Bruce Schneier responds to the Kristof column that recommmends national ID cards. Bruce replies that they would make us less secure.

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My host’s server died yesterday and didn’t come back until this morning. Sorry for the interruption.

I don’t know yet what will happen to email you sent me yesterday. Apparently it’s all going to arrive soon. Sorry for the inconvenience.

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Kevin Salwen points to Starbucks’ report on how corporately responsible it is. And, while I certainly would rather work for a company that cares enough to issue such a report than the egregiously selfish ad agency Kevin points to, the Starbucks report does raise a question: Who do you trust any more?

So, Starbucks does up a lovely color brochure explaining just how good a world citizen it is. Kudos for at least pretending to care. But how much of the report is BS? …

Continued at Worthwhile…

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Technorati has made it easy to see which other blogs are commenting on one of your blog entries. Click on “BlogThread” at the end of one of my entries to see how it works. (For purposes of example, pick one that has some TrackBacks.) Dave Sifry explains how to do it here. [Later that same day: I’m adopting Esther Dyson’s suggestion of “Threadorati” instead of BlogThreads.]

This is a lot like TrackBacks, which were introduced by MovableType, except the aggregation of referring sites is done by Technorati as part of its continuous polling of the blogosphere. With TrackBacks, your blogging software automatically pings aggregation sites whenever you post anything. Technorati’s feature — which I’m calling “BlogThreads” in honor of the comatose ThreadsML, an attempt to make discussion threads interchangeable — works with any blogging software. (This blog uses MT, by the way. I’m very happy with it.)

Technorati continues to be very, very cool.

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So, when Symantec’s Anti-Virus program — which has been around for, what, 75 years? — lists the viruses it’s found, it gives you the three key pieces of information: The name of the infected file, the virus, and the action Symantec took to fix the problem.

Click on this image to see the full screen capture.

Unfortunately, there’s not enough room in the window to list everything. And it’s an un-resizable window with no horizontal scroll bar. And, no, hovering doesn’t work.

Another couple of decades and maybe Symantec will get this right.

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I thought it was just an oddity of my particular set up, but I’ve heard from a reader that he’s having the same problem:

If you do the ^F search thing on this very page as viewed in Microsoft Internet Explorer, Explorer will terminally hang and you’ll have to Ctl-Alt-Del your way out of it.

But, wait, it’s weirder than that! Search for a word that’s visible and near the top, and it’ll work. For example, if you’re reading this in the main blog, not in an archive, try searching for “LCD”. Should be fine. Now try searching for “Scotty,” which is toward the bottom. Hang city.

Happening to you, too? Is IE a total piece of shite or what? (Yes, I do use FirePlace or FireMe or FireStone, or whatever the hell the new Mozilla build is called these days.)

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I’m thinking about switching to an LCD since I’ve been having problems with my 22″ Viewsonic CRT. Just about any LCD will be good enough for text work, I figure, but I’d also like it to work acceptably for fast-paced (= shoot everything) games.

Any thoughts?

And, care to tell me if the following assumption is true? Since 19″ and 17″ LCDs run at the same resolution, there’s not much point in paying the extra couple of hundred bucks for the larger one: It’s just making the pixels bigger.

And the truth is that I’m thinking about getting two LCDs since I use up a lot of real estate in the course of a workday; I typically have 30+ windows open at a time.

Comments, criticisms, instructions to get a Mac?

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Ah, what a perfect morning. Crispy matzoh for breakfast, a cup of delicious coffee, and then a couple of hours trying to clean my PC of adware and spyware, some of it fiendishly clever and as tough to pry out as a hermit crab that’s grown into its shell.

Adaware works pretty well – extremely well since it’s free – but there are some objects that it can’t delete because they are in use. And neither can I, even doing a safe mode start-up. Die 3avxfmcodec.cpy.dll, die!

Some of the little wankers get loaded via my Hosts file, and then reload themselves after I manually delete them. WinPatrol – also free – has been doing a good job of monitoring the various soft startup bellies of XP, notifying me when a program is trying to add itself to auto-start, hijacking my home page or is juist hanging around the schoolyard asking kids leading questions. Their persistence is almost admirable.

Get a Mac? And miss the thrill of editing the Registry? Not on your life!

Thanks to Jason Lefkowitz’s comment, I got a copy of SpyBot. It’s good, but not good enough to get rid of two of the vermin on my system: Something continued to overwrite my HOSTS file, putting in redirects, and something was causing IE to spin up an unwanted page. Even running it while in Safe mode didn’t work.

I’m crossing my fingers that I’ve got it licked. I saved a fixed version of the HOSTS file and locked it against alteration, and I hand edited the Registry, especially some of the funky entries in HKey_USERS/S-1-5-21…etc/Software/Microsoft/Internet Explorer. (The middle set of numerals is too long to write out.) Check entries like SearchUrl and Toolbar. And good luck to you.

PS: Remember to set a savepoint and to save your Registry before mucking about with it.

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An entire generation, plus 30 years of psychoanalysis, all in a five-word phrase:

His [David Carradine’s] costar, Barbara Hershey, later gave birth to their son Free, who now calls himself Tom.

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Over at Loose Democracy, I’ve blogged about two questions I hope the Commission gets around to: Why did we help 140 Saudis leave the US in the first couple of days after 9/11? And why was Ashcroft warned not to fly commercial airlines 6 weeks before 9/11? I’m trying not to be paranoid…

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