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Ok, I’m a few days late (cut me a break, it’s been how long since i’ve posted?). Did you know that this last Monday was “Cyber Monday”? According to all-knowing wikipedia

the term was coined based on research showing that 77% of online retailers reported a significant increase in sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving in 2004. In late November 2005, the New York Times reported that “The name Cyber Monday grew out of the observation that millions of otherwise productive working Americans, fresh off a Thanksgiving weekend of window shopping, were returning to high-speed Internet connections at work Monday and buying what they liked.”

Millions of otherwise productive working Americans busy on their work day shopping online? Someone want to know why the economy is in trouble?

Microsoft is offering a free antivirus program called Security Essentials. It includes protection against viruses, spyware and other malware. I’ve just begun testing it in order to see if I would recommend it. The installation was simple, hassle free and it seems like it runs smoother than AVG, especially when opening documents in Microsoft Word (AVG occasionally hangs when working with documents). Security Essentials also has a “very good detection score” of 98.4% according to this article on PC World.

You can download Security Essentials for free from Microsoft here.

A very important decision has come out for those involved in computer forensic’s, law enforcement and computer privacy. The Ninth Circuit has ruled that search warrants for electronic files must be specific and segregation and redaction must be done by specialized personnel or a third party. Those people conducting the search are not allowed to confiscate files not specified in the warrant and the investigating authorities are not allowed to conduct the search themselves, being only privy to files relating to their case.

For example, in the past if the Government suspected someone of using your email server for illegal activities they could image the whole server and every file on that image would fall under the plain sight rule, meaning if it’s there then it’s there in plain sight. They would be allowed to look at your email, even though it is unrelated to their investigation because it is “in plain sight”. With this new ruling however they would only be allowed to confiscate and examine email that is the subject of their investigation and would be required to leave any other email untouched on the server. This protection of privacy is the object of this extraordinary opinion by Chief Judge Kozinski

The advent of fast, cheap networking has made it possible to store information at remote third-party locations, where it is intermingled with that of other users. For example, many people no longer keep their email primarily on their personal computer, and instead use a web-based email provider, which stores their messages along with billions of messages from and to millions of other people. Similar services exist for photographs, slide shows, computer code, and many other types of data. As a result, people now have personal data that are stored with that of innumerable strangers. Seizure of, for example, Google’s email servers to look for a few incriminating messages could jeopardize the privacy of millions.

You can read the full opinion in pdf format here (pdf).

I saw this when I logged into one of my linux machines today…

        THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #5: VALGOL
From its modest beginnings in Southern California's San Ferna
VALGOL is enjoying a dramatic surge of popularity across the

Here is a sample program:
        LIKE, Y*KNOW(I MEAN)START
        IF PIZZA = LIKE BITCHEN AND GUY = LIKE TUBULAR AND
           VALLEY GIRL = LIKE GRODY**MAX(FERSURE)**2 THEN
                FOR I = LIKE 1 TO OH*MAYBE 100
                        DO*WAH - (DITTY**2)
                        BARF(I)=TOTALLY GROSS(OUT)
                SURE
        LIKE BAG THIS PROGRAM
        REALLY
        LIKE TOTALLY (Y*KNOW)
        IM*SURE
        GOTO THE MALL

When the user makes a syntax error, the interpreter displays

        GAG ME WITH A SPOON!!

The Hunt for Gollum is a wonderfully made short film, especially if you are a Tolkien fan. From their about page, “The Hunt For Gollum is an unofficial not for profit short film by a group of enthusiast filmmakers. As a Lord of the Rings Fan Film, we are not affiliated with the Tolkien Estate or New Line Cinema and are producing this project as an entirely non commercial film. As with other fan films we are making this purely for the enjoyment of the material and the experience of making a high quality low budget film.” Check out the movie on their site here. Enjoy!

Just a note that I’m testing a newer stable release of Chromium. I had released 3.0.190.0 for download but have since pulled it since it looks like it has stability issues. I’ll be looking into it or another more up to date stable release soon. For anyone who actually checks the site for updates, don’t worry, we are not going to go the way of srware’s Iron or other Chromium offerings and just fade away. I actually use the software and intend to keep it relatively up to date.

I happened to use Gmail’s “Open as a Google document” in Gmail the other day to open a form that I had received in Microsoft document format. When I did this I received an email from The Google Docs Team informing about my use of the service. One thing they said caught my eye, namely:

“Know that your documents are safe. Since your content is stored on Google’s secure servers, even if something happens to your hard drive, your documents are protected.”

I understand that they are probably just talking about physical safety but it’s important to know that the safety of your content, any content, that you run through Google’s services is not guaranteed. Within their terms of service you will find items that should give pause, such as this one:

By submitting, posting or displaying the Content you give Google a worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through the Service…”

They do not make this clear when you open a link with Google Docs. They also don’t make it clear that you are going to open the document on their server before you do this. On first glance you would think that they’d store the document in a temporary location and use a program to display it, much like pdf’s are handled with most browsers. It’s only after you open it and use the service are you notified that you’ve saved a document on their servers and they have held an editable version with google docs for your convenience. Not to worry, you can know that your document is safe with Google…

I received an email today from the Downloadtube.com Editor Team. They have decided to award neverRun with their Top Software Award. They describe it as a “Simple little tool created to detect and intercept autorun.inf files on usb and network drives.” It was surprising that this was would receive an award, as it was almost not even published. I created it over a weekend, largely to solve an in-house issue where I do not have Administrative Rights outside my immediate network.

As I’m sure most out there have, I’ve been reading a lot in the news about Iran’s disputed elections and the protests and it got me wondering just how different their election process is from what I’m used to. I’ve read a little bit about it and it seems that after the results of the popular vote are shuffled through their Interior Ministry they are verified by a Guardian Council and then finally approved by Ali Khamenei who has constitutional authority to overturn the vote of the people if he chooses.

Compare this process to that of the US. We have a popular vote which doesn’t really mean anything on the federal level. Most states use the popular vote to determine the members of the Electoral College and by extension how their Electoral votes will go. The Electoral College generally consists of elite members of each the Democratic and Republican parties. The vote of each states Electoral College is verified by that that states Governor and turned into the President of the Senate who then presents the results to both houses of the Congress. The person with the clear majority is declared president.

There is no Constitutional requirement that I am aware of that requires the popular vote to be used in a certain way and it is very possible to win the popular vote and lose in the electoral college. This happened in the Gore / Bush elections of 2000. Gore won the popular vote by over five-hundred thousand in that election but the political elite of electoral college declared Bush the winner… Like Iran, we had riots also but you didn’t see those in the news.

Neither the United States or Iran have direct democracy. Both of our democracies depend on the will of the political elite and their consideration of the popular vote. That’s minus one for democracy in my book. democracy–

This is too interesting not to mention. The State Department under Secretary of State Clinton is hosting the first government sponsored TED Talks (Read some details on the White House Blog). Along with fora.tv TED Talks is one of my favorite outlets on the net. It is an annual conference that aims that offers some of the brightest people around a platform to share their ideas. If you haven’t heard of it you owe it to yourself to set aside a few minutes (the talks are all under twenty minutes i believe) to listen to something different and interesting. So Bravo to Madam Secretary for partnering with the great minds of the country. This kind of partnership gives much reason for optimism about our general state of affairs.