waffle

It’s happening.

Awesome.

Windows 7 gets “Classic”: Windows XP virtualization.

Genius. That’s how you allow pre-Vista software to run and clear your ass for putting a chainsaw to the gargantuan pile of old crap in the Windows API stack.

Aaron Swartz, after having worked on a transparency site for just over a year and after having read more on the subject than I have read books probably ever, comes to the conclusion that “Transparency is Bunk”:

The problem is that reality doesn’t live in the databases. Instead, the databases that are made available, even if grudgingly, form a kind of official cover story, a veil of lies over the real workings of government. If you visit a site like GovTrack, which publishes information on what Congresspeople are up to, you find that all of Congress’s votes are on inane items like declaring holidays and naming post offices. The real action is buried in obscure subchapters of innocuous-sounding bills and voted on under emergency provisions that let everything happen without public disclosure.

This sounds plausible but it also asks the question: Why not abolish secret sessions in the first place? Critical war situations or crises in government (and I mean real crises, not spinning “lipstick on a pig” quotes) would be the sole things that could trigger closed protocols, and the session protocol would open up after 90 days with a provision for 90 more days. This way, the only thing that’d actually legitimately need to be kept secret momentarily would be so, and everything would be subject to sunlight after a tape delay anyway.

Michael Sippey was contacted out of a blue by a fishbot with the appetizer “I IMed you first. If I deny this later, I’m lying.”. Turns out that this is a new kind of bot that finds random AIM users, open a conversation with both and forward the messages between the two users, like calling two random people out of the phonebook and holding the receivers to each other.

Very creative.