Bruce Schneier has an interesting article on wired.com on the parallels between the recent Colombian hostage rescue and man-in-the-middle attacks.

My existence is now validated, as 'pescatarian' and 'fanboy' have been added to Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.

Doppler shift at the wind farm.

xkcd.com

It seems that everywhere I look on the tubes today, I see a link to this NY Times article about a "boot camp" for internet-addicted kids in South Korea. Is it somehow meta to continue this internet meme on internet addiction? Or ironic? Meta-ironic?

It being football season and all, I tend to read a lot sports websites. Occasionally I'll venture into the comments section or forums of these sites. That's usually a mistake. In addition to the omnipresent trolls and the poor schmucks who think they can actually win an internet argument with those fuckers (don't feed the trolls, you morons!), I'm driven mad by the constant homonym/heterograph errors. I'd probably pull my hair out if I could grab a handful of it.

Anyway, I wondered if there was a way I could fit in if I ever wanted to participate in these discussions. Well, there is!

Seagate Technology has agreed to reimburse potentially millions of customers and pay up to $1.79 million in plaintiff's attorney fees to settle a lawsuit accusing the world's largest maker of hard drives of overstating the data-storage capacity of those devices, court records show.
...
The plaintiffs, suing on behalf of all affected Seagate customers, allege that Seagate's marketing was deceptive because it used the decimal definition of the capacity term "gigabyte," which indicates 1 billion bytes of capacity, instead of the binary definition used by operating systems, which translates that measurement into 1.07 billion bytes, a difference of 7 percent.

Seagate was technically correct to call 1 billion bytes a gigabyte, but it's also kind of a shady practice. I'm torn, though, between my inner prescriptivist language nazi and my aversion to the totally retarded kibi/mibi/gibi prefixes.

Took long enough. Hope it doesn't suck.

As you might imagine, the /. thread on this news is even nerdier than usual.

From the always great xkcd.

FYI, I do not make graphs in my spare time, nor was I just recently geeking out on some census data.

KeeLoq is a rolling code cipher used in keyless entry and "secure" ignition devices in many makes of cars. While there have been slow methods for cracking KeeLoq in the past, a group of researchers have recently shown that all it takes is access (i.e., proximity) to a car's RFID key for about an hour to gather enough data from the key to inform their code cracking software, which takes about two days to run on a modern 50 node computing cluster.

For cars that have both a traditional machine etched key and KeeLoq, a thief would still need a copy of the key (or good lockpicking skills). Those cars that are really at the most risk here are ones with push-button ignitions, which do not require a physical key insertion. The Prius is of course one such car, but many luxury cars are at similar risk. It may be time for tin foil key cozies.

Apparently you don't have to be young and stupid to push a Prius over 100mph. Turns out even a graying wacky nerd can do it:

"I pleaded guilty, with an explanation," Wozniak said in one of several e-mails exchanged the past few days. "I said that I was really scientific, and in the last year had been in Athens, Moscow, Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich (twice), Zurich, Canada (three times), Columbia, Singapore, Japan, London, etc., and had gotten used to kilometer speeds."

The judge smiled. But he didn't buy it. The fine was about $700.

(If the mercurynews link leads to a registration page, try the link once or twice more and the story should show up... weird.)

Jesus, someone seems to have issues. Would have been cooler (if a geeky Win 98 BSOD tattoo can get any cooler) had he done something original with the hex codes, but it looks like he pulled the message verbatim from this BSOD screenshot.