Weather
On the weather and other natural phenomenon.
Rain, in LA? In May?
What next? Cats and dogs sleeping toghether?
Oh Canada
A little northern snow in the great white north.
26c3 Berlin
26c3 was a blast, as was Berlin. It’s a good conference in the olde school hacker style: mostly younger people, mostly wearing black. There weren’t a lot of women, but Carolyn, Isabella, and Meredith tried to even out the ratio a bit.
Some of the best lectures included one by some German engineers working on the lunar x-prize. They had their prototype rover with them and gave a great talk about the various challenges.
Another great one was Dan Kaminski’s talk on PKI. I don’t agree with the premise that SSL should be a reliable method for identifying the owners of websites as people just can’t tell the difference between bankofamerica.com and bancomerica.com and so it doesn’t make anyone safer if the bankofamerica site is super green if bancomerica.com is also super green, and so the complexities of getting an accepted certificate simply reduce the use of secure connections and the overall security of the internet. But he had some pretty great attacks on the security of SSL that causes problems no matter what.
We enjoyed fuzzing the phone as well. It was a very entertaining talk on attacking phones with crafted SMSes. The method of creating the attacks was very clever – rooting the phone, redirecting the radio to a wifi link to a CPU so they could try zillions of SMS and see what would happen. In the process they discovered they could remotely root the communications manager (which runs as root). And %n to specific windows phones and they’ll crash and fail to reboot until the SMS is cleared out of the inbox.
Berlin is a great city and it was fun working in the shadow of the TV tower.
We made reservations for lunch but we could tell it wasn’t going to be a great day. In the end it was a very intimate lunch with pretty clouds pressing against the glass.
The fog lifted but was replaced by snow, which is a lot of fun in a city when you don’t have to drive.
WOOT! 34C 98F
Nice April weather, I can’t wait for August. Can I have some more CO2 please?
As Bender Says: “We’re Boned.”
There is a great article in this week’s New Scientist by James Lovelock about the state of Global Warming and “green” mitigation strategies. His view is not comforting, nor does he mince words. It is a great read and I highly recommend it.
I’ve had ongoing discussions with friends about how much of a scam carbon trading is and about what technologies have any viability from a system level analysis. James addressed many of my favorite subjects and he’s obviously very bright because I tend to agree with him (though the biochar sequestration idea is not viable on the wee amount of biomass created through global agriculture compared to the global system as a whole, alas).
The best part of the whole interview is James’ matter of fact assessment of a likely genetic bottleneck in the next century. He seems optimistic for the outcome as an evolutionary driver, which is a pleasantly cheerful way to look at near extinction of the human race, a substantial “cull,” as he puts it.
Canada = Snow
My nice Buick rental car covered in snow.
It was quiet but underpowered.
Tossed like a Salad…
The New York Times had an article about the trials of the survivors of Ike in Texas. Pretty dramatic, but nothing highlights the malevolence of a storm than an allusion to tossed salad:
“Outside, the peninsula was under siege. Flooding and winds moved beach houses onto the highway, tore off awnings and walls, and rushed straight through houses and businesses, leaving their roofs intact but their insides tossed into a salad of clothing, furniture and debris.”
Pretty Cool Contrail and Halo
Odd atmospheric effects for a summer day in California. This is a 22 degree halo, sometimes called an “icebow.”
Bay Area Fires
The sunset has been rather surreal lately. The skies are filled with smoke that it seems heavily overcast all day.
Snowy Toronto
I’ve been going to Toronto every week. And every week it snows. Usually my flights are delayed, many times I get to the airport and it is clear and while I’m waiting the storm moves in and the cancellations cascade.
So far there has been 189.6 cm of snow here, putting this winter in 4th place in Toronto history. But tonight it snowed again, at least a cm, and that’d put us in 3rd place overtaking 190.6cm. The record was set in the winter of 1938-39: 207.4cm.
