If you too are tired of seeing blue leds everywhere. read this article (courtesy of Wired) and know you’re not alone:
A rare sight only five years ago, blue LEDs now seem to be everywhere: on laptops, DVD players, air ionizers and even toothbrushes. And they have some consumers seeing red.
Want to annoy those emacs-using colleagues? Buy this vi reference mug! Or, if your preference is rather the opposite, there is the emacs reference mug, of course.
Bruce Schneier comments on a recent court ruling:
An appeals court in Minnesota has ruled that the presence of encryption software on a computer may be viewed as evidence of criminal intent.
I am speechless.
That was roughly the way I felt when I read that, too. What I found much more interesting was this quote from the referenced CNET article:
Randall favorably cited testimony given by retired police officer Brooke Schaub, who prepared a computer forensics report–called an EnCase Report–for the prosecution. Schaub testified that PGP “can basically encrypt any file” and “other than the National Security Agency,” nobody could break it.
Really now, does the NSA have knowledge that other crypto-experts don’t? I hope we can discard this as a simplification of facts by the retired police officer here and assume that it was merely an indication of the agency having a bit more computing power available than the average person.
And the Belgians are living up to their reputation (as it’s known in the Netherlands, at least). When I heard about this plan on the radio I couldn’t help but wondering if it was someone’s idea of a horrible joke:
A new Belgian electronic ID card contains typos introduced purposely to confound potential fraudsters, Luc Vanneste, General Director Population and Institutions of the Belgian Home Office, proudly announced this week.
But they appear to be quite serious about it.
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