Don’t be evil (unless you can make money!)

Posted by Synfinatic on January 26, 2006 at 11:00 am in Tech.

So we all know Google’s corporate motto is “Don’t be evil.” It’s not the most inspired thing in the world; since evil is a rather strong term and it leaves a lot of wiggle room compared to something like “Always be good.”

Now recently, Google made a deal with the Chinese government. Basically, the Chinese government has an internet firewall which tries to stop it’s citizens from accessing certain kinds of information on the internet. Here in America, we have a word for this: censorship. In the past, the Chinese government would block certain content that Google helped Chinese citizens access, but now Google has agreed to censor itself based on the Chinese government’s requirements. Now …

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First rule of Congress: you must not talk about VEIL

Posted by Synfinatic on January 23, 2006 at 11:22 pm in Geek Law, Politics.

I’m trying to understand what is so important to secure that the US Congress is not only considering mandating certain security methods, but that those methods be a secret from the general public. Nuclear weapon control systems? New kind of stealth aircraft? Some kind of spy satellite? Maybe some new way of tracking down terrorists?

Turns out it’s none of those things. Instead, this bill has to do with limiting what Americans can do with TV shows. You know, like taping them on a VCR/TiVo or perhaps fast-forwarding thru commercials.

Basically, Congress is looking to force companies which decode digital TV signals to impliment DRM technology called VEIL. But you and I can’t …

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RAID & Backups

Posted by Synfinatic on January 14, 2006 at 4:30 pm in /dev/random, Tech.

So every IT person worth a penny knows that RAID isn’t a replacement for backups and that backups are worthless if you don’t test them.

So why do so many of us find ourselves “too busy” to bother testing backups? So today I almost found myself burned. After noticing that a drive failure in a RAID10 array had taken out my server, I started thinking about that that nightly backup. Luckily for me, only one drive was down and the array was able to come backup (albiet in a downgraded state). So I immediately kicked off a manual backup.

Now, the output of the backups are always emailed to me and I had noticed for quite some time, …

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Wow, spammy

Posted by Synfinatic on January 8, 2006 at 9:43 pm in Life, Tech.

So lately, I’ve been really annoyed with the amount of spam I get. After various custom filters + SpamAssassin, I still get around 100 spams/day (of which about 20% finds it’s way into my inbox and the remaining 80% into my spambox which I have to check for false positives). Pretty painful.

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Don’t hit F5

Posted by Synfinatic on January 6, 2006 at 10:43 pm in Geek Law, Rant.

Because apparently this prosecutor in Canton, OH thinks hitting F5 to reload a web page repeatedly is a *felony*.

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Drugs are good.

Posted by Synfinatic on January 4, 2006 at 10:38 pm in /dev/random.

Well finally went to the doctor yesterday. First time in something like 5 or 6 years I think.

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