it"

Oleg Volk is a photographer / teacher. His most interesting images are politically charged illustrations of common-sense pro-freedom, pro-civilian firearm ownership messages.

Here are a number of samples which represent my favorites from his publicly available gallery.

He is an active supporter of A Human Right and there are t-shirt, hats, etc. available with some of his images from Liberty Outlet.

Thank you Oleg for making these images publicly available.