Out of the corner of my eye

“Mitnick, the Mumia Abu-Jamal of the hacker world who inspired a “Free Kevin” movement, was imprisoned for four and a half years, beginning in February 1995, before he was finally sentenced to 46 months in 1999, with some credit for time already served. Part of that time he was held in solitary confinement and without […]

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The Guardian goes back to interview visionary architect Paolo Soleri about Arconsanti, the first arcology:
“This is Arcosanti, 70 miles from Phoenix, Arizona. It’s a curious taste of what an environmentally friendly US town could look like, but probably never will. It was designed by Paolo Soleri, an Italian-born architect, who originally came to Arizona to […]

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23 year old woman: police raided her house and found 1 bag of pot and 6 pills of ecstasy. They said face 3 years in jail, or become an armed informant for the police, and meet drug barons to buy a load of coke and thousands of pills for thousands of dollars. She’s now dead.
Prohibition. […]

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It’s interesting looking at the contrast between the official media line on the South Ossetian conflict and what people on the ground over there (and elsewhere throughout the world) are saying. Some news headlines:
“Russia recognises Georgian Rebels”(rebels: never mind that South Ossetia has been de facto independent for 16 years)
“Russians losing propaganda war”
“Russia condemned for […]

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“A tool that automatically steals IDs of non-encrypted sessions and breaks into Google Mail accounts has been presented at the Defcon hackers’ conference in Las Vegas. Last week, Google introduced a new feature in Gmail that allows users to permanently switch on SSL and use it for every action involving Gmail, not just authentication. Users […]

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If you open a port in the server 2003 firewall, be prepared for some things to silently fail, such as database replication: apparently a weird ‘reset’ is sent to everything that’s connected, but it doesn’t seem to work properly so some apps think their TCP connections are still established (such as MySQL). This can then […]

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Missed this one when it came out, but here’s an excerpt:
“The opinion was written by John C. Yoo of the Office of Legal Counsel, the executive branch’s highest authority on the interpretation of the law. It told the Pentagon’s senior leadership that inflicting pain would not be considered torture unless it caused “death, organ […]

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At JFK Airport, Denying Basic Rights is Just Another Day At the Office
Deputy Threatened to Arrest 12-year-old Daughter for “Unlawful Photography”
The “Suicide” of US Army Private LaVena Lynn Johnson - “According to the U.S. Department of Defense, Private LaVena Lynn Johnson killed herself on July 19, 2005, eight days before her twentieth birthday. Exactly how […]

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I’ve started a new blog about Microsoft Silverlight’s Deep Zoom technology, mainly out of personal interest. I plan to follow the release of new websites that make use of the technology, with the hope that we’ll see some nice innovative deployments. The Hard Rock Cafe’s Memorabilia is the first one I look at, as it […]

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