There’s been a bit of excitement recently about ISPs – namely Comcast – throttling or traffic-shaping bittorrent file-sharing traffic; in the case of Comcast, they’ve reportedly blocked all outgoing torrent traffic, which of course defeats the whole point of file sharing.
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Secrecy News posted recently a CRS report on highway bridges, that’s surely of interest to those who still remember the Interstate 35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis. At the same time, the GAO has released a report on the state of rail bridges and tunnels in this country. Amazing, once you read these, that catastrophes happen so very, thankfully, rarely.

I don’t quite recall what city this was in, but this video never fails to make me laugh – people who can’t read the giant signs, trying to follow public buses through “bus only” thoroughfares – and getting quite literally hung up on the nifty retractable bollards designed to prevent just that. Note the last fellow’s close encounter with the windshield…

One of the least-known components of the American intelligence community is the Interagency OPSEC Support Staff, or IOSS for short. They provide training, guidance, and a variety of publications to federal agencies, the military, state and local authorities, corporate interests, government and defense contractors… just about everyone, really. Except the general public.
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Spey is a neat piece of software I think I’ve written about before – an SMTP proxy with a lot of neat antispam capabilities. Recent builds include TLS support for the “STARTTLS” command. It’s not terribly difficult to get working, and is of course useful opportunistic encryption, but it should be noted – the documentation is virtually non-existent here, and everywhere else – that even when TLS is working, no mention of it is made in the email message headers, which I think is a bit… foolish. But now you know, thereby, perhaps, saving yourself quite a headache…