Sean’s Mental Walkabout

Mythbusters RFID hacking episode canned by credit card company lawyers - Engadget
Remember, you are only allowed to be scared into thinking security works. You are not allowed to question new security techniques and show that they are flawed.

jwz - Arctic ice cap is an island for the first time in 125,000 years
Remember, there is no such thing as global warming, and polar bears don’t need our protection, as their entire continent goes liquid and the north east passage starts taking shipping loads this year.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association - MHAA
Too bad they only have a yahoo calendar and I can’t add it to thunderbird

Schneier on Security: Diebold Finally Admits its Voting Machines Drop Votes
“vote fraud, what vote fraud? oh, that vote fraud, yeh sorry about that”. I really wished this had gotten more main stream media attention in the past.

Balance Through Extremism » Redhat perl. What a tragedy.
An example of why not communicating with upstream is an issue. Redhat always sort of shunned perl, which is one of the reasons I was on Mandriva for a while (as they actually bothered to package a lot of perl stuff), so it doesn’t surprise me that they made this sort of bad call.

Popularity: 1% [?]

The Font Sizes of the Planets | Orbiting Frog
Very nifty, might have to buy one of these shirts

Schneier on Security: The DNS Vulnerability
If you only read one article on the DNS issue, this is probably the one to read.

Patent Office finds voice, calls for software patent sanity
thank god this pendulum is finally swinging back in this direction.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Schneier on Security: Homeland Security Cost-Benefit Analysis
queued for weekend reading

Opensim Users
OpenSim Users social network started on Ning. Very cool.

Popularity: 1% [?]

News: GoDaddy allows executives to bid against own customers in auctions
I always thought godaddy seemed a bit sketchy, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Glad I’m not a customer of theirs.

OAuth Core 1.0
Does this fully replace openid? I know google is on this bandwagon, as are, it seems, a lot of new web 2.0 companies.

Popularity: 22% [?]