Worth A Glance

Making predictions is hard, especially about the future. In descending order, when predictions come true, it is likely because of: 1) some undisclosed foreknowledge of the event; 2) discernible writings on walls, patterns, trajectories, trends, or nigh inevitabilities; 3) pure random luck; 4) voices, visions, and other sorts of esoteric transmissions. The recent introduction of [...]

Experts have issued a warning of an impending epidemic of swine flu warnings. The number of victims of these thinly disguised, commercially-motivated warnings is expected to exceed the number of victims of the actual swine flu by many orders of magnitude. “Be leery of anyone using the phrase ‘orders of magnitude’ in casual conversation,” cautioned [...]

The first thing that comes to my mind when reading all the “Twitter Terrorists” news headlines this week is that one of the investors in one of the 250 Twitter clones is friends with someone in the US Army’s 304th Military Intelligence Battalion, or at the Federation of American Scientists. Or maybe it was just [...]

The eternal recursive human lament. If you’re a post-adolescent with a functional left-brain, the thought has surely occupied your mind. And it goes through stages, progressing from incompetent ignorance (”I know it all, so don’t you try to teach me anything”), to personal agnosticism (”I know enough to know that there’s a lot I don’t [...]

The word “hacker” is very frequently misused, insomuch as jargon can be misused. But who would dare argue with an RFC? This venerable 15 year old document incontrovertibly defines a hacker as “a person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.  The [...]

Well, this is one way to make IT vendors more accountable for bugs in their products. This is more or less vigilantism, but at least it provides an less injurious alternative to vulnerability-discoverers selling their discoveries on the black-market. I don’t know if this will fly (the word extortion comes to mind) but if does [...]