technology

Has the US National Park Service gone rogue?

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The short TL;DR; answer is probably not, and officially they continue to maintain a politically neutral position. So what inspired the question? The National Mall, the bit of land between the US Capital and the Lincoln Memorial, is officially managed by the US National Park Service. As you are no doubt aware, when Mr T … Read more

What the heck is a TOR Exit Node?

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When writing about an analysis of the report on the Russian Hacking the other day, the following was mentioned … …What we’re seeing in this IP data is a wide range of countries and hosting providers. 15% of the IP addresses are Tor exit nodes. These exit nodes are used by anyone who wants to be anonymous online, … Read more

What is the best source for accurate information?

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The TL;DR; (Too Long; Didn’t Read) answer for the question in the subject line is that Wikipedia is. When you have vast swathes of the human population interacting on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter then it tends to naturally devolve into bubbles. For example those that support Hillary will be sufficiently motivated … Read more

Protecting the privacy of cows

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This is not a serious posting, and I am not making any specific point. Instead it is something funny that caught my eye. Automated software solutions can at times results in unintended consequences and this is one such example, Google street view software takes individual privacy seriously (quick rightly) and so it will automatically blur out … Read more

“The Great Kersten Blunder”

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Phil Plait writes about the “The Great Kersten Blunder”, the story of a probe to Venus that was lost because a programmer made a stupid mistake. OK, first the actual story. The great Kersten Blunder is about the error made by Kersten (programmer) on the Vigor space probe’s converting program. He made an error in the … Read more