...the prospect of having your power shut off for the lulz?

I'm not a fan, personally.

I have a feeling they are :-(

Damn straight, Mr President!

Privacy and Control, from Bruce Schneier. Says a lot of things quite well.

(for those who don't know, PyCon) -- it is, so far, made of win.

Dammit...

Er, what? SQL injection is a complicated technique these days?

Come on, it's in XKCD, for heaven's sake, it's not that bloody complicated...

(In other news, remind me never to use my credit card in the US again; if that many payment providers don't sanitize their database inputs, there is little hope for the web development world...)

Mental note: make tinfoil holder for passport.

So the actual algorithm for generating Social Security Numbers has been reverse-engineered. For those who don't know, a Social Security Number was originally used to identify government benefit accounts, but the US government has recently been using it more and more as a personal ID number (e.g. on tax returns) and many institutions have followed ( Read more... )

I'd never been to Cambridge before today. I know it's a pretty major failing for a long-distance foreigner like myself to have spent so much time in the UK and never been to such a famously pretty university town, but I've never quite gotten around to it. Until today ( Read more... )