Posted on by lhl

Nothing like coming out of work and finding your car with a big frickin’ dent in the door to really cap off the day. I was parked at the inner end of a right turn in the structure. From the looks of the angle and height, it was probably backed into by a moron doing some kind of maneuver in a truck or SUV. No note, of course. This is exactly the kind of thing I don’t need.

results of some jackass running into my car

Posted on by lhl

Y bother: men are doomed after all

“Like the face of the moon, still pitted by all the craters from all the meteors that have ever fallen onto its surface, Y-chromosomes cannot heal their own scars. It is a dying chromosome and one day it will become extinct.”

According to Bryan Sykes’ estimates, males will cease to exist in about 125,000 years. I’m not sure how certain this prediction is (why haven’t other species’ males suffered the same fate?) or how relevant (I suspect either we’ll have hit the singularity or go extinct long before).

Posted on by lhl
  • US notches world’s highest incarceration rate – take that China!
  • US DOJ: Justice system’s impact on crime – inconclusive
  • The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime

    We offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed significantly to recent crime reductions. Crime began to fall roughly 18 years after abortion legalization. The 5 states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines earlier than the rest of the nation, which legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. States with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime reductions in the 1990s. In high abortion states, only arrests of those born after abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states. Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime.

  • find that article on NYC crime
Posted on by lhl

Hey, so if SCO claims the GPL is invalid, by what license are they distributing Samba in their new version of OpenServer?

The SCO Forum crowd applauded when SCO executives announced that an
upcoming version of its OpenServer–code-named Legend–will support the
latest releases of Java; include new hardware support, such as
universal serial bus (USB)
printer drivers; contain expanded security features; and provide better
compatibility with Microsoft Windows through version 3 of Samba,
which is developed by an open-source group. The OpenServer update is
scheduled to debut in the fourth quarter of next year.

Posted on by lhl

I started noticing the worm spoofs this morning around 10AM. Doing some legwork seemed to reveal it as a Sobig variant, and about a half hour later the virus definition popped up in the AV scanner. Around the net, a lot of people are clarifying that this isn’t an “email worm,” but a “Windows worm,” which in some sense is true, however, while the worm only propagates through infected W32 machines, the spoofings/spoofed bounces affect (and highlight the problems) of the entire email system, and highlight the need to some sort of authN/dsig system.

Perhaps signed headers would be a simple way of solving the problem – it’d require some extra key servers, but you could implement this on a per-server basis, or even the user level (mta level would be better, it would save bandwidth and allow realms of trust), and is completely backwards compatible…

(While perhaps resource intensive, it would certainly create a trusted path, and could be done completely voluntarily (ie, deployed when the cost of sifting/sending bad emails outweighs the cost of the decrypting the signatures of each message).

todo: look up proposals for various systems/frameworks that can verify paths, senders, recipients, but still maintain some semblance of privacy or anonymity