tech

From Network World: Emoticon-based “Moby Dick” gets its day in the sun: In the US Library of Congress (Network World):

The US Library of Congress welcomed Moby Dick onto its vaunted shelves this week but it wasn't the famous Herman Melville-penned whale tale version oh no, it was the version told exclusively in emoticon - you know those little signs like J, ;). Emoji are the emoticons typically used in Japanese texting though they obviously are used world-wide to annoy or entertain everyone depending on your opinion of them.

Called "Emoji Dick," the emoticon book project was undertaken back in 2009 by data engineer Fred Benenson. According to the Library of Congress' blog, in 2009 Benenson started a campaign to fund the "Emoji Dick" project and within a month raised enough money to put it together - $3,500.

Here's the Kickstarter video for the project:

Computer security experts have long decried the practice of "security by obscurity"; keeping the design of a system secret cannot effectively protect it from attackers, because points of compromise won't stay hidden long.

Montreal’s Dawson College has taken the failure of security by obscurity one step further with what we might call "security by expulsion":

Ahmed Al-Khabaz expelled from Dawson College after finding security flaw

Ahmed Al-Khabaz, a 20-year-old computer science student at Dawson and a member of the school’s software development club, was working on a mobile app to allow students easier access to their college account when he and a colleague discovered what he describes as “sloppy coding” in the widely used Omnivox software which would allow “anyone with a basic knowledge of computers to gain access to the personal information of any student in the system, including social insurance number, home address and phone number, class schedule, basically all the information the college has on a student.”

At her blog Infotropism, Alex “Skud” Bayley posts about what Silicon Valley is doing to our civilization, and why she still doesn’t want to work for Google.

Since I’ve been out of the Silicon-Valley-centred tech industry, I’ve become increasingly convinced that it’s morally bankrupt and essentially toxic to our society. Companies like Google and Facebook — in common with most public companies — have interests that are frequently in conflict with the wellbeing of — I was going to say their customers or their users, but I’ll say “people” in general, since it’s wider than that. People who use their systems directly, people who don’t — we’re all affected by it, and although some of the outcomes are positive a disturbingly high number of them are negative: the erosion of privacy, of consumer rights, of the public domain and fair use, of meaningful connections between people and a sense of true community, of beauty and care taken in craftsmanship, of our very physical wellbeing. No amount of employee benefits or underfunded Google.org projects can counteract that.

This came up on Facebook, and I thought it worth a quick post here. From time to time you may see e-mail or files with a date of December 31, 1969. What the heck?

The explanation is that many computer systems measure time as the number of seconds since January 1, 1970 12:00 am UTC. (Sort of. Leap seconds make it complicated. See the wik's article on "Unix Time" for the gory details.)

So a time of "0" indicates that date and time -- which in any U.S. timezone, would have been the night of December 31, 1969. (UTC, for most practical purposes, is "Greenwich Mean Time", and so is a few hours ahead of the U.S.)

And if your file doesn't have valid time information attached to it, or your e-mail has a garbled Date: header, the system will treat it as 0, and claim that it's from the dawn of the 70s.

So now you know. And knowing's half the battle.