id theif pursuit

The San Francisco Chronicle published an article about an ID-theft victim chasing her ID's thief. The story reads like a great chase scene in a novel! The victim chases the thief for about forty-five minutes through down-town San Francisco.

She didn't really know what she would do if she caught Nelson. "She was a big girl," Lodrick recalled. She told the 911 operator she felt a little scared. The operator said: "If you in any way feel threatened, do not continue the pursuit."

Lodrick told the operator: "No, I'm OK."

San Francisco Chronicle Article

the internet is a reflection of self

"The Internet, this place intended for sharing information, has become a place where we go to confirm beliefs we already have."
(on "I read it on the Internet")

"I'm not suggesting we put anonymous bloggers, or anonymous posters in jail..."
(on improving accountability online by jailing originators of anonymous data)

-- Andrew Keen

interesting visitors

john edwards
Originally uploaded by sidstamm

One of the great benefits of working at Google is the flock of people who come to speak. Yesterday I listened to Michael Griffin, Administrator of NASA, talk about the future of the country's space program. He even showed us pretty pictures of their new plans for a moon rocket.

Later in the day, John Edwards popped in for a "fireside chat," and let us ask him questions. By far, the most interesting part was when he was answering our questions. It was unusual for a politician, but he was more likable when answering off-the-cuff than when he was participating in somewhat scripted discussion with the host. Things I remember: (1) he is going to do fifty billion things in his first six months if he is elected, (2) $3bln for running water, sewer, in other countries, (3) "nice haircut", and (4) "I was a dumbass when I voted for the war in Iraq" [[not a direct quote]].

gsa?

Deep Thought: I wonder if TSA checkpoint guards could use a Google Search Appliance to speed up their bag and pat-down searches. Surely since the GSA allows looking into files' contents, one could see which liquids are dangerous without requiring them to be in a 1-qt see-thru bag...

towel day 07

What are you using your towel for?

Maker Faire

fireballs
Originally uploaded by sidstamm.

Since I'm out in the bay area for the summer (yay!), I'm taking advantage of the events like Maker Faire that are going on. A friend and I popped in on Saturday and had a look around at the cool gadgety-geek things. See my Flickr photo set for more photos...

Anyhow, while there, I ran into Mark Frauenfelder, which was cool, and chatted at him for a little while about this party that he inspired.

Earlier today I was making some coffee in a common area and Cory Doctorow just happened into the same kitchen, sparking a bit of quick conversation before he was whisked away to a meeting.

It's kind of fun being in a place where you can randomly run into all these cool people...

09 f9

Two lessons of the day: (1) security by obscurity does not work for simple yet widely popular technologies and (2) if you create the encryption scheme and expect people to keep the key secret, make all the hardware that uses it too (a la Apple's FairPlay).

fighting the blogger navigation bar

When you host a blog on blogspot or use pretty much any template provided by blogger, an intrusive navigation bar appears at the top of the blog (login button, search box, blog this button, etc). While it's nice, it really prohibits integration with non-blog sites. For example, the blog at Stop-Phishing is hosted on blogspot, but we wanted to integrate it into the main Stop-Phishing webpage to provide a nice seamless design.

Anyhow, this was done with a positioning trick, basically drawing the template and the rest of the blog on top of the navigation bar by setting the z-layer higher than default. Recently, the blogger navbar CSS data changed to put the navigation bar at z-layer 500, drawing it above the template. Of course, we could begin fighting with them and put our template at z-layer 501, but this is a never-ending cycle.

I decided to place our template at z-layer 2147483647 (maximum integer in defined in Mozilla). Now the template is back on top. Lets see what happens next...