Too many times have I said this. There is no silver bullet.

Security is not an option, it's inherent in the system or not all.

Nothing fixes bad code. Nothing can. Now there are things you can do to prevent writing bad code, like scream when your code goes and screws up stuff. You can automate the things you might do wrong, use a garbage collector, use prepared statements, use a filter to check for input. And it's hard work, but that's why you get paid. Now management can help you too (my boss gives me work that "needs to be done right, first time") by ensuring they don't make you cut corners. Most of us want to do the best job we can, but we're not allowed to - "Just Ship it and put a patch next month", because security is not really a feature that sells, it's assumed to be present and cannot be monetized properly. Bruce Schenier explained it brilliantly in - Market for Lemons.

But there's no silver bullet, in fact there's not even a silver band-aid. And sometimes the bug is in the shield itself. My usual policy is to have as little code as possible, so that I can read and verify it all the time. Smaller the chunks I build, the easier it is to test it apart. Easier it is to tear it apart, to replace a part or just anything. Code in ADA will be more auditable than code in PHP (trust me, I work with php all day). But eventually, you can't really write bad code, push it production and slap security over it.

So tell me, how will you fix this bug that was there in your security tool, Recursive Ventures? :)

What do the decency groups know about indecency?

(. ) ( .)

Are these decent? I'm sorry, you can't wash out the filth out of my brain ... you can try, but I see the a-style logo and I see what I see, because of the filth in *my* brain.

If you see the same ... well *giggle*

If they are nothing like us, that will be a bigger problem.

This particular idea almost collides with the idea that aliens will make our life better in some way when we encounter them. They might treat us just like the old world treated the new world and its inhabitants. If simple cultural differences can cause such trouble, imagine whole species encountering each other.

I sure hope for aliens who have evolved into societies like ours, completely independently. I (and in extrapolation, the rest of humanity) will not be able to deal with something like a hive mind of consciousness in an incoming attacker. But I'm sure with the regular kind of invaders, I shall be able to achieve some sort of truce

Because you see, I for one welcome ... (bah, that was too easy).

Today Bangalore is playing in the IPL today and youtube is supposed to be streaming the match live. The timing of this outage is almost coincidental. And not all of youtube is down, for instance, I clicked through to this video which seems to be working.

Add to that, the fact that Airtel (my isp) has lifted the bandwidth limits for this particular Youtube channel (they have a local stream point, I guess ... it doesn't cost them upstream).

So as soon as youtube is down, I head a groan all around my floor and people leaving their desks to go watch the match in the cafeteria. One of those odd situations when youtube going down probably caused a drop in productivity ;)

Facebook is slowly turning into the WalMart equivalent for the internet. Sure, you could go to flickr for the photos, twitter for the updates, upcoming for the events, youtube/hulu for videos, gtalk/yahoo for IM, gmail to send messages - or you could go to facebook and have all of it half-assed.

Basically a huge walled garden which is only available to those inside the wall. The trick of course, is to make it nice so that people can bring in their data easily and fb's success is because they make it damn convenient to put your data in there.

Now, do I use facebook? Damn right, I do ... because as much bitching as I do about the effect it's having on the entire internet, I gotta move with my friends or end up falling out of touch, with everybody who already knows what everybody else is doing. And in some selfish way, my friends are more important to me than the internet.

Sad, but true.

Heck, I can't figure out how to disable half the auto-runs on my sister's laptop.

These guys definitely know what they're doing :)

Somehow in my world view, the concept progress somehow involved a rise in the standard of living globally. In a more selfish angle, poverty anywhere is a threat to prosperity everywhere ... but it should come as no surprise that a low standard of living has a lower carbon footprint, but a reversal into the medieval dark ages, into a world of filth and disease is not where I thought progress would take me.

The hint of "noble savage" that this particular article seems to dig up almost horrifies me. The illusion that somehow all of us should aspire to simple living goes against two centuries of human culture. Even they aspire for me, as the article clearly spells out "Discomfort is an investment". These people aren't comfortable, the population explosion and the draw-in into the cities is causing the rural india to collapse, the two-bit farmer who grew his own grain & sold his veggies during the rains is gone. Fewer hands to till and more mouths to feed.

Because I live in urban India, I see slums day in & day out. I walk by them, I occasionally grab a cup of chai from the roadside vendor (hey, I got an immune system, don't I?). I end up people-watching, the drunkard husband, the garbage picker kids, the housemaid wife, the precocious teenager dreaming of a gangster life. Vivid, poignant & stark at the same time. But very rarely do I click a picture or write about what I see (maybe I'm in middle-class denial, I don't know). Though occasionally rant about the representation of it in popular culture. This is the bombay I love to visit, not the slums or the bombed hotels.

I want progress, not just for me ... but for everyone. Not a green planet that's So-so-Soylent. Let me have my dream, at least ... don't glorify my nightmares :(

Ugh, I think I've spent all the optimism I'd had for the day.

I find that a hilarious option on my US entry form. Because you see if I was actually there to do something illegal, I'd be declaring it when I enter. Yeah, right.

But it makes sense as a sort of "But ... but ... but ... he said so!" legal CYA move. (Wait, CYA ... that sounds like something else).

I think from what I've heard, Israel does the most ardous security check ever and they do it without being dicks about it. They have intelligent agents, who ask the right questions and do not invade your personal space to intimidate you. And it seems to work for them, especially since they back it up with the kind of stuff Mossad did at Entebe (despite the international legalities of doing so),

The video is actually fairly funny, heh the "never do it again".

They're thinking, they're feeling. And they want you to know. That's why they paint it on walls, cliffs and carve it into the school benches. There's this school of thought that believes that it will go away if nobody reads it. But they've really never done something, stood a few feet away and sighed about getting it off your head. Ignoring it and waiting for it to go away is dumb.

Keeping tabs on the expression gives you a much more clear indication of what the pulse of the otherwise silent are thinking. This is a fun experiment because nobody wall painting is doing it because they want to be part of a statistic ... unlike a girl with a clipboard asking questions.

I remember being in a train in melbourne, riding past a few walls full of legal graffiti (union lane?) and wondering what the line between art and vandalism really was.

Natural selection doesn't pre-suppose DNA. Anything which multiplies to produce copies of itself, which can degrade/mutate between generations can evolve just in exactly the same way. Selection pressures work exactly the same. So does the chain reaction effect of multiplication of the survivors, resulting in major shifts in characteristics of a population.

But the actual story is the bad news part of it. That using anti-prion medication probably won't work all the time as it would just breed a drug-resistant breed of prions by preference.

Definitely bad news. We can forget about having the "saviour" take a bath in the daily oatmeal for our protection :)

What happens to developers? Just in case, we fork out Novell's moonlight tree because they got bought by someone (*cough* mysql, *cough*), will the conventant apply to us? Or does it only apply to code written by Novell & redistributed by others? Does this indirectly kill the freedom to modify & redistribute? like that firefox logo thing?

Alright, I admit it, I do have an axe to grind against silverlight (and flash too, I guess). But this covenant just goes on to establish precedent in terms of patent coverage ... (yes, note my domain, I've been through this before).