Holidazzle (Pt 1) Santa’s Sleigh

Santa’s Sleigh
ISO 3200, 1/30S, F4.5, Hand Held

On Wednesday, we went down to watch the Holidazzle parade. We had tried to go on Saturday, but realized when we got down there that we had made a fatal mistake:

We went on a Saturday. And the weather was nice.

Bad idea.

But Wednesday? That’s the day to go.

I brought my camera down and fooled around taking some low light photos. This is the first of three that I liked a lot.

Laugh Out Loud Funny

Oh man, if you have cats, this post over on Flea’s blog is soooo funny.

Steve called me at work. “The cat’s throwing up bubbles,” he said. “Solid bubbles. I’ve been moving her around the house everytime I hear her gacking, then I scrub the bubbles into the carpet. The floor looks cleaner now than it has in years.”

Referrers were borked

Hmm. Looks like the upgrade to the latest version of Serendipity turned off the referrer tracking.

Silly software.

So I have no referrer data after 10/27.

I have renabled referrer tracking, so I should start seeing some data again (assuming that anyone is actually referring traffic to me.)

If you upgraded your Serendipity install recently, and you want referrer tracking, you might want to check your settings.

Personal firewall for the RFIDs you carry

From BoingBoing comes this wonderful information:

A Platform for RFID Security and Privacy Administration is a paper by Melanie R. Rieback and Georgi N. Gaydadjiev that won the award for Best Paper at the USENIX LISA (Large Installation Systems Administration) conference today. It proposes a “firewall for RFID tags” — a device that sits on your person and jams the signals from all your personal wireless tags (transit passes, etc), then selectively impersonates them according to rules you set. Your contactless transit card will only send its signal when you authorize it, not when some jerk with an RFID scanner snipes it as you walk down the street. The implementation details are both ingenious and plausible — it’s a remarkable piece of work. Up until now, the standard answer to privacy concerns with RFIDs is to just kill them — put your new US Passport in a microwave for a few minutes to nuke the chip. But with an RFID firewall, it might be possible to reap the benefits of RFID without the cost.

This is a must-read paper for anyone who cares about electronic privacy and who wants to catch a glimpse of the future.

Here is the pdf.