A Peculiar Blog

There’s a form of “spring cleaning” that are actually a good idea to do on a monthly basis if you can. Of course, there’s always stuff that gets in the way of doing things like this so it ends up being an annual or semi-annual event.
Cleaning out the computer case. This applies especially [...]

There’s a story at the University of Texas that I think needs to get all the attention possible. Scientists there have created a new cyanobacteria (also known as blue-green algae), by adding cellulose making genes from another cellulose making bacterium. The resulting critter is apparently very good at taking in sunlight for an [...]

Remember the big flap that’s been made about the National ID card that the government has been trying to foist off on us, requiring states to become “Real ID compliant”? This is the same “Real ID” that several states have refused to be part of. Well, if H.R. 5405 passes then it’s [...]

Given the track record of federal agencies going out of their way to gain power they shouldn’t have, this news isn’t exactly a surprise. The Feds have finally managed to pull off something that I know they’ve been wanting to do for a long time. They’re planning to collect DNA samples from everybody [...]

Today’s society is getting more and more subject to every kind of tracking you can imagine, from GPS systems in our phones and cars to satellite maps that can be zoomed close enough to make out your house from orbit. The invasiveness of it all just keeps growing.
One of the next things coming down [...]

We can now raise a cheer for a group of a group of bright people in the Chaos Computer Club of Hamburg, Germany along with colleagues from the University of Virginia have succeeded in cracking the encryption scheme used on the Mifare Classic RFID chip sold by NXP.
It turns out that the proprietary encryption scheme [...]

Not only are they snooping on the browsing habits of customers, it’s going a lot farther than that. First there’s an article on dailymail.co.uk where BT, One of the UK’s largest ISPs, admits to spying on 36,000 customers. The article tells how BT chose 36,000 of it’s users for a trial run in [...]

Japan’s four main Internet provider organizations have gotten together and worked out an arrangement where they’re going to be cutting Internet access to people using the “WinNy” P2P file sharing program.
Their big reason for this is the big battle against piracy. They’re claiming that most of the files being traded by the 1.75 million [...]

I’m thinking that the people running the MPAA need to get their story straight because what they’ve been saying lately sounds like they belong in a drug rehab facility.
Why? Because on the one hand, they’ve been ranting for years now about how online piracy is costing them humongous amounts of money. Yet at the [...]

“Sneaker-net” is a term from back a few years when files would be moved from one computer to another by carrying ‘em around on 5 1/4 inch floppies. Back in those days Internet connections weren’t very common. Nor were local networks. If you were online those days it was by way of [...]