Just another nerd.
A couple weeks ago, Mattel launched its online collector store MattyCollector.com. Basically, the store offers hard-to-find and exclusive figures. They offered limited quantities of their SDCC figures, for example.
Later this Fall they’re going to sell this Adam Strange/Starfire DCUC two-pack exclusively online. Nice.
Firefox 3 changed how it handles self-signed SSL certificates — it gives users a big scary full-page warning that “The certificate is not trusted because it is self signed.” You can add an exception for sites using self-signed certificates, but Firefox will warn you that ““Legitimate sites will not ask you to do this.”
The change has made some people unhappy, including Nat Tuck Thu who writes,
Now, it’s an interesting question as to exactly what the user interface should show for a self-signed website. Obviously it shouldn’t show a green address bar like the new (extra high price, major corporation only) EV certificates. But there is absolutely no excuse for it to be significanly less inviting to a normal user than an unencrypted site.
This is really an issue of the basic principles of internet openness. Everyone has equal access to the features of HTTP or SSH, there’s no reason why there should be artifical constraints on access to HTTPS. But that’s exactly what the Firefox SSL behavior does.
In response to various critics of the Firefox approach, Johnathan Nightingale makes a persuasive case in favor of Firefox’s handling of self-signed certificates,
The question isn’t whether you trust your buddy’s webmail – of course you do, your buddy’s a good guy – the question is whether that’s even his server at all. With a CA-signed cert, we trust that it is – CAs are required to maintain third party audits of their issuing criteria, and Mozilla requires verification of domain ownership to be one of them.
With a self-signed certificate, we don’t know whether to trust it or not. It’s not that these certificates are implicitly evil, it’s that they are implicitly untrusted – no one has vouched for them, so we ask the user. There is language in the dialogs that talks about how legitimate banks and other public web sites shouldn’t use them, because it is in precisely those cases that we want novice users to feel some trepidation, and exercise some caution. There is a real possibility there, hopefully slim, that they are being attacked, and there is no other way for us to know.
On the other hand – if you visit a server which does have a legitimate need for a self-signed certificate, Firefox basically asks you to say “I know you don’t trust this certificate, but I do.” You add an exception, and assuming you make it permanent, Firefox will begin trusting that specific cert to identify that specific site. What’s more, you’ll now get the same protection as a CA signed cert – if you are attacked and someone tries to insert themselves between you and your webmail, the warning will come up again.
One of the complaints I’ve seen in a number of forums is that with a CA signed cert you’re paying potentially hundreds of dollars, but it turns out there are free cert provides. StartSSL, for example, has a free cert, for example. They verify domain ownership by requiring you to upload an arbitrary file to the website you want the cert for.
Michael Birken dug up and reworked Mike Mayfield’s 39 year old text-based Star Trek game.
When I was in high school back in the early 1980s, the library had some sort of DEC terminal hooked up to a modem that had a number of simple programs, with this Star Trek game being one of them. Now, we’re talking like 1982 or 1983 so there was no monitor — the terminal was literally a dot matrix printer and every time you would enter a command, the printer would print out the next “screen” (which was why it was in the terminal was in its own special room).
Star Trek, Adventure, Eliza…we spent many a lunch hour wasting paper that way.
PZ Meyers linked to this review of Richard Dawkins’ new documentary ‘The Genius of Darwin’. The reviewer, Charlie Brooker, has a wit about as acerbic as Dawkins’, writing,
Darwin’s theory of evolution was simple, beautiful, majestic and awe-inspiring. But because it contradicts the allegorical babblings of a bunch of made-up old books, it’s been under attack since day one. That’s just tough luck for Darwin. If the Bible had contained a passage that claimed gravity is caused by God pulling objects toward the ground with magic invisible threads, we’d still be debating Newton with idiots too.
Since Darwin’s death, Dawkins points out, the evidence confirming his discovery has piled up and up and up, many thousand feet above the point of dispute. And yet heroically, many still dispute it. They’re like couch potatoes watching Finding Nemo on DVD who’ve suffered some kind of brain haemorrhage which has led them to believe the story they’re watching is real, that their screen is filled with water and talking fish, and that that’s all there is to reality – just them and that screen and Nemo – and when you run into the room and point out the DVD player and the cables connecting it to the screen, and you open the windows and point outside and describe how overwhelming the real world is – when you do all that, it only spooks them. So they go on believing in Nemo, with gritted teeth if necessary.
Ouch.
I definitely have regrets in my life and things I’d like to do over, and at the top of the list is the time when I was about 12 years old and checked out and read the entirety of Andrija Phuarich’s ridiculous biography of Uri Geller. I’d really like that week back. What’s always amazed me about Geller is not that he is a fraud but that was such a hack of a fraud — and yet, got all that media attention anyway.
Anyway, Geller’s fraud is trivially easy to expose and you can find videos on YouTube pointing out how he does all his magic tricks. That apparently pissed Geller off, so he sent a DMCA notice to take down one compilation of clips that had been posted on YouTube, asserting that the compilation contained 8 seconds of a clip from a Geller-owned video.
EFF filed suit against Geller’s in 2007, and later a Geller-owned company named Explorologist also got involved. On August 4, however, the EFF announced that not only had they settled the lawsuit with Geller and Explorologist, but as part of the settlement Explorologist agreed to license the disputed footage under a non-commercial Creative Commons license so its free to use to criticize Geller’s nonsensical claims.
Or, in other words, Geller and his company caved after the ridiculousness of their position became clear. For once, I suspect Geller really did get bent out of shape.
Somehow I missed this Seagate press release announcing the release of a 1.5 TB hard drive planned to ship in August. Alas, no pricing.
However, the downward pricing on magnetic media continues unabated. I’ve seen 750gb HDs from big retailers hitting the $110 range. At the rate prices keep dropping, it won’t be much longer before the cost/gb of hard drives falls below that of optical media like DVD+R.
The bigger long term problem, at least for those like me who like to have optical-media backups is that Blu-Ray media is still very high. The cheapest I could find 25gb Blue-Ray write-once media was $11.50 which is 46 cents/gb. Three times higher than magnetic media, and nine times higher than DVD+R on a per gigabyte basis.