Reason #2781 to avoid Internet Explorer

The researchers tracked three browsers (MSIE, Firefox, Opera) in 2004 and counted which days they were "known unsafe." Their definition of "known unsafe": a remotely exploitable security vulnerability had been publicly announced and no patch was yet available.MSIE was 98% unsafe. There were only 7 days in 2004 without an unpatched publicly disclosed security hole.Firefox was 15% unsafe. There were 56 days with an unpatched publicly disclosed security hole. 30 of those days were a Mac hole that only affected Mac users. Windows Firefox was 7% unsafe.Opera was 17% unsafe: 65 days. That number is accidentally a little better than it should be, as two of the upatched periods happened to overlap.This underestimates the risk, because it doesn't count vulnerabilities known to the bad guys but not publicly disclosed (and it's foolish to think that such things don't exist). So the "98% unsafe" figure for MSIE is generous, and the situation might be even worse.

Schneier on Security: Internet Explorer Sucks

Wow. How can people keep believing Microsoft is a reasonable software provider?

I'm so tired....

I just got back from business meetings in Virginia. I picked up 15 caches on the drives down and back, and we accomplished a huge amount, but I'm really worn out (please nobody point out that I'm up blogging at two in the morning). I can't believe it's almost Christmas. It seems like just yesterday that I was watching the leaves turn. Maybe I'll get some good photography done in West Virginia....

Anyway, Happy Holidays to all!

Cool Hunting

Cool may be our country's most precious natural resource: an invisible, impalpable substance that can make a particular brand of an otherwise interchangeable product—a sneaker, a pair of jeans, an action movie—fantastically valuable. And cool can be used to predict the future.

TIME Magazine: What's Next?

You know it. We're not talking about what everyone's doing. By the time everybody at the local high school thinks something's cool, it's behind the curve. You can get it at the mall, and odds are you found out about it from your friends (or - *gasp* - your kids). This is about spotting those standouts, the few people who do new things, whether it's cool or not, because that's who they are. Because what they're doing will be cool next year....

This morning's cache

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Originally uploaded by hukuzatuna.

Temp 17, wind chill 5. A beautiful, crisp, clear, winter dawn in Battery Park, New Castle, Delaware. This kind of beauty makes the whole day better.

The Death of an American City

If the rest of the nation has decided it is too expensive to give the people of New Orleans a chance at renewal, we have to tell them so. We must tell them we spent our rainy-day fund on a costly stalemate in Iraq, that we gave it away in tax cuts for wealthy families and shareholders. We must tell them America is too broke and too weak to rebuild one of its great cities.Our nation would then look like a feeble giant indeed. But whether we admit it or not, this is our choice to make. We decide whether New Orleans lives or dies.

Death of an American City - New York Times

Go read this (link above). I couldn't add anything. I'm going to go be embarassed to be an American now....

Ad Memes

William Gibson, in his most excellent book "Pattern Recognition," has as a sub-theme attractive young women who are hired to go out to clubs with friends, strike up conversations with gentlemen (who might be inclined to chat with attractive young women), during which the women mention - just mention - some cool new product. Odds are good that these gents might then go try the product, and mention it to their friends, who, in turn....

You get the idea.

This is a variation of the concept of memes - memory structures or ideas that persist in a society independent of the individuals who carry them. In one day, I've now found two sorta kinda examples of this - the 'Bucks on the car, and the Sony graffiti - that make me wonder how many others are out there....

Sony is Evil

Ok, so Loretta got me some Sony noise-cancelling earbuds (NDR MC11A) and these things absolutely rock. They're the most comfortable headphones I've ever worn. So why is Sony evil? Two reasons. First, they released Digital Rights Management (DRM) software on their music CDs that installed rootkits on the listener's computer, potentially giving access to any hacker that wants to own your box. Oh, and removing it will cripple Windows. Second, they have an ad campaign that looks like graffiti - images of people with Personal Sony Playstations (PSP) stenciled with spraypaint on alley walls and underpasses. This isn't real graffiti - it's just an ad campaign, aimed at sk8rs and other marginalized youth. Quite insulting. So don't buy Sony stuff. Just, well, these earbuds, if you want them.

Donate your computer to science

Oh yeah. Here's a Grid computing project I can sink my teeth into. Kip Thorne, a physicist at CalTech, came up with a machine that detects gravity waves. A gravity wave is a disturbance in the space-time continuum caused by large gravitational events. One such persistent gravitational distrubance is an asymmetrical "neutron star" (whether or not it's really a neutron star, or a quark star, or...). As these bad boys rotate (bad boys, in that they're the mass of the sun shoved down into an object the size of a medium city - 10 or 11 km) they should radiate gravity waves. The objects are called GWENS - Gravity Wave Emitting Neturon Stars. The detectors use very long tunnels - 4 km - at right angles and finely-tuned lasers to detect gravity waves. These detectors, one in Washington and one in Louisiana, are called LIGO, for laser interferometer gravitywave observatory.

Unfortunately, they generate huge amounts of data. Sifting through that data takes a lot of time. So, they've created a grid computing project called Einstein@home to search for candidate objects. You can join up, and use the spare compute cycles on your computers, to help process these data. Go off to the Einstein@home home page, right now, and read up on it.

Office Chair round... er, sit...., um. Oh hell. Summary.

Modern office chairs have grown far too complicated. Their underbellies have sprouted gnarly forests of knobs and levers. Their instruction manuals have thickened into tomes. On occasion, new chairs are equipped with explanatory CD-ROMs. This is absurd: Since when have we needed an animated schematic to teach us how to sit on our keisters?

Sit Happens - A search for the best desk chair. By Seth Stevenson

I like the Aeron. I guess I'm just an out-of-date fuddy-duddy. Check the link for other offerings.

Geocaching at the C&D Canal

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Originally uploaded by hukuzatuna.

Early Sunday morning at the canal, geocaching in the cold!

Free Starbuck's Stuff

This morning i drove up to a guy in a car at a stoplight, to tell him that he forgot his coffee cup on the roof of his car. it had been sitting there unwaivered as we traveled down market street together in the morning traffic. the guy gently cut me off as i started to speak, retorting "happy holidays from starbucks!" and proceeded to hand me a $5 gift card.

Life Without Buildings: A Starbucks Car(d)

So if you see someone driving around with a 'Bucks cup on top, stop him. Even better if you don't like 'Bucks, 'cause then you can send the card to me.... :-)