Category Archives: Technology

Greenspun and Photo-Net

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Philip Greenspun, founder and editor-at-large of Photo-Net, has apparently become an unperson there. All the top-level links to his personal pages have vanished, and the deep links to his former pages there now redirect to his personal home page. I wonder what happened?

(Update: much legal unpleasantness later, he’s become a person again, though I suspect he no longer cares much. As part of getting rid of him, the company he co-founded threw a big pile of month at him, enough so that he can buy airplanes and helicopters and not worry about where the next payroll is coming from.)

Uh-oh

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Apparently there are still travelers on this planet who don’t know that you shouldn’t put your exposed film in your checked baggage. Toothbrush, okay. Heart medication? Maybe. Your youngest child? Sure. (In fact, I’d prefer that you do so.) But not your exposed film.

For what it’s worth, I agree with the author about the quality of the airline under discussion here. Despite the fact that my father worked for them for thirty-plus years. They are no longer the airline that he was so proud of.

What’s on the airwaves?

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An interesting article describing how hackers can intercept your credit card numbers by electronically sniffing the airwaves near your favorite store. I’ve always wondered if this was possible; your local airport car-rental return seems like it would be a great place to do it. And I knew there was a reason why I refuse to allow Home Depot to use their “line buster” because they are too cheap/too stupid to hire more clerks!

Corel

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Corel has fallen upon hard times these last few years. They’ve fallen victim to Microsoft, in trying to maintain their WordPerfect product in a world where Word is the de facto standard. They squandered their early advantage with CorelDraw, which was a leading-edge product in its day (which has long past.) They tried to make money on Linux, a foolish choice, and tried to re-invent DOS, a move which seems so boneheaded that I can’t even think of a good way to describe it.

But miracles happen. It seems that they may actually be profitable this year; they’re actually making money for the third quarter in a row. Will wonders never cease.

802.11 Crypto

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The RC4 crypto scheme used in 802.11 wireless networking has been cracked. Worse yet, it scales linearly, so using a bigger key only makes the crack marginally harder. Worst of all, the crack is entirely passive– it relies only on listening to the stream.

Hopefully most commercial users already require their users to use this technology with a VPN client, but for home users, that’s often not an option.

I wonder if we’ll be hearing from Cringley about this? You’ll recall that a few weeks ago, I blogged his adventures in long-distance 802.11. He’s effectively transmitting 802.11 packets over five or ten miles. Perhaps he’s operating as a free ISP and doesn’t even know it!

Testing a new feature

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Oh, and just FYI, beginning with the “sick lemon tree” entry, I’m experimenting with a new feature. If you’re running a version 4 browser, and you have Javascript enabled, clicked pictures should pop up in their own little window. Let me know what you think via email, or post a comment to this entry.