Category Archives: personal

“Don’t Worry. Your Data is Safe.”

I took my laptop to the Apple Store to get it repaired. (The keyboard doesn’t work.) After explaining to the guy at the store, he starts taking down my contact info. When he’s done, he says. “And what’s your username and password? Don’t worry. Your data is safe.”

Aghast, I say “But my data is NOT safe if I give you my password!*”

“Uhh….”

“Can’t you just boot off an external drive or something?”

“Well, umm… yeah, but this is how that prefer we do it.”

Sure enough, the Apple form has blanks for username and password.

In the end, I gave them Ming’s password, because really it didn’t matter. I was giving a perfect stranger an unencrypted drive. It does make me think though. After decades of telling users not to share they’re passwords. Not to give them to people saying they’re from IT. Not to trust anyone with your password, Apple is undoing this as part of standard operating procedure. Or maybe I’m just old, and I’m supposed to think of Apple as a parent.†

* Yes, I recognized the naivete of believing a simple password provided adequate security in this situation.

†My parents never read my stuff. I see no reason to read my child’s.

Cloud Mirror

Daniel Burnham, Anuj Patel, and Sam Bell created for their embedded systems class at Georgia Tech a bathroom mirror / information display. Dubbed Cloud Mirror, it is essentially a partially silvered mirror placed in front of an LCD television, hooked up to a WinCE box with some Phidget sensors.

The User controls the display by waving his/her hand across eight infrared sensors (four across the top, and four down the side). Swiping across the top. the display is toggled on and off, while various modes (weather, news, traffic, and calendar) are controlled through the sensors on the right side. (Video after the jump.) Obviously, it is prototype level technology, but is a bit interesting. Basically, they were thinking about how to integrate typical morning information gathering into daily grooming rituals.

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1% Want Landmark for Garage

Not content with having an exception to land their party plane at Moffett Field, Google’s triumvirate want a historic landmark for their eight private jets. That’s right. The triumvirate says they’ll pay for restoration, if they get to park their planes.

While I support keeping Hanger One, it just feels to essentially like an an attempt by the ultra rich to indulge their whims on public property. If it was a straight up philanthropic gesture that’s one thing, but this is reeks of a crass move. They (and numerous other Silicon Valley multi-millionares) have wanted to use the NASA field as their own private airfield, and now it looks like they’ve sensed the opportunity to get it. The most depressing part of this whole thing is that this could be the only way to keep the landmark.

Pharama Payola

Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma has REAL compensated doctors hawking Pradaxa? Why should I trust those doctors’ judgments if they suggest Pradaxa to me?

Doctors are already influenced by marketing. Boxes of free pens are important, discounted drugs are important, and the American Pediatric Society has expressed concern about payola.

Is this better? Well at least these doctors’ conflict of interest is exceedingly transparent. If I was the patient of any of these doctors:

  • Dr. David Montgomery of Chicago
  • Dr. Minerva Santo-Tomas of Miami
  • Dr. Dennis Finkelstein of New York

I’d change doctors. I can’t trust that their judgements about treatments are unbiased.

“No Man. No Problem.”

Fourth in the series of indeterminate length, Recolonizing Detroit

The root cause of the problems Paul Romer encountered in Madagascar was the local population. So how about founding these cities not just in unpopulated areas, but in areas people do not identify with as well? Could this be effective? From the European perspective, that’s what the era of colonization was, but most of us have a more expansive view of ownership now. Today, the only land that doesn’t have recognized claims on is Antarctica (Actually, it’s a bit more complicated on that, but more on that later.), but that location is not likely to attract many people to it. What if instead of land, these cities were built in international waters, or somewhere else unclaimed by any country? What then?

That’s right, we’re talking about micronations.
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The Photos of Anders Behring Breivik

This post is not about what Anders Behring Breivik (allegedly) did. Instead it’s about the photos.

Everywhere you look, you see professional portraits of the suspect. Where did these images come from? Obviously, they came from the Anders Breivik, but where did the media get them? What was the context that they were taken in?

I found the proximal answer to where the media got them. Most photos of the man on CNN are attributed to Getty Images, but where did Getty get them? I didn’t know, until I read the attribution on the above picture from CNN. “Facebook via Getty Images.” [Original Link]

Wait. “Facebook via Getty Images?” What does that mean? How does Getty get the attribution? Do they own the right to license the images to news agencies or what? Did Facebook just invoke their right to sub-license (See section 2.1 of Facebook’s Terms and Conditions) Anders Behring Breivik’s photos to Getty for (blood) money?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Update: Mon Jul 25 01:28:50 PDT 2011
Let me be clear. It’s not not just Facebook and Getty. There’s this photo that carries a Reuter’s copyright notice no less. This photo appears again, this time with “AP Photo / Twitter” attribution. And again, but with Getty. Either Getty, AP, and Reuters are engaging in widespread unauthorized redistribution of copyrighted materials for commercial gain, someone (meaning Facebook and possibly Twitter) has sublicensed the photos, or the AP, Reuters, and Getty are making a very dubious fair use claim over distributing the photos.
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It’s Over

Atlantis just landed at KSC, its permanent home. What can I say? The era is now over. The one honest spaceship is no more. I’m a pretty much in agreement with Miles O’Brien’s take. The space shuttle just never quite lived up to its potential. As O’Brien points out, the shuttle was designed with the one of its main ideas as building a space station, which it finally did some 17 years after its first launch.

I was looking at the list of canceled missions, and while most were simply got converted into unmanned launches, one did stick out to me: STS-144. The retrieval of the Hubble Space Telescope for display in the Smithsonian. Yes, it would have been a mawkish mission, but I still have loved to of had that happen.

So long shuttle.

Previously.

Taking a Byte Out of Bandwidth Costs

Estimated Number of Internet Users 1.971E+11

Average Number of Objects on a Webpage 85
Average of HTTP Requests Made
When Loading a Webpage		 86
Average Number of Websites Visited
Per User Per Day		 94
Total Number of HTTP Requests Each Day 1.59336E+13
Estimated Cost to Transmit 1 Gigabyte $ 0.03
 
Total Dollars Phillip Hallam-Baker has
Personally Saved the World Each Day 		$ 445.18