In an article for Nature, Cory Doctorow, co-editor of Boing Boing, describes some of the world’s most colossal data centres. These include facilities for gene sequencing, particle physics, internet archiving, and so forth. The article includes some vivid descriptions of the massive scale at which data is being interacted with, as well as some of [...]

Today, the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group decided to approve a nuclear deal between the United States and India (which is not part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and which tested bombs between 1974 and 1998). The decision is one about which I feel ambivalent. One the one hand, it might promote the relatively responsible [...]

Written by a journalist embedded with the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion of the Marine Corps, Evan Wright’s Generation Kill describes the experience of invading Iraq alongside them in 2003. The book provides a graphic account of what transpired among the men of the Battalion and its subsidiary units, as well as on battlefields between Kuwait City [...]

Compared with his 2004 performance, Barack Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention the day before last seemed a bit lackluster. That being said, it was a more specific about the priorities of a potential Obama administration. Energy issues were touched upon a few times - the environment hardly at all - but that is [...]

In the past, I have posted a few cipher challenges for the cryptographically inclined. Here is a new one:

The above is an example of steganography rather than cryptography, though the two can be easily combined. Indeed, the same approach used above could be applied in a far more subtle and effective fashion. To save people [...]

Those enthusiastically toting their MacBooks, MacBook Pros, and MacBook Airs to coffee shops and university libraries should take note of Adeona: a free program that helps recover laptops in the event of loss or theft.
Installation is very simple: download a file, double click an installer, and choose a password. Once the program is running, it [...]