I love it! GOP freshmen whining that they are playing politics...

and they want Obama and the Dems to stop doing the same!

This is the problem that I see with American politics: the two parties want to advance their agenda at the cost of all else, regardless of what is good or best for the country. Two parties CANNOT represent the full spectrum of political philosophy, and the rate at which lies spread from both parties throughout the media just makes me a sad panda.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2011/05/11/136207994/gop-freshmen-admit-to-playing-politics-ask-obama-to-stop-doing-same

The EFF is advocating leaving your wireless routers open

It's an interesting proposition, and it's not using current router tech. Basically, each person who connects to a router would be separately encrypted, presumably through a shared key. The problem is that once someone can connect to a router it isn't too difficult to listen in to other people's traffic. If each connection is separately encrypted, you pretty much eliminate that possibility.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/04/open-wireless-movement (their site kinda sucks, on my browser I have to scroll down quite a bit to get to the text)

http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/11/04/28/150241/EFF-Advocates-Leaving-Wireless-Routers-Open


At the same time, you have the issue that people are getting raided by ATF/DHS/MOUSE at 3am, getting guns pointed at their head, having people with guns shout at them that they're child molesters, and they didn't do anything: people used their open connection to download porn, and in one case, send death threats to the vice president. I'm not entirely clear on how full encryption will prevent this. But for the time being, I'm keeping my router encrypted, no broadcast SSID, and MAC filtering. It's not totally hack-proof, but it's as close as I can easily get. I'd like to have an open router, but if I do, it's going to have all connections logged.

China's cyber offense is apparently pretty pitiful

A researcher has been consistently cruising through Chinese government web sites with little difficulty. So does this mean their bark is worse than their bite, or everyone's cyber defense sucks?

http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/glass-dragon-chinas-cyber-offense-obscures-woeful-defense-042711

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/04/27/1849233/Does-Chinas-Cyber-Offense-Obscure-Woeful-Defense

A Pulitzer awarded for online journalism!

This is pretty cool, two reporters for Pro Publica won the award for a series reporting on the Wall Street money machine! I haven't read the entire series yet, but I'm looking forward to it.

http://www.propublica.org/podcast/item/podcast-pulitzer-special-jake-bernstein-and-jesse-eisinger/

http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/02/2349248/First-Ever-Pulitzer-For-Non-Print-Series

Fibromyalgia sucks

Today, May 12, is Fibromyalgia Awareness Day. I had heard of fibromyalgia over the years, but I never knew what it was, that is, until a friend of mine was diagnosed with it. I've known Michelle for probably more than 15 years now, and it forced her into medical retirement and Social Security Disability (SSDI) before she turned 40. She had completed her BA and was working on a CPA and MBA, now that probably will never happen.

Fibromyalgia is classed as a rheumatoid disease, same class as arthritis, and it is rather difficult to diagnose because the symptoms are highly variable. The main symptoms seem to be interference with sleep, basically it's almost impossible for you to get a good night's sleep, sometimes even with sleeping pills, and hyper-sensitive pain clusters. There is no blood test for it, there is no solid diagnostic test that says “you have fibro!”. The basic test is for a rheumatologist to poke your body in 18 points, and if 11 or more are painful, you probably have fibromyalgia.

And we're not talking pushing as hard as you can: just a light touch at some of these points can cause excruciating pain in the patient.

We're talking about sometimes doubling over with pain.
( Read more... )

SCO changes its name to TSG

Apparently TSG stands for The SCO Group. They're still in bankruptcy, I have no idea what they hope to accomplish as any journalist who writes about them will either directly call them SCO, or will write "TSG, formerly known as SCO".

Let obfuscation abound!

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/SCO-becomes-TSG-in-legal-name-shift-1242151.html

Microsoft buys Skype, $8.5 billion

A week ago I posted that Facebook and Google were jockeying to buy Skype. Looks like Redmond ended up being the big bid.

I don't like this. I can't see this boding well for people on non-MS OS platforms.

“Microsoft’s own software already has considerable overlap with Skype. Windows Live Messenger offers free instant messaging, and voice- and video-chat.“ So the benefit to MS is what? A replacement for Live Messenger? Does LM work on non-MS platforms? Will the replacement?

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/05/microsoft-buys-skype-2/

http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Skype-ing-out-an-open-source-future-1241617.html

http://gigaom.com/2011/05/09/why-microsoft-is-buying-skype-for-8-billion/

http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/10/1244253/Microsoft-Buying-Skype-for-85B