On January 18, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will hold a hearing to hear testimony from technology experts and job creators about why the PROTECT-IP Act and Stop Online Piracy Act are bad. In conjunction, some of the Internet’s largest sites will be protesting by shutting themselves down for the day.
On January 24, 2012 the U.S. Senate will vote on PIPA, a bill that would enable government censorship of the Internet. This cannot be allowed to pass.
For many months I’ve been using a Yubikey as a staple of my cyber security plan. It makes me exponentially more secure and at the same time makes it easier for me to stay secure. The only part of it that isn’t drop-dead simple is the configuration, though even that isn’t very difficult. I’m going to show you step by step how to configure your Yubikey to get the most out of it and set yourself up for success.
My father and I are headed up to Maine this weekend to close up our summer house. October is a great time of year to be there, since the leaves are changing and the weather is cool, but not so cold that it isn’t fun. I’ll be posting pictures on this page while we’re there, so check back for that.
I’ve been a Flickr user for a few years, but over the past year or so I’ve barely given it more than a glance. It’s not for the lack of a quality service – Flickr works very well for posting pictures online and allowing other people to see them and comment. It’s due to Flickr not meeting my needs or wants for photo sharing anymore, through a lack of some features, the level of photography that it seems to draw, and the lack of my community of people with whom I engage.
Hurricane Irene is coming. It’s gotten lots of coverage, and by the time it reaches my area it’s expected to be a Category 2, transitioning to a Category 1. While Annapolis isn’t on the direct path for the storm, we’re close enough that they’re projecting up to a foot of rain and a storm surge up to 4 feet high, which has the potential to do a lot of damage. It also has the potential to produce some really interesting imagery.
I’ll admit it: I’m kind of a weather geek. The last time I encountered a named storm, I was taking pictures and videos of stuff that wasn’t even that exciting. I was stuck on watch, and it was the best I could do in weather that was barely a tropical storm by the time it reached me. This time it’s likely to be different.
So, I’ll be posting pictures, videos, etc. throughout the storm. Some of it could be awesome, and some might only be awesome to me, but I’ll at least have fun doing it. Check back periodically for updates.
I’ll also be live streaming during portions of the storm, which you can watch at my live page. I’ll post on Facebook and Twitter when I’m going to be turning on the stream.
For the past six months I’ve used the Cr-48 I got in December on a daily basis. As you may recall, the Cr-48 is a test computer Google created and sent to chosen applicants to field test their new Chrome OS. I received one, and I’ve used it all the time. Since Google just announced that Chromebooks will start being sold commercially on June 15, I thought it was time I talked about my experience using it.
It’s that time of the year again: Blue Angels at the Naval Academy. Every year the team of stunt aviators comes to Annapolis during Commissioning Week. It’s a highlight of the season for Annapolitans, and massive crowds line the banks of the Severn River to watch the show.
So here we are at the conclusion of a months-long journey in pursuit of the Ultimate Blogger position, and despite lots of effort and tons of support, it didn’t work out. While I’m certainly disappointed (who wouldn’t be?) it’s not the end of the world, and I have other things to pursue and will continue building my own products and brands.
I continue to be grateful to and flattered by the massive outpouring of support and voting during the course of the contest, and I hope that everyone who helped me try to achieve this goal understands how much I appreciate their efforts. It’s been truly amazing to see such a huge group of people helping me. Thank you.
Lastpass, my favorite password management solution, noticed a “network traffic anomaly” on their servers yesterday which they couldn’t account for. They immediately notified users that they were investigating if any data was breached, and said this:
Because we can’t account for this anomaly either, we’re going to be paranoid and assume the worst: that the data we stored in the database was somehow accessed. We know roughly the amount of data transferred and that it’s big enough to have transferred people’s email addresses, the server salt and their salted password hashes from the database. We also know that the amount of data taken isn’t remotely enough to have pulled many users encrypted data blobs.
So basically, they don’t know for sure but better to be safe than sorry. Good on them.
The Westboro Baptist Church picketed this morning at Meade High School. As I discussed in a post the other day, they based today’s demonstration on claims that the school has a large number of homosexual students. When they announced their intentions, a surge of counter protest movements fired up, and the result was impressive.