If you don’t think this is a problem, I suggest you invite the police to come into your home and search through all your records, all your receipts, all your drawers, everything. I’m sure they can find some little law somewhere you broke (got an illegal radar detector? Didn’t pay USE tax on those internet purchases? Maybe a bad cop finds some intimate photos of you and the wife and decides to earn some money on the side by blackmailing you, or just enjoy them personally), cross your fingers.

Right now there is little to NOTHING you can do about it. And this hasn’t received much attention from mainstream press yet, which is sad. It’s all done in the name of protecting against terrorist and child molesters, and it will likely help neither of those causes. What it does mean are your corporate secrets on those company laptops are now the Government’s. All those personal moments in email and photos are now the Government’s. Your new idea you haven’t gotten patented yet that was going to let you break into the big time? Yeah, gov’t has it now.

If you worry at all about this (which you should if you travel internationally) you should write your representatives. They could at least have the common courtesy of setting some regulations and limitations on it. Oh, and yes other Governments can do this too. Flying into the UK? Yes they can search you just the same. Think twice about your laptop, smartphone, pda, they hold a LOT of information.

Here is a good article talking about how you might be able to do to protect your “Intellectual Property” (I hate that term, but at least I’m using it for good, kinda). Schneier on Security

Last year I actually missed out on attending LinuxWorld as I was on baby watch (the little one was due any day around that time), but looking forward to making it this year!

So, it’s very sad to learn that one of the creators of the original D&D and really one of the fathers off all modern RPG systems has passed away. Gary Gygax, co creator of D&D, passed away yesterday. Thank you for everything you’ve given us Gary!

More information here

Dungeons and Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax dies.

“Verizon Wireless Says ‘Bring Your Own’ Device”

Very interesting, but after reading it, all it really sounds like is a slightly refined version of what GSM networks are all about. I have for the past 3 years brought my own device (in my case an Unlocked Treo) to AT&Ts network. I bought phone and data plans independent of the device (which admittedly kinda stretches the boundaries of some of AT&Ts policy, they have an idea of what plans I should have, which is different from what I think I need and have).

It will be interesting to find out what the eventual details will be, is it just going to be a SIM card for CDMA networks? Or will it be something more?

Have to wait and see I guess.

Failed SSH logins: 2971

Failed FTP logins: 18,415

Faild SMTP logins: 1656

And this is not a server hosting super popular websites or mirrors. This is just a no name server hosting a couple of websites. In the past I used to contact the owners of the IP addresses these came from, but it became tedious and difficult. They’re often internet providers dynamic IPs of clients, which the ISP tends to not care they are attacking my server (most likely, they are trojaned anyways).

All these attempted attacks do is waste resources. They waste my bandwidth, processing, and storage (the log files).

Just me deciding to put into writing one of my daily annoyances.

Well, decided for now I’d just do a minor upgrade when I found a real good deal on a used but practically new Treo 680. It gives me a slightly smaller and lighter form factor, no antenna stub, more onboard ram, and better bluetooth than the Treo 650. Minor improvements, but enough hopefully to hold out till Palm, Apple, or Blackberry put out something compelling.

Oh and for the record, I’m not very impressed with any of the Windows or Symbian based smartphones out currently. The few Symbian phones that look cool are only available overseas and lack the US frequencies I need.

So I have a little more breathing room to wait for the smartphone of my dreams, and keep dreaming…

You can find it here.

Here are the specs of my MythTV Box:

• Fedora Core 6 (may migrate to CentOS 5)
• AMD Athlon 64 x2 3800 CPU
• 2 GB DDR Ram (512MB x 4)
• 2x Seagate 400GB SATA 300 HD in Raid 1 (will migrate to Raid 0 soon)
• nVidia 6150 Chipset motherboard with built in HD scaling component video out
• MCE USB IR sensor
• Hauppauge PVR-500 Dual Analog Tuner (NTSC)
  
• Silicondust HDHomeRun Dual High Definition Tuner (ATSC/QAM)
• NMediaPC HTPC 200 Case
• Logitech Harmony 880 Remote (makes it all easy to run).

LiveTV and programmed listing recording works perfectly. I have about 360GB of space dedicated to Media storage. I’ve found that even Analog TV takes a lot of storage space (about 1GB per 30 minutes) to get good quality video that scales well to the 1920×1080i resolution I’m running on my HD TV. I’ll probably play with the analog recording settings more to try and find the optimal quality to still create nice images, but right now the picture of analog TV looks better through MythTV than it does with the TV’s built in Analog tuners. My only complaint is fast action shots show a little tearing/pixeling, but that’s more an artifact of 1080i than the MythTV. Wish the TV accepted 1080p or even 720p, but it’s an older Toshiba CRT HDTV that only does 1080i, 480p, and 480i. Still, the picture is beautiful!

Oh, and yes, I have learned that sleep is optional.

Germany enacts “anti-hacker” law