Got this message from Google Voice today:

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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!

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.

My wife has been reading books on her palm pilot for years but when the prices began to fall on the e-ink e-readers recently I urged her to get one of those instead. The e-ink screens aren’t backlit, so you have to read them in a lit room or outside but they’re reflective (like real paper) so they’re much easier on the eyes than what is, on LCD screens, essentially staring into a glowing lamp. We looked at the Amazon Kindle, the Sony e-reader and the B&N Nook. I’m a long time Amazon customer, so it seemed natural that we’d go for the Kindle, but the Kindle doesn’t support the electronic book formats that our library uses and I’m not a fan of vendor lock in like that. Also, we were afraid that we’d end up spending a lot of money for Amazon content that we weren’t planning to do because it would be so easy. Sony was out because I’m a rabid anti-Sony person – I won’t buy anything made by that company for multiple reasons no matter how great it might be – don’t get me started. The Nook runs Android, supports our library’s file format (ePub, an open but DRM-able format), costs less. While I don’t like the idea of the separate touch screen, at least it doesn’t have a bunch of stupid blackberry-like buttons on it, so we decided on the Nook – here’s some quick first impressions:

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The other night I was having a fantastic time with some friends after a barbeque and the subject of family history came up. I had pulled some old photographs off the walls and we were talking about this and that character in the photo and when someone asked the question, I realized I had no idea what year my grandfather had been born. “No problem”, I said, “I’ll just fire up the Mac and call up my website – I have this awesome software running that I share with the family with lists and graphs and everything, we’ll just look it up!” Seconds later I was staring at the screen wondering what had happened to my data. I couldn’t log into my own site and all my family data was inaccessible.

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