Words Myte Bite

Be Just A Little Paranoid

This lovely story on wired about companies storing cookies for “bad purposes” that is reconstructing cookies that users deleted is out there:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/zombie-cookies-lawsuit/

But have a look at this:

http://jamiedubs.com/googlealarm/

Every time you land on a web site the people with adverts from google and so on embedded they are sending data back to google about who what where when why etc.

The extension may not work for you, but it is interesting, now you have already been sending them data, what will you do in the future?

It gets to be more fun:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703940904575395073512989404.html This wall street journal talks about the business behind tracking your doings on the web.

I realise that most technical people who read this are aware of all of the above, I do know this blog is read by some non technical people, and it is for this reason I publish the above.

Long Weekend Things You Might Not Do

Not in the right order.

Update your blog.

Security patch servers.

Sort out a long running question of a domain with your brother in law.

Buy lots of Herbert Von Karjan on http://emusic.com

Read Sherlock Holmes short stories.

Do backups at home.

Check your office email (don’t tell me you didn’t).

Organise the breakfast club for Saturday Morning.

Walk the dog.

Ignore the rain outside.

Talk to a pal or three on the phone.

the more that things change the more they stay the same

ompaul@hal9001:~$ cd linux-2.6/
ompaul@hal9001:~/linux-2.6$ git pull
Already up-to-date.
ompaul@hal9001:~/linux-2.6$

7:20 am and nothings changed

Recent Reading

Pascal Mercier’s Night Train To Lisbon, this book is brilliant. The plot is simple, it is a lecturer whose boring life gets turned upside just after the book starts. Where it ends, that is up to your imagination, in between there is a journey, a most interesting journey as the protagonist delves into the life of a man who was in the Portuguese resistance back when that kind of thing mattered, as he gets to know this man, he meets new people, ideas, challenges to his thinking.Warning, I found it hard to read, however the style is required to tell the story the way it was told. Well worth spending time with.

Hugo Hamilton’s book The Speckled People, is the early life story of children of an Irish father and German Mother in Ireland in the fifties and sixties. Told though the perspective eyes of one of their children, a consistent in age is used as the viewing point. That view does not change, but the people become older, life becomes more complicated as it usually does. Really easy to read, well written, most enjoyable.

Lastly Bill Oddie’s autobiography, One flew into the the cookoo’s egg. Bill tells the stories of growing up, becoming famous, getting older, having what is often incorrectly referred to as “a nervous breakdown”, dealing with the aftermath of recovery, he even manages to interview himself and manages not to get too caught up in a dream as a result. All in all I really liked it.

Wikileaks founder on TED

All I can say is watch this. Julian Assange makes a powerful statement about people who work to keep things secret.