Fiat Lux

Well, this is disconcerting. Consider yourself duly warned:

Users of Yahoo! Mail, MySpace and just about every Web 2.0 service take note: If you access those services using public Wi-Fi, Rob Graham can probably gain unlimited access to your account - even if you logged in using the secure sockets layer protocol.

[snip]

The hack caught our attention because it shatters a common assumption concerning secure surfing on public access points. Up until now, we felt relatively safe using hotspots to access email as long as we logged in with an SSL session. Yes, we knew that any subsequent pages that were not appended by "https" in the address bar were were susceptible to snooping, but intruders still had no way to access the account itself.

Now we know better. Any session that isn't protected from start to finish by SSL is vulnerable to the hack. And because session IDs generated by most sites are valid for an indefinite period, that means intruders could silently access our accounts for years - even if we regularly change our passwords.

The only way .... to work around the vulnerability is to use Google and select options that automatically keep Gmail, Google Calendar and several other properties encrypted throughout the entire session.

Sometimes life is a pile of kitties.

Other times, it's just a pile-on.

A New York Times article on the millionaires of Silicon Valley is garnering mostly negative feedback today. And it's easy to see why. It's hard to have sympathy for people like this:

“You’re nobody here at $10 million,” [Gary] Kremen said earnestly over a glass of pinot noir at an upscale wine bar

I can't say I'm all that sympathetic to people who got themselves onto a money treadmill and now feel that they can't get off it. You always have a choice, and if you think you don't, it's because you're not looking in the right places for options. If your role models are the folks with a net worth of $50 million, then yeah, you're a schlub for only having $5 million. Perhaps you might try spending a little time with people whose net worth is only $500 thousand instead? Is that too demeaning for you? Those people, after all, can't afford a nanny for the toddlers and new Acuras for the teenagers. They might even -- dare I say it? -- rent their homes and join the Y instead of a country club.

Is that too much like "admitting defeat"?

Cry me a freaking river.

Here's where I come from on this: I went to a very exclusive private school when I was growing up, and my family was on the lower end of the income spectrum for the school. Kids didn't have ipods and multi-function cellphones and $200 Gucci sunglasses back then, but some things were the same; many of my classmates had brand-new cars, designer jeans, shopping sprees at Bloomingdales, and spring break skiing trips to Aspen. I didn't. I'd like to say that it didn't matter, but that would be a lie. Of course you're going to feel bad if some people in your peer group have stuff you don't. What's important is how you deal with it.

If you're lucky, you take away the lesson that 'stuff' doesn't necessarily make you happy, that somebody is always going to have more stuff than you, and to be happy with the stuff you do have. If you're less lucky, you walk away with the ambition to get all that stuff, and then some, when it comes time for you to raise your own kids. And thus, a new generation of overworked treadmill-walkers is born.

Any accusations of sour grapes aside, there's also a business lesson to be drawn here. I was interested to see that one of the subjects of the article earned much of her wealth from being an early member of the team at Handspring (and later a senior staffer at Palm). One wonders if that company's ever-increasing inability to deliver products that people wanted might be linked to their own staff's disconnection from what life for "normal" people is like.

I am old enough to remember Hank Aaron's drive for Babe Ruth's record in 1973-74. It was a special day when he finally did it.

Today ..... not so much.

I console myself with the thought that if A-Rod stays healthy, there's a good chance he'll top 756 in the not too distant future.

Scene: Our bedroom. Scott has loaded a flavor of Linux onto a thumb drive and is booting it up his laptop.

Scott: "Look at that. Kernel panic."

Me: (looks at screen) "It's not doing anything. Doesn't seem all that panicked to me."

Scott (pulling out the thumb drive, rebooting): "Very funny."

Fast-forward a minute or two.

Me: "How's that kernel panic doing? Has it been promoted to a General Protection Fault yet?"

Scott: "That is so. not. funny."

Me: can hardly breath I am laughing so hard at my own joke.

Another week, another random mix.

1) Lohengrin Prelude - Wagner
2) Shape of My Heart - Backstreet Boys
3) Beat Box - Matisyahu
4) Blood Of Eden - Peter Gabriel
5) My Hometown - Bruce Springsteen
6) It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) - REM
7) Not A Day Goes By - Mandy Patinkin
8) Say It Isn't So - Hall & Oates
9) Still Take You Home - Arctic Monkeys
10) my funny valentine - Sting

#2 is a little embarrassing. At least it's the only song of theirs in my collection.

I got a closed beta invite for Tabula Rasa.

That's about all I can say about it until the NDA goes away.

This is pretty pathetic: Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary to offer academic program in homemaking. Yes, really:

A description of the homemaking program on the seminary's Web site says it "endeavors to prepare women to model the characteristics of the godly woman as outlined in Scripture.

"This is accomplished through instruction in homemaking skills, developing insights into home and family while continuing to equip women to understand and engage the culture of today."

The whole thing sounds like an expensive way to find a 'suitable' husband more than anything else. If you honestly believe that the role of a woman is to stay home and raise kids, why would you be getting a bachelor's degree in the first place?

To be fair, at least not all Baptists share that college's view on things:

The Rev. Benjamin Cole, pastor of Parkview Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, and a frequent Southern Baptist critic, wrote about the homemaking program on his blog.

"At first it was almost incredible to me," Cole said. "I thought this is not happening. It's quite superfluous to the mission of theological education in Southern Baptist life. It's insulting I would say to many young women training in vital ministry roles.

"It's yet another example of the ridiculous and silly degree to which some Southern Baptists, Southwestern in particular, are trying to return to what they perceive to be biblical gender roles."

Good for Rev. Cole.

It's amazing that in a world with ever-increasing amounts of available information, people can still fall prey to flat-out incorrect conspiracy theories, but they do. This article in the Nation about the so-called NAFTA Superhighway is a prime example.

I particularly liked this graf, which attempts to explain why so many people are willing to accept rumor over reality:

The myth of the NAFTA Superhighway persists and grows because it taps into deeply felt anxieties about the dizzying dislocations of twenty-first-century global capitalism: a nativist suspicion of Mexico's designs on US sovereignty, a longing for national identity, the fear of terrorism and porous borders, a growing distrust of the privatizing agenda of a government happy to sell off the people's assets to the highest bidder and a contempt for the postnational agenda of Davos-style neoliberalism. Indeed, the image of the highway, with its Chinese goods whizzing across the border borne by Mexican truckers on a privatized, foreign-operated road, is almost mundane in its plausibility.

Although apparently there is an effort underway in Texas to build a bunch of new highways there.

It was only 6 months ago that I finally put down my money and upgraded to MT 3.3x .... and if I had waited a little longer, I wouldn't have had to pay for the upgrade at all.

A bit annoying, frankly, but it's my own fault for waiting so long, I suppose.

... you tend to get burned.

Noted in passing. Thanks, Barry.

Why cat blogging? Because they're a much-needed dose of perspective when Ben Bernanke powers up the helicopters.

Insomnia and a massive blog spam attack are not the most promising start to the week.

Just saying.....

I agree 10,000%.

Look, we know what we're talking about here won't be able to happen today, tomorrow, or next week. It's going to require some serious time, dedication, and faith in the brand you've built. Your stock is tumbling, the lowest it's been in months; your customers have lost faith, and those buying Treos seem to be just going through the motions; your efforts to expand your business have gone unfulfilled, and perhaps most importantly your consumers are unhappy and looking for the next great thing -- that you're not providing. But it's not entirely hopeless. Your biggest competition's already shown its hand, and you've seen how successful they've been. Look at what they've done right (and wrong), and build upon it.

Even if you only implemented half the suggestions we've laid out here we think you could really turn things around. And we do, honestly, want you to make it through this thing. We want to love Palm like we loved it in the old days, and know somewhere, deep down, you've got some fight left in you. And believe you us, this is your shot. The bottom's about to drop out on the Treo, and if you can't make it happen soon, you may never get another chance to get a foothold on innovation.

Sadly, I think Palm is neither willing nor able to listen.

In a little more than a week from now, this humble blog will celebrate its 4th anniversary. But that's not what this post is about.

I was actually blogging all the way back in 1996, although back then, it was called an "online diary". I thought that I'd lost those web pages forever, but I finally got the Wayback Machine to cough them up (I'd forgotten the correct URL, silly me).

So, if you're curious, you can see what I had to say all the way back in February 1996, and intermittently the rest of that year. Nothing momentous at all, really, but I'm pleased about it. And I've downloaded a copy of the file, so that I won't lose it again.

I'm of the camp that feels a blog is not a blog without comments. I also feel that there should be as few barriers to entry as possible when it comes to allowing comments. Easy interaction is a huge part of what has made the Internet great, and I'm a huge fan of it.

However, the damned comment spammers have made it impossible for me to run my blog the way I'd prefer. The vast majority of my older blog entries have had their comments closed to keep the spammers at bay, I've added all sorts of anti-spam plug-ins, and I've turned trackbacks off entirely.

And despite it all, especially in the last 48 hours, the comment spam has been overwhelming.

So today, and unwillingly, Captcha verification has been added to the blog comment form (Thanks Scott!). I really wish I didn't have to, but it's either that or go to some form of user registration / comment moderation, and on balance, I think Captcha is a little less of a burden all around.

To all you comment spammers out there who've forced me into this: You suck.

To the rest of you: I'm sorry. I hope it's not too much of a hassle.

Scott and I were supposed to be taking a week's vacation back East this week. Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way. I posted some of the headlines in Twitter over the weekend, but if you're not a Twitter fan, here's the long and the short of it:

On Friday afternoon we were told that what we though was a mild-to-moderate shoulder injury Scott suffered while out on a bike ride was, in fact, a lot more severe than that -- basically, the accident broke both the left ball joint and shoulder blade in several places -- and surgery was required to put Scott's shoulder back together.

He went under the knife first thing Saturday and is now home recovering. The vacation has been canceled. Long-term, Scott will be just fine, and everything could be much, much worse -- which I'm infinitely grateful for -- but I am also bummed about the lost vacation. We don't travel home anywhere nearly as often as I would like.

There's a lot of interesting things going on out there in the world to blog about, but I'm not feeling very bloggy right now. Please feel free to peruse my blogroll for a list of folks doing a much better job of this blogging thing than I am.