Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist

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29 November 2002
Filed under:Uncategorized at1:11 pm

Buy Nothing Day

18 November 2002

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It’s called Kikkoman, so some mad Japanese person decided to make a Flash animation about a superhero of the same name.

… and now here is an English translation… kind of.

6 September 2002
Filed under:Uncategorized at8:41 am

I suggested earlier that my use of Mozilla may have made my PC unstable – I am now reasonably confident that my switch to a Radeon 8500 graphics card is probably largely if not solely to blame.

1 September 2002
Filed under:Uncategorized at12:36 am

BBC News has published a revealing photo essay by Jeroen Bouman, who, “gets a rare glimpse inside the illegal Chinese workshops where young teenagers work long hours amid noxious fumes, recycling computers from the US and Europe. The industry has turned four villages in Guiyu, Guangdong province, into toxic waste tips.”

16 August 2002
Filed under:Uncategorized at12:00 am

Are you a telecomms person? Perhaps laid off in one of the last few rounds of “industry rationalisation”? Why not put your skills to good use in the third world?sexy scenes movieshemale moviesuck dick movieteen movies nudeteenage mutant turtles ninja moviesex movies toonmovies upskirt panties andvintage movies sexhome voyeur moviesfucking movies weddingmovies teen boygirl teen movietgp movies teenmasturbating movies teensstars female movie thaimovie soundtrack titanicboys park trailer moviemovie voyeur the Map

5 August 2002
Filed under:Uncategorized at7:39 pm

An intriguing proposal – a whacky outgrowth of war chalking. Why not create your own bar code containing a URL and stick it as a comment on some location. Then people who happen to be walking by and carrying both a laptop and a bar code scanner can visit your site and read what you have to say.

Of course you could just write the URL itself, but presumably the bar code gives you the chance to encode more information and besides using a bar code is much more appealing to a geek…

4 August 2002
Filed under:Uncategorized at9:07 pm

The Washingon Post reports on how students and others looking for information over-rely on the Internet and trust it too much. A lot of this has been remarked on before, of course. I wrote about this myself back in 1996.

The examples that the writer turns up, though, are interesting. Like this distressing tale:

Superficial searching habits can have tragic consequences, illustrated last year at Johns Hopkins University. A physician-researcher performed a test of lung function on a healthy 24-year-old woman, administering a large dose of a particular chemical. The woman then died of lung and kidney failure. The doctor had searched online for information about the drug but had failed to turn up any literature warning of its dangers — information that medical librarians later did find online after the woman died.

11 July 2002
Filed under:Uncategorized at2:25 pm

You wouldn’t think a 5 minute animated film called “Headless” by Wojtek Wawszczyk would turn out to be, in the end, uplifting, but it is. It’s not a masterpiece but it’s quite touching…

31 May 2002
Filed under:Uncategorized at11:41 pm

Even if you use cryptography to secure your email (and almost nobody does anyway) you still may not be safe, as Lenny Foner pointed out on a mailing list recently:

Someone was saying that the forged email generated by that pesky Klez virus would encourage people to use digitally signed email (so you should be able to verify that the sender is really that email address instead of a forged email address). He responded:

Signed on the Windows box? Since these things are running on OS’s
that don’t have a security perimeter (otherwise, these worms wouldn’t
be running there in the first place, right?), then:
(a) Son of Klez grabs your passphrase, and then
(b) Forges -signed- mail from you

What better way to completely invalidate the whole -concept- of
trusting cryptographically-signed mail? The mere existence of
anything like this would certainly give lots of plausible deniability
to anyone trying to prove in court that they did -not- sign a message,
make some transaction, etc. In court now, a handwritten signature
doesn’t prove much, since forgers exist—it’s the testimony by the
signer or the witness that the signer signed something, or the
circumstances around it that lead to a preponderance of evidence one
way or the other (I’m assuming a civil proceeding here). But with
Son of Klez, there doesn’t even have to be a human forger in the loop.

Such things are already easy to write, of course. But someone arguing
that they didn’t sign something might have an uphill battle convincing
a jury that some evildoer had compromised their machine. If they
could point to a known worm that did this and had compromised a
million machines, they wouldn’t have to make the case that they were
some special target—merely that they ran with the herd and used the
same operating system everyone else did.

This is why, about a decade ago, I was arguing that the -right- way to
use things like PGP was in a special-purpose box that -only- ran PGP,
had a built-in keyboard and screen, and only talked to the rest of the
world via a serial connection that -only- passed cleartext and signed
or encrypted stuff. The idea was that you write the mail anywhere
(on the box or not), have -its screen- show you the contents, then
sign/encrypt there, in the secure environment, where people can’t
easily infect your machine with a keyboard sniffer, or have it change
what you -thought- you were signing just before it gets signed, etc.
Pilots didn’t (quite) exist, and are only now getting fast enough not
to be painful for certain private-key operations, so I didn’t pursue
it at the time. But it was obvious that running PGP on a general-purpose
machine was sheer folly, especially if it ran a popular and insecure OS.
(I’ve omitted many technical details here; for example, you wouldn’t
-really- want to run this on a Pilot unless you broke its ability to
sync, since every sync is a way to compromise the code it’s running.)

P.S. I can’t wait for the stealthy worm that grabs credit card
numbers which are entered in forms. Or makes phantom purchases
on Amazon, or phantom bids on eBay, or… All of these would be
tremendously disruptive, yet awfully easy to write…

29 May 2002
Filed under:Uncategorized at6:24 pm

It may be true that all-digital film-making and projection can produce a better image – free of wear and tear – and could make distribution more efficient – no more reel shortages etc – but as Alex Cox, a British independent director points out there are some risks involved for the public.

1) “If cinema owners do get rid of 35mm, what becomes of all the 35mm prints? And what happens to the work of third-world, or independent, filmmakers who prefer film on economic or aesthetic grounds?”

2) Digital projection may end up giving the studios/distributors more control over cinemas. If you have a big screen and a small screen you can now switch a dog of a film into the small screen. In future the studio’s software may not allow you to. Similarly software-based “film” may be easier for studios to forcibly “regionalise” as they have done with DVDs.

Certainly something to think about (though I admit having seen the Attack of the Clones with digital projection I was impressed by the quality).in show breasts moviesebony girls free movies clipsfree analingus moviesfree ass licking moviesporn ebony movies freebareback movies free gayhairy free pussy moviesmovies sex free hentaiincest movie freeporn japanese free movies

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