You can start here.

Jim takes a lot (a lot) of information and pulls it together into a remarkably coherent discourse on the causes, time-lines, and fallout of the many factors that brought New Orleans to disaster. It started well before Katrina, and it's hardly done yet.

Seriously, give it a read. All 8 parts.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/wire/sns-ap-rehnquist,1,6551882.story?coll=sns-ap-politics-headlinesRead more... )

( Read more... )

Yet another financial manages to have "go missing" a tape-set full of "Social Security numbers, names, account history and loan information about retail customers, and former customers" -- this time from a division of Citi; the tapes were bound for Experian. They didn't make it.

Read about it on CNNA number of other financials have also reported ( Read more... )

Doing some picking through my many sources to mark juicy quotes for the thesis writeup, I come across a real eye-opener.

From Cliff Stoll's 1995 book Silicon Snake Oil, page 107:What about security on the Internet? After chasing hackers across the nets, I've wondered if computer people would cork up the obvious holes in systems. Sure enough, ( Read more... )

EndNote 8 comes blazoned with the feel-good slogan, "...Bibliographies Made EasyTM" in a colorful, friendly-looking box . . .

. . . containing a 580 page manual.

A server I help maintain gets regular SSH brute force login attacks, sometimes thousands an hour. Today I went around and looked at ways to automatically block these attacks. Many scripts, in shellscript and perl, some semi-built-in routines.

( Component pieces in blocking brute force ssh login attacks )

Not usually one to get into the random name cranking engines... but when the Unitarian Jihad generated the below name immediately, well, I just had to post.
My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Sister/Brother Claymore of Loving Kindness.
Get yoursI've seen some people trim down their names to include only "brother" or "sister." In the spirit of this ( Read more... )

Our IRB (Institutional Review Board) has put out a feedback/satisfaction survey. Now, for those of you who have not had the pleasure, an IRB deals with ensuring that research involving human subjects (in this case, in the social sciences) is geared to protect subjects' consent, safety, and privacy, and that there is research/methods oversight by ( Read more... )

When getting a new desktop that would no longer support my aging Alps Glidepoint, I went looking for what's out there. I found the coolest mouse-eliminator everThe iGesture worked out of the box with tons of functionality without a driver on Mac OS X (including Classic), on SuSe Linux 9.1, and in Win 2k. On the USB wire, it just emulates a USB ( Read more... )