jeffrey k eliasen

I know I'm a little late getting the word out, but if you own a website, you should be striking against SOPA today. It's pretty easy to set up, just add a JavaScript snippet to your homepage and it will do the right thing both today (striking) and tomorrow (when it's over)... see the link for details on what to do.

Wikipedia (which, by the way, is striking by making all pages except two unavailable today) has more about SOPA and what it is.

OK, so you've decided that it's just too hard to do security right: to have strong passwords for important sites, to use 2-step authentication, etc. Well, here's one story of what happened during and after a Gmail account was hacked:

As email, documents, and almost every aspect of our professional and personal lives moves onto the “cloud”—remote servers we rely on to store, guard, and make available all of our data whenever and from wherever we want them, all the time and into eternity—a brush with disaster reminds the author and his wife just how vulnerable those data can be. A trip to the inner fortress of Gmail, where Google developers recovered six years’ worth of hacked and deleted e‑mail, provides specific advice on protecting and backing up data now—and gives a picture both consoling and unsettling of the vulnerabilities we can all expect to face in the future.

Most border crossings are uneventful, but if you have sensitive data on your electronic devices, you may be in for some surprises if you assume the data is private:

For now, a border agent has the legal authority to search your electronic devices at the border even if she has no reason to think that you’ve done anything wrong.

The EFF has a great guide for maintaining your privacy:

Different people will choose different kinds of precautions to protect their data at the border based on their experience, perception of risk, and other factors. There is no particular approach we can recommend for all travelers.

They go on to explain the options and make recommendations for many common scenarios.

Sometimes it's important to push your fears aside and experience the world. Scott Adams spent the last year doing just that:

As 2011 approached, I wondered what would happen if, for the next 12 months, I said yes to any opportunity that was new or dangerous or embarrassing or unwise. I decided to find out.

A fascinating technical/scientific piece about the destructive power of asteroids and a simple strategy to defend Earth from them:

Apparently, bad security has led to the naughty list being leaked on the internet:

Here's another commentary on the uselessness of most of the security programs in place in airports:

To a large number of security analysts, this expenditure makes no sense. The vast cost is not worth the infinitesimal benefit. Not only has the actual threat from terror been exaggerated, they say, but the great bulk of the post-9/11 measures to contain it are little more than what Schneier mocks as “security theater”: actions that accomplish nothing but are designed to make the government look like it is on the job. In fact, the continuing expenditure on security may actually have made the United States less safe.

"Let's just tax the rich, that will pay for everything!"

Nope, it doesn't work like that:

Do you say 'yes' to opportunities in your life?