Category Archives: Internet

If there were to be a hacker emblem, Eric Raymond, author of How To Become A Hacker, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and the original Jargon File, is surely as good a choice as anyone to pick it.

And if someone were going to pick an emblem, what better than a symbol from the Game of Life. Some might vote for the blinker, the most-seen object in Life, others for the glider gun, block, the beehive, or the integral sign, but the glider is fine.

But really, even keeping in mind the more comlex and nuanced way that Eric Raymond uses “hacker,” as opposed to the USA Today cartoon version— are hackers the sort of group that need a logo? (See the Slashdot thread. I particularly liked the suggestion that hackers are defined by the color of their hat.)

Actually, yes. Hackers require a small but constant supply of new T-shirts. For some it is because the old ones wear out from being worn and laundered day after day. For others it is because the old shirts get too tight round the waist. Still others find that their old T-shirts get up and walk off after months of not being washed.

And this will look nice on a T-shirt.

I had a small cascade of reactions to this (via Eschaton).

First thought: It's disgusting that the White House is trying to relegate its statements about Iraq to the Memory Hole.

Second thought: It's great to live in a free country where this doesn't work.

Third thought: This demonstrates the same level of technical (in)competence we see in so many things this Administration does.

Fourth thought: Maybe it does work more often than not — many people have come to rely on Google. Efforts like this often won't get spotted most of the time.

Fifith set of thoughts: How do we prevent, or at least identify and publicize and warn about, this sort of activity in the future? Will this mean that commercial databases which keep pristine copies of things and promise not to santize still have a place? Can something like archive.org overcome this sort of attack on our online history? Is there anything Congress could or should do about this? (Needen't ask “would”—we know the answer to that.)

Update: Sixth thought: Well, they just made it much less accessible (although people who rely on google might get the idea the statements didn't exist), as far as we know they didn't actually delete them. It could be worse. But it's also more deniable.

Seventh thought: If I ran Google, would I now instruct my spiders to ignore the robots.txt file at whitehouse.gov?

I have just discovered 'ask Yahoo'—mostly answers to questions I never cared to ask, but with a sense of humor. Some questions, though, I really was curious about the answers:

• Does hot water really freeze faster than cold water? (answer: yes, sometimes, which I find really odd)
• How many vacation days has George W. Bush taken to date as president? How does that compare with Clinton? (what you'd expect)
• Why are legal pads yellow (because they've been yellow since 1888)
• Did Jessica Lynch receive the Bronze Star? Why? (Nobody knows why)
• Why do people hang pairs of shoes from power lines? (This one is almost as mysterious)

Here's a particularly nice, illustrated, explanation of how a typical identity theft scam works. It starts with a fairly convincing looking email “from” e-bay, that directs you to a website that looks legit…but isn't. It harvests your data, and your life is never the same again.

I'm adding disLEXia: cybercrime/-security sightings to my monitoring list.

All hail the Public Library of Science Biology the free, elitist (in the nicest possible way), peer-reviewed, open-access journal whose inaugural issue appears today. This is the future for journal publishing, especially as even libraries are being priced out of the market for journals, especially scientific ones. All materials in this web-published attack on high-priced dead tree scientific publishing will be subject to the PLoS Open-Access License which happens to be identical to the Creative Commons Attribution License