Random musings

Wash. man electrocuted by urinating on power line March 2, 2010 – Possibly the most gruesome way to go that I can imagine.

Vancouver Now – Emergency shipment of condoms headed to Olympic athletes – Post Sports February 26, 2010 – Canada is awesome!

Ex-Goldman programmer indicted over HFT code theft | Reuters February 18, 2010 – Who wants to bet that this case never goes to trial? There will be a settlement involving the perpetrator agreeing to never describe what this code actually does.

School used student laptop webcams to spy on them at school and home Boing Boing February 18, 2010 – This is pretty creepy and fits in to my “hypothetical attacks we talked about in Grad school are very real” theme. Yikes.

Mozilla Debates Whether to Trust Chinese CA | Freedom to Tinker February 17, 2010 – It’s amazing when these esoteric technical issues we talked about in grad school turn out to be real-life issues. What if the certificate authority is working in concert with your attacker? How do you know you’re really talking to GMail…

BBC News – Warner retreats from free music streaming February 10, 2010 – Surprise, Surprise. Just as streaming music sites like Pandora look to be turning the corner, here come the music labels to move the goal posts. Again. In theory Pandora is protected under the DMCA but expect posturing and perhaps litigation over what…

How Facebook uses Erlang for real-time chat – Off the Grid!! February 8, 2010 – This is a somewhat old blog post from a Facebook engineer describing how they engineered the chat system in Erlang. It’s notable because it contains a description of a scale testing technique I’ve never heard of before – they did…

On College Campuses, a Shortage of Men – NYTimes.com February 6, 2010 – Hmm, not what I remember…

Backing out of a term sheet cdixon.org – chris dixon's blog February 5, 2010 – Chris Dixon flexes some muscle. Hardcore.

The disrupted of Davos « BuzzMachine February 5, 2010 – Very interesting view of the WEF