I hate the tv

I missed this story until Mike Feldman brought it up on his annoying show this week. Apparantly Barb “donated” to katrina victims so they could buy Neils software. From Talking Points:

“Ignite!’s has a unique business model, which works like this. Neil goes around the world finding international statesmen, bigwigs and criminals who want to ‘invest’ in Ignite! as a way to curry favor with the brother in the White House.”

Barb Bush continues to please…she even hates the Simpsons! The enemy of my friend is my enemy.

What is going ON in that family? It’s like a competition who in the Bush family can be the biggest scumbag….

So I was browsing around Google Videos and ran into this, which I’m sure is a GEM: A debate between Bill Kristol, a big wig at the Weekly Standard and bigtime Bush, Cheney, and all things R stroker and Joeseph Wilson, the guy who served as an arms inspector, has repeatedly called the administrations bullshit, who’s wife (Valerie Plame) was outed.

Should be a good one. I’d hope it would be springer-esq. “Jerry! Jerry!”

Here you can see a presentation given by Danny O’Brien and Jason Schultz about the EFF.

” Danny O’Brien
Danny O’Brien is the Activism Coordinator for the EFF. His job is to help EFF’s membership in making their voice heard: in government and regulatory circles, in the marketplace, and with the wider public.

Jason Schultz
Jason Schultz is a Staff Attorney specializing in intellectual property and reverse engineering. He currently leads EFF’s Patent Busting Project. Prior to joining EFF, Schultz worked at the law firm of Fish & Richardson P.C., where he spent most of his time invalidating software patents and defending open source developers in law suits. Jason maintains a personal blog at lawgeek.net.”

What happens when code dorks meet robots? Well they naturally enslave them to be commanded them with their voice.

See video here

Congratulations on SourceForge Project of the Month May 2005.

Seen here at TSG, this is proof positive that Cheney hates nature.

He gets in a real tiff if he has to wait for his coffee to brew or his lights to be switched on.  Oh and the TVs should be pre-tuned to Faux News.

I admit that it took me a while to get around to using RSS. I never saw the point until I tried it, at which point I realized it’s purpose: It provides a uniform interface for many heterogenious websites. I don’t have to browse the front page of all sorts of sites, with RSS I can just see the headlines (and my choice of either the full article or summary) and tell them to open in my browser.

I’ve been using Thunderbird to check my multiple mail accounts for years and I’m very happy with it. I keep most of my mail archived so its a slightly big task. I saw that it handled RSS accounts and I used it as my first real feed reader.

Unfortunately the way I had it configured it slowed my thunderbird down tremendously, and I chose to drop it. My thunderbird on XP memory usage dropped from ~110 MB to ~50. Now I’m giving FeedReader and RSS Bandit a try. They are also open-source projects. I’ll try to post back with my opinions on it after a decent trial period.
I guess I just want my RSS seperate from my mail for speed. The two tasks are too seperate and in my opinion thunderbird shouldn’t do all of them. I’d like to see mozilla spin off a seperate RSS reader application with the some of the same features as thunderbird.

In a related story, Ion Sancho, the Florida Elections Supervisor who witnesssed the Harri Hurtsi Hack has been threatened with a lawsuit for not meeting the county deadline for getting new voting machines.

“Florida’s secretary of state’s office disparaged Sancho’s finding, demonstrating considerably more interest in propping up vendors than protecting elections.”

I guess no good deed goes unpunished.

UPDATE: Click here to write the state officials in Florida to protest the treatment of Ion Sancho.

Susan Pynchon, a member of Florida Coalition for Fair Elections, has a very powerful piece on CounterPunch.org, where she describes witnessing the Harri Hursti Hack, when he proved to Ion Sancho (The Leon County Supervisor of Elections) that the Diebold machines in use could be hacked.
A snippet:

“It was a powerful moment and, I will admit, it had the unexpected result for me personally of causing me to break down and cry. Why did I cry? It was the last thing I thought I would do, but it happened for so many reasons. I cried because it was so clear that Diebold had been lying. I cried because there was proof, before my very eyes, that these machines were every bit as bad as we all had feared. I cried because we have been so unjustly attacked as “conspiracy theorists” and “technophobes” when Diebold knew full well that its voting system could alter election results. More than that, that Diebold planned to have a voting system that could alter results. And I cried because it suddenly hit me, like a Mack truck, that this was proof positive that our democracy is and has been, as we have all feared, truly at the mercy of unscrupulous vendors who are producing electronic voting machines that can change election results without detection.”

The piece goes through the whole process in detail. The voting system must be open sourced and verified by the security community before it can be used. It is also probable that a paper ballot will always be needed as a check mechanism.

According to this and this, pretty soon developers with the need for hardcore specialized processing power will be able to get a Xilinx Virtex FPGA as a co-processor on an AMD Opteron system. This may be an interesting option for infrastructure folks as it would allow for reconfigurability at the same time as non-laughable throughput.

Broadbandreports / dslreports has a nice utility for scanning your IP address to check for open ports on your computer. Open TCP or UDP ports can be used by an evildoer to crash your machine, propagate a virus, guess your password and log in, etc.

A basic firewall, such as the ones built into practically all routers and OSes today, will fix most of these problems. This test is good to run if you don’t know much about networking or if you, like me, have to do a lot of configuration edits on the router and are not sure if the thing is still secure or not.