Let’s face it, I’m a tech geek, and my job generates a bone-fide need for USB flash drives. Alas, I’m also a crypto, privacy, and security geek; in a few months, I’ll have been using Phil Zimmerman’s PGP for ten years. I’ve got encrypted flash drives, I’ve got flash drives protected with biometric fingerprint sensors…
Read the rest of this entry »
I’d always assumed from the name that relevantnoise.com was some kind of blogosphere search engine. Gods know they spidered this site often enough. So, under the impression they were meaningful and worthwhile, I put up with their unprofessional scraping that would have gotten most others blacklisted a while ago:
64.21.98.196 - - [da/te/2007:HH:MM:24 -0600] “GET /feed/ HTTP/1.1″ 200 41843 “-” “-”
64.21.98.196 - - [29/Jan/2007:HH:MM:57 -0600] “GET /feed/ HTTP/1.1″ 200 41843 “-” “http://www.relevantnoise.com; info@relevantnoise.com”
But it turns out they’re actually a corporate intelligence service, just like the much-loathed Cyveillance. So… Here, anyway, spying for big business, together with what is either incredibly bad software design or a paranoid approach to scraping content off the web (requests from the same IP, for the same feed, thirty-three seconds apart, one with and one without a user-agent? WTF?), gets you banned. The usual offending IP is 64.21.98.196; the relevant netblock is 64.21.98.192/27.
Thanks go to A Daily Rant for pointing out Relevant Noise’s irrelevance.
It’s been three years, almost to the week, since Twin Cities filmmaker Melody Gilbert began work on Urban Explorers: Into the Darkness, the first major documentary about urban exploration and some of the people behind this unusual activity. It’s been a long time to wait, but no longer - it’s finally finished.
Read the rest of this entry »
I managed to catch the second airing of the second episode of the SciFi Channel’s new show The Dresden Files tonight. In many ways, it was an improvement over the pilot, and it’ll be interesting to see how things have changed when the show returns in two weeks’ time.
Read the rest of this entry »