Posted in Computer | August 12th, 2010 | No Comments »
Got this message from Google Voice today:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
and received this handy transcription:
It’s not a matter and I want to make a single. But I think the rest of the not. If you’re not. You’re gonna.
Unfortunately, Google Voice didn’t recognize that the message had been left in Spanish, and so the message makes no sense. What’s really funny is that while it bears no relation to the sense of the message in Spanish as the Spanish speakers among you will recognize, Google Voice did a great job of making sense of the sounds assuming the speaker was speaking English!
Posted in Journal | August 9th, 2010 | No Comments »
Posted in AncientHistory | July 31st, 2010 | No Comments »
Now that smartphones are everywhere and seemingly everyone is hooked into the social web, there are a number of different ways to keep tabs on whats going on at Pennsic in real time even from afar. I’ll keep poking around for new links and updating this post as I come across them.

Posted in Computer | July 25th, 2010 | No Comments »
Just a short note to my military friends. Doubtless you’ll be hearing about this soon enough anyway, but just in case you do not: Tom Ryan is due to present a talk at the upcoming Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas about the dangers of revealing too much information on social networking sites. According to reports on computerworld, FOXNews, and Armed with Science [dod.mil], Ryan ran an experiment to see how much sensitive information he could glean through social networking. He created the ficticious persona of “Robin Sage”, a good-looking twenty-something, hacker grad from MIT who claimed to be an intern at Naval Network Command. In the month Ryan ran the experiment he was able to build a considerable number of social networking connections on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn with active duty military personnel and officials and through these connections was able to glean military intelligence. The simplest and most obviously dangerous example of leaked information should be of immediate concern to military folks:
For example, one of Robin’s soldier friends posted a photo of his unit on surveillance duties at a mountain outpost in Afghanistan. That inadvertently exposed their location, because the photo contained GeoIP data from the camera.