Justin.MadIrish.net

Today I ran across a case of someone blatantly republishing my content without consent or approval. They're publishing the content on Google's blogger.com. I figured it would be a simple matter of notifying Google and getting the content removed. Unfortunately, in their infinite wisdom, Google makes reporting copyright violation a royal pain in the ass! You have to actually print out a letter, include very specific language, and mail or fax the letter to them. The whole process reminds me of the hassle you used to have to go through to register a domain name.

If you've ever done a Google search for your name you'll be shocked at how much information comes up. There are customer profiles on commerce websites, your profile on social networking sites, heck, perhaps even the deed transfer information from when you bought your house. Of course, we all want our friends to be able to find us online, but often times too much information about who we are gets leaked onto the internet. I'm fine with people finding my e-mail address, but finding out where I work, where I live, my phone number and my Amazon wish list is a little too much for me. There are even new sites like http://pipl.com that do deep searching and pull all these details our for any casual searcher.

A recent post on the Tao Security Blog got me thinking about what I feel is probably the most important book on computer security in the market today. Whether overt or by influence, this book is making waves in the computer security industry and hopefully changing things for the better. In the case of the Tao Security Blog it seems that Richard Bejtlich borrows directly from the book. In fact his entire post appears to be a synopsis of Chapter 3. Bejtlich swears he hasn't read the book - which for me is just further evidence of how accurate the book is in reflecting emerging trends and new philosophies evolving in computer security.

I've been away from the blog for a while (which is bad) because I've been upgrading servers (which is good?). I haven't had much time to devote to personal writing but I figured I'd get back in the saddle now that things on the hardware/operating systems fronts have settled down.

I've been giving a lot of thought to data formatting recently. It seems that we have an ever increasing volume of data being stored digitally, as well as new requirement to retain digital information, formatting is becoming an ever increasing problem. I know I frequently face formatting issues when moving data from one application to another, and often from one version of a format to another. It seems to me that much of this formatting is laziness on developers' part. Sure, you want to format data in a way that's easily accessible and that looks nice, but in the end data can all just be reduced to 0's and 1's. More fundamentally, all human usable data can generally be broken down into text - that is character data. There is no excuse for hiding this sort of data in a format that users cannot access.

Ok, once again, we return to the topic du jour, defiling mashups. In response to Chris' blog. As a side note I've enable anonymous comments for now, let me know if there are still problems (my opinion of Drupal is declining the more I use it).

I'm tempted to take a lot of different avenues in explaining why I would strongly recommend mashups, and there's a strong pull to use anecdotal evidence, but I think I'll stick to straightforward analysis. By this I don't even just mean business analysis, but also engineering analysis.

Mash ups are the latest cause celebre on the internet (now that corporate blogs have cooled off) and I have to say, as a developer I'm not impressed. Now, I'll admit that I'm notorious for having negative reactions as a knee jerk response, but I think "mashups" are just another facade in the internet hype cycle.

Of course, it's easy for me to be negative about any new, unproven technology, but mashups aren't anything new. Mashups are derived out of a long and less than illustrious heritage that includes portals, SOAP and remote XML. At its core a mashup is nothing more than a refactoring of remotely available data.

So I finally kicked Windows to the curb at home yesterday. It's part of an ongoing experiment and my way of celebrating the Windows Vista release. Actually, I've been crushing on this project for my MCIT course at Penn and my home workstation keeps crashing. I get up and go to grab a snack and when I come back the machine has rebooted (and been so ungracious as to not even save any of my work). After this went on for several days I finally decided to investigate. Well, actually, that's a bit of a misrepresentation. I looked at what paltry logs Windows offers and they didn't have any clue. Occasionally I'd get a "Windows has recovered from a serious error." when I logged back in after the reboot.