Here is Where I Carry on about my Daily Life, and usually some stuff about Technology!
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Originally I wrote this as a possible guest-submission to Dave Schmelzer’s Blog, but silly-me, I had forgotten that a similar topic had been covered in a couple previous posts around September-October time-frame. So, in the future, Lauren may submit something as a guest-blog over there that extends upon this idea and proposes some other questions that are related. This had accidentally appeared once on LJ while still in draft status, due to a mistake in how I handled the cross-posting plugin, so I’m deleting a few old comments (sorry Rob and Bob), and opening this up for new comments because after editing the post took a different tone than originally was planned.
Please share your thoughts, I’d love to hear what some of my friends who don’t frequent Dave’s blog think about this topic.
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Every year for my wife’s birthday she has a movie marathon and shows 6 of her favorite movies throughout the day. A perennial favorite has been Iron Jawed Angels, a movie about Alice Paul fighting for women’s suffrage.
( The 'Ethanol Effect' when tackling the worlds issues )
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http://thejuliegroup.blogspot.com/
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081124-teacher-in-porn-popup-case-dodges-jail-loses-creds.html
This type of thing makes me really mad. This woman suffered pretty horrible consequences of a hacker/virus, and no official can admit that.
The worst part is the people brought in to testify as ‘expert’ witnesses.
Maybe it is my tech-background chip on my shoulder, but these are the people that stifle innovation and forward thinking. School IT administrators, law enforcement types, etc, who think that their position makes them moral authorities. And what is worse is that they are incompetent at their jobs.
A slightly more in-the-know lawyer (oddly a profession that is slow to adapt to new technologies according to my father-in-law) could have blown holes in these testimonies with just a little bit of prior discovery, and a counter-witness who could demonstrate exactly how quickly a computer could be compromised and the effects that happen when it is.
It is simple cause-and-effect - you can install windows in half an hour in a court-room, set it up with basic drivers while a jury is watching, and then install the virus and show immediate effects of it.
Case closed, trial over, IT guy fired, cyber-forensic guy fired.
There is a similar case where a really insidious virus puts child-porn into the browser cache and local RAM w/o ever visiting websites or other content providers that may cause the problem.
So you have evidence of being a child pornographer who is only half-way competent at covering your tracks. Which of course makes you look more guilty initially.
Maybe it is my over-inflamed sense of justice that my wife accuses me of having, but this type of thing gets me really incensed when I read about it.
The lessons learned here are: don’t be quick to judge when it comes to computer crime, be open to being wrong if you form an opinion in cyber-crime cases, and make sure you use a secure browser and don’t install things from websites just all willy-nilly and install virus scanners. (there are free ones like AVG free edition, ClamWIN, AntiVir, etc)
Lauren and I have been trying to do better at recycling (unfortunately Minneapolis makes you sort it, so I forget a lot) and we have probably cut our actual trash in half or better in the last 6 months.
Also, I’ve been doing a lot of work over the last year for the solar market (CIGS solar to be exact), and I’ve been attending a lot of talks on Green buildings (particularly churches) at the conferences I’ve attended and I’ve had an interesting realization.
Being Green, particularly the principal of understanding where things you consume come from, and where the waste and other end products of consuming those things goes, and who that affects, can be really relevant to other areas of life.
( A application that matters to me )
So, let me know what you think. Am I over-thinking here, or is there a way you think that I or we as global citizens could be more ‘green-minded’ in areas that aren’t necessarily considered green.
