Month: August 2008

Another reason to feel sorry for the aardvark – they probably get more spam than any other animal. A study was done showing that patterns in your username, such as the first letter, seem to impact how much spam you get. Actually, their title claiming that aardvarks get more spam than zebras is misleading. The pattern is more complex than that, with L, P, R, and S seeming to lead the pack in terms of spam versus non-spam messages received. Really, it seems like all this is saying is that spammers guess email addresses, and if your address occurs on … Continue reading Aardvark@gmail.com

In yet another RFID update (it’s funny how once you are thinking about something like this you see it everywhere) this is an interesting little video of Adam Savage explaining why Mythbusters won’t be debunking any more RFID myths anytime soon. In short, they had an entire show planned around RFID myths – how hackable they are, how easy it is to track someone with them, etc. – and legal counsel for various large financial institutions contacted Discovery and scared them into blocking the show. But it is more fun to hear it in Adam’s words so go watch! I’m … Continue reading All RFID, All the Time

Related to my post from last week, Scientific American has an article about how RFID tags are popping up in unexpected places and be able to be used to track individuals, including, due to poor security in the devices, by individuals unassociated with the tags. The main application that the article is concerned with is the desire to have border states issue drivers licenses equipped with RFID tags to simplify border crossings. Says the article: Although such “enhanced” driver’s licenses remain voluntary in the states that offer them, privacy and security experts are concerned that those who sign up for … Continue reading Tag You’re It

While I have played around with sed/awk and perl and shell scripting in the past, in recent years I’ve spent more time using programming languages than scripting languages. This summer I’ve been playing around with Python a bit, though I’ll probably get more into it once I think of a good problem to solve using it. I thought about picking up Flash, but between it being so closed and it being difficult to just see your code, I decided to pass on that bit of frustration. Somehow I didn’t think of Javascript at all, though I do not do much … Continue reading Have Language, Will Code