10 thoughts for December 28, 2013

It's official: I'm a lazy bum who prefers to jot down these 10 daily thoughts than write long form.

1. A couple of cheetahs in a zoo got lucky: A wild white-tailed deer jumped into their enclosure.
2. A federal judge says bulk metadata collection is legal, because "the cost of missing such a thread [extracted from the metadata] can be horrific."  In other words, the ends justify the means.
3. You hate that slow, green bar in your Windows folder, don't you?  Solved.
4. Why, I still remember how, earlier this year people told me that, because Bitcoin was anonymous and decentralized, that it couldn't be shut down.  And yet, the central banks of India and China have pretty much accomplished this.  Exactly as I said could happen.  If FinCEN were to declare Bitcoins illegal, the Winklevoss twins would turn into huge losers.  Oh wait...they already are.
5. Instinctively, don't you sleep when you feel stressed or find yourself at a mental roadblock, because you know that when you wake up, you'll feel better?  I didn't think this needed to be explained, but it is, here.
6. Target says that PINs were stolen as well as CC / DC data, but that the data was protected by triple-DES.  But think about it for a moment...you don't need to break the encryption at all.   Credit cards don't necessarily use PINs (except for use as a debit card).  CCs rely on CVN for online transactions -- data that wasn't stolen, either -- but it provides room to use stolen credit card info to make in-person purchases.  Also, one should expect more information to be revealed over time, because I still believe that the attack would have likely involved modifications to the swipe machines themselves to take bypass encryption of debit card PINs.
7. So far so good...PAC-12 is 3-1 in bowls.  WSU (or should I say Mike Leach?) turned out a turd in the last two minutes, though, and the PAC-12 should have been 4-0.  Looks like Leach has settled into being a proper Cougar.
8. Oh look: After three months of my frequent complaints (here and elsewhere), Cover Oregon has finally moved its website to HTTPS.  Of course, you still can't sign up for coverage online, but at least there's some progress.  How embarrassing, though.  Oracle should be fired, tried and convicted of incompetence in the court of public opinion otherwise known as the news media.
9. This one might be a big one, but you know, I'd moved on a loooong time ago because the outrage was fake.  Anyway: NYT in-depth probe finds that the Benghazi incident was fueled by outrage over a video, and did not involve Al Qaeda.  This therefore means that Susan Rice was dragged over the coals for no good reason.  More than that, the single piece of evidence tying Al Qaeda to Benghazi was a phone call placed to a person with ties to people within Al Qaeda, who'd expressed surprise that an attack had occurred.  In other words, no one told Al Qaeda that an attack was about to happen.  So that's that, right?  Probably not, because you know, Darrell Issa and other Republicans can't seem to let go of an issue that has no legs other than the self-fueled echo-chamber of the conservative media.
10. Do you know why there are so many crappy bowl games?  ESPN.  If not for the guaranteed money from ESPN, these really crappy bowls would not exist, because they haven't the filled seats to break even.  Do you know who's to blame?  People who subscribe to cable TV.  They subsidize things that they don't watch.  A review of the major bowl games show that viewership has dropped after they moved from broadcast TV to ESPN.  So, fewer people are watching, but more people are paying.  Laughable economics, but that's what happens when you have government allowing certain types of monopolies.