The knife is shipping Monday.

If you’ve been following my posts over the last few months, one of the main themes I’ve been touching on is the concept of giving back. This for me has equated so far to joining the Sierra Club and the EFF, but I intend to do much more than that.

Well, the EFF has a new program available now where professionals can volunteer to help with technical expertise. I think this is an outstanding opportunity for us all to lend a helping hand, and I encourage anyone who believes in what the EFF does to offer their help.

Here’s the link:

cooptechs@eff.org

Eagle’s Realty Mining project logged 350,000 hours of data over nine months about the location, proximity, activity and communication of volunteers, and was quickly able to guess whether two people were friends or just co-workers….

He and his team were able to create detailed views of life at the Media Lab, by observing how late people stayed at the lab, when they called one another and how much sleep students got.

Given enough data, Eagle’s algorithms were able to predict what people — especially professors and Media Lab employees — would do next and be right up to 85 percent of the time.

A tracking apologist:

People should not be too concerned about the data trails left by their phone, according to Chris Hoofnagle, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

“The location data and billing records is protected by statute, and carriers are under a duty of confidentiality to protect it,” Hoofnagle said.

We’re building an infrastructure of surveillance as a side effect of the convenience of carrying our cell phones everywhere.

(Source: Bruce Schneier)

A security researcher at ISS by the name of Michael Lynn has supposedly discovered a major issue with Cisco’s IOS Operating System. He has evidently deemed it such a huge flaw that it could potentially effect the safety of the world’s infrastructure (citing evidence that crackers were already working on exploit code), and he actually ended up quitting ISS while at BlackHat just so he could present the information.

Understandably, Cisco is pissed. They’re considering suing him and already have a court order saying he can’t discuss the issue further. This is bound to go down as one of the more significant cases in the disclosure debate.

So the biggest spammer in Russia has been killed. After much consideration I’ve come to realize that one word embodies the entire story:

Deterrent.

Looks like Phil Zimmerman (the creator of PGP) is tackling the lack of encryption in most VOIP implementations. I think this is a worthy cause, of course, but I can’t help but notice that Skype already has encryption built in to both calls and IM by default (256-bit AES/Rijndael, even).

Here’s what Skype has to say about the encryption used:

“Skype uses AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) – also known as Rijndael – which is also used by U.S. Government organizations to protect sensitive, information. Skype uses 256-bit encryption, which has a total of 1.1 x 1077 possible keys, in order to actively encrypt the data in each Skype call or instant message. Skype uses 1024 bit RSA to negotiate symmetric AES keys. User public keys are certified by the Skype server at login using 1536 or 2048-bit RSA certificates.”

Skype rocks. If you’re not using it, go get yourself a copy.

This I could deal with: (Comcast’s fastest offering in Fremont, Ca.)

Yes — that is over 1MB per second. That’s über-sick, in case you didn’t know. Here’s a small chart:

– A 5MB File — 5 Seconds A 10MB File — 10 Seconds A 120MB File — 2 Minutes A Gig Of Data — 17 Minutes

A Full DVD — One Hour and 20 Minutes

Uh, yeah. Oh, and if you know of anything faster in the area, do let me know. ;)

I just paid $18 for a CD that I know I can rip off of a friend for free. He has the original, store-bought copy sitting there for me to rip at will, but I chose to pay $18 for it instead. The cold, practical side of me is shouting obscenities over this, but I think it’s worth it.

Everyone has moral guidelines for stealing music; some think it’s absolute idiocy to pay for anything available for free. Others think that failing to pay for any content is a horrible crime. Like most, I have a hybrid system that incorporates both schools of thought. In general though, I do believe that acquiring non-free (as in beer) content without paying for it is wrong, and it’s for this reason that I elect to buy things even when I know they’re there for the taking.

I do, however, have rules that modify this general guideline to some degree. Here are a few of them:

• Certain bands, like Phish, for example, have a pretty liberal view on the sharing of their music. So for them I’d be more inclined to rip a few CDs that someone has while making note of the fact that I need to buy some of their stuff and/or go to a concert of theirs. I enjoy this model, but I also see why not everyone shares the approach.
• Techno is a genre that I seem to have little trouble downloading off of P2P networks. I find that the genre is made in large part of hacked up versions of songs, i.e. versions customized by various DJs, so it almost feels like there’s very little “legitimate” IP coming out of the scene. There are exceptions, I’m sure, and one of them — Darude’s Sandstorm — I did in fact purchase.
• Sadly enough, the way a given band interacts with the world also matters. Metallica, for example, is so low in my book that the only reason I’d object to someone stealing their content is because I don’t think it’s worth owning. This, of course, is because of their whole Lars-lead onslaught on their fans. I think their approach was both philosophically unsound as well as patently stupid. It’s not right for me to deem in less wrong to steal from them on account of this, but I do anyway.

So that’s basically it — the gist of my approach is to simply buy music whenever I can. If I do go with the “sample” technique, I do so with the solid intention of going ahead and purchasing said content assuming I like it. Contrary to what the RIAA says, all evidence seems to point to this helping the industry and artists, not hurting it.

The bottom line is that if I know I like something, and I have the money, I’m going to drop the cash on it even if I can get the exact same content for free. I get made fun of for doing it, but I think knowing it’s the right thing to do is worth the ridicule.

A book review on Slashdot had an interesting quote in the context of technical writing today:

“There is a school of thought that says if you cannot explain what you’ve done, then what you did was worthless.”

I don’t think that’s always or absolutely the case, but it definitely has some truth to it. I think being able to articulate concepts both verbally and in written form is highly useful regardless of one’s industry.

It doesn’t matter if it’s banking, law, or IT — if you can impart understanding onto others, you’ll have a massive advantage in the workplace. This ability is something I’ll continue to work to improve.

One of the coolest (yet little-known) features in Firefox is the ability to search virtually any website via your address bar. To do this, simply right-click in the search field of a site you want to search and select, “Add A Keyword For This Search”. Once you’ve done this you’ll be prompted to create a bookmark. Call it $whatever-quicksearch and then give it a keyword.

The keyword is the “key” to the whole thing. It’s the prefix that you’re going to use to search that site from now on from the Firefox address bar. Example: I have a quicksearch for Google and its keyword is ‘g’. This lets me search the entire Google site from Firefox’s address bar, just by using the ‘g’ prefix.

So if I am looking for some GTD information related to osx, I can type:

g gtd osx

…which will yield all the results I would have gotten from the main Google site. The difference is that all I had to do was 1) Command-L (Control-L in Windows and Linux) to take me to the address bar, and 2) type my quicksearch prefix + searchterm.

Now, this wouldn’t be all that cool if it worked only for Google, but it works for just about any site you want to search. Just go to the site, make your bookmark/keyword combo, and start saving massive amounts of search time via the Firefox address bar. Below are a few that I have configured. Enjoy.:

Google g $searchterms

Technorati t $searchterms

Wikipedia w $searchterms

MSN Search m $searchterms

Amazon a $searchterms

Gentoo Forums gf $searchterms

Delicious Tags dt $searchterms