This week I'm at the Recurse Center as part of the "Mini 2 Batch". I'll be spending my time researching and implementing the Kademlia Distributed Hash Table. DHT's are a building block of decentralized systems. They allow "efficient" storage and access of data that is both produced by many untrusted computers and stored by many untrusted computers. I use quotes around "efficient" because while it's absolutely more efficient than previous systems …
I was expressing frustration with moving money around the other day and was asked to share what I knew. This is an incomplete list of ways to move money, and their consequences. Moving money (and in turn getting paid or paying others) is one of the most important yet strangely high-friction things a business has to do. On top of that, most of it is frustrating from a technical standpoint.
I'm not going to cover moving money on behalf of other peo…
If you saw me talk at ManhattanJS you know I have a dream about a decentralized mesh network that supports decentralized applications that cater to our decentralized behaviors.
There are a lot of parts to this dream, the hardware, the network, the software, the apps, the critical mass. All sorts of things. A ton of things. So I have to start somewhere. hackerchat should be the app with some plugable network backends. The two backends I have are o…
I got one of them Drink Shields and assembled it today. It uses a Alcohol Gas Sensor MQ-3 to take readings and displays them on a light bar that goes up to 11. No idea how to convert this to BAC but one beer didn't even push one led a few minutes after drinking. The datasheet says it needs a 20 hour burn in before the sensor becomes reliable so we'll have to see.
[gallery link="file" columns="2"]
This originally started as an email to some coworkers, but I think people here might find it more interesting.
If you have an amex online account they limit your password to 8 characters and you can only use numbers and letters. That’s not very secure (I could write a program to guess every password in those restraints in a matter of minutes.). So someone complained. (Note: I’ve complained by phone myself and got no response.)
I wish that I coul…
I write more for other people's blogs then I do my own.
When I think of the Kindle, I think of an awesome device (the big one is wonderful to use) with a free data connection that needs to be hacked to be useful. Hacked to remove the ability to remove books. Hacked to allow browsing of the web. Hacked to allow my own content to be freely placed on the device. The hacking negates the free data plan because the device no longer functions along Ama…
I found a really cool jQuery graphing plugin over atThe Filament Group. They constantly pump out great little toolkits they make for their clients. I'm just a consumer at the moment, but I'm loving the idea that I can cultivate what I learn into something I can share back. All in time. Another iFrame today. If you can't see the table and graph below (or if you want to check the source) check out theoriginal document
This fancy post needs iframe…
On a side note trying to put html/js in a wordpress post is a bad experience. If the iframe doesn't work try ithere.This post requires javascript and now uses an iframe so you may have trouble viewing it in an rss reader.
Torrent Freak writes about a counter measure:
Yesterday we reported that a provision in the revamped French “3 strikes” bill will allow for the punishment of ISP account holders for the copyright infringing actions of others. Now a group of hackers has set out to compromise WiFi routers en masse, in order to create an environment of plausible deniability.
I very much like this idea. It goes to show they're missing the point. They can't stop peo…
Michael Jackson died yesterday prompting a DDOS attack on the worlds news organizations and Google. Whatever became of him doesn't change the fact he knew what he was doing when it came to putting on a performance and singing a song. I'm going to share one my favorite facts about him, he had a patent for shoes.
Method and means for creating anti-gravity illusion
No wires just shoes.
It's fascinating to watch these videos, but boy is he ever weir…
The Beatles are important to me. This game is an embodiment of them.
You need JavaScript to view this post.
This is a talk from "America's Greenest CEO". He's transformed his petroleum intensive carpet tile company's business practices into a sustainable business practices. That's a fancy way to say he's shifted from taking from the earth to make carpet (which eventually ends up as trash) and started paying attention to the whole cycle of his goods. So there's less waste, carbon, and materials. He tasked his company to figure out a way to use sustainab…
I'm cleaning up some old draft posts that I never wrote out. This one is even more relevant today then when I planned to write it.
https://www124.americanexpress.com/cards/loyalty.do?page=expresspay
http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/19/rfid-credit-cards-easily-hacked-with-8-reader/
I own a dirfwear wallet, and while it isn't perfect at blocking rfid tags at close range (3-4 inches) its a dam good walet and will stop distanc…
This post contains a little bit of bragging. My internet setup at work is pretty simple, we have two T1 lines (not counting our voip trunk or our DID lines but that's sort of telephone) going into two different Cisco PIX firewalls and behind those an old Cisco 2600 to do basic routing.
One does NATing and port forwarding for our normal internet usage, as well as port forwarding from different IPs for our email and web servers. It's important tha…
I've changed dsn servers today for roborooter and few other domains, let me know if you had a domain and it stopped working. Or if you can't send me email, jabber requests or anything like that.
-Francis
PS For the record DNS Made Easy is a good service I just don't need it.
