Month: July 2008

Laptop Search

Federal agents may take a traveler’s laptop or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.

only morons store any interesting data on a laptop.

LHC

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27 kilometer long particle accelerator straddling the border of Switzerland and France, is nearly set to begin its first particle beam tests. CERN is preparing for its first small tests in early August, leading to a planned full-track test in September – and the first planned particle collisions before the end of the year. The final step before starting is the chilling of the entire collider to -271.25 C. Here is a collection of photographs from CERN, showing various stages of completion of the LHC and several of its larger experiments (some over 7 stories tall), over the past several years.

big machine porn

Fixing IE

One of the big unresolved questions is how to distribute this thing — it’s what’s called a “binary rendering behavior” in IE parlance, and is packaged as an ActiveX component (well, it might or might not be ActiveX — I don’t really understand that part of the equation). Currently, the experience is pretty crappy: you have to click through an infobar to allow installation of this component, then you have to click “Yes” to say that you really want to run the native content, and then you have to click “Yes” again to allow the component to interact with content on the page. This sucks. In theory, with the right signatures, the right security class implementations, some eye of newt, and a pinch of garlic, it’s possible to get things down to a one-time install which would make the component available everywhere.

Mozilla is now paying people to fix IE, in this case canvas support.

True Generics

stop buying cheap-ish pseudo-generic drugs from Walgreens, Rite-Aid, and Duane Reade and start buying really cheap true generics. As you might know, Benadryl (available at Walgreens.com for $5.29 for a box of 24 capsules) and Wal-dryl ($3.99 / 24 capsules) are otherwise known as “25 mg. of diphenhydramine HCI.” Compare [with the true generic available at Amazon]. Yes, that is 400 tablets containing 25 mg. of diphenhydramine HCI, for about $10 when you factor in shipping.

real generics can be 10x cheaper

Cuil

We’ve been testing the engine for the last hour. Based on our test queries Cuil is an excellent search engine, particularly since it is all of an hour old. But it doesn’t appear to have the depth of results that Google has, despite their claims. And the results are not nearly as relevant.

when i tried cuil.com from the google network i still got the old, unlaunched version.

Adeona

We tackle the problem of building privacy-preserving device-tracking systems — or private methods to assist in the recovery of lost or stolen Internet-connected mobile devices. The main goals of such systems are seemingly contradictory: to hide the device’s legitimately-visited locations from third-party services and other parties (location privacy) while simultaneously using those same services to help recover the device’s location(s) after it goes missing (device-tracking). We propose a system, named Adeona, that nevertheless meets both goals. It provides strong guarantees of location privacy while preserving the ability to efficiently track missing devices. We build a version of Adeona that uses OpenDHT as the third party service, resulting in an immediately deployable system that does not rely on any single trusted third party. We describe numerous extensions for the basic design that increase Adeona’s suitability for particular deployment environments.

covertly records and sends crypted comms. very cypherpunk