Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to blackfyr!!! Have a good one!!

Followup

This article has the best information to date about the Galloway Ridge incident described in this downwhen post.

Seven years ago, Barbara Clark pleaded guilty to stealing more than $5,000 from a 90-year-old man at the Durham retirement community where she worked.

A judge gave her a suspended sentence and ordered Clark not to work anywhere she would have access to elderly people's property or possessions for three years.

On Thursday, Clark was charged with first-degree murder, accused of fatally beating a 92-year-old woman who had hired her as a housekeeper. The woman had asked Clark to come to her Fearrington Village retirement center apartment to discuss stolen checks.

There are more articles here, here, and here. (added here.) (12/8 Investigators: Financial Problems Spurred Maid to Attack Elderly Women -- that's no damned excuse.)

A little research might have kept her from being hired in the first place, but I don't think there was anything in her past that would have predicted that Clark would have become a killer when confronted. You want to give people a break, give them a second chance, give them the benefit of the doubt. Then something like this comes along...

Color e-paper on the way

Write On: Writeable, Color e-paper ReKindles Our Interest

Fuji Xerox has just demonstrated what may be the Holy Grail of e-paper—probably not the "E-Ink" technology found inside the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader, but something similar—a prototype display that a user and write on. Three layers of polymer-dispersed liquid crystals are used (red, green and blue), meaning the display has a gel-like base.

Still flexible, the display can recognize "optical" writing, though probably not quickly. An eyes-on report mentions that the refresh rate is under a second, which while probably fast enough for quick marks, is not what you want to be handwriting a letter on.

A reason not to buy drives from Western Digital

Techdirt: Western Digital Decides That You Shouldn't Be Allowed To Share Any MP3

Rich Kulawiec writes in to let us know about a Boing Boing post about some fairly ridiculous limitations on Western Digital's networked drives. Apparently, once you've set up the drive, you can subscribe to a service that will allow others to access your drive from the internet (rather than on the local network). You can set up accounts for specific people, including highlighting what is available to be shared with that person. However, Western Digital has simply decided that under no circumstance can you share a variety of multimedia filetypes, such as mp3s, wmvs, aac or others. Its reasoning is that this is "due to unverifiable media license authentication," which is basically a gibberish way of saying that you might be infringing on someone's copyright.

The actual post has a link to the list of filetypes. So, for example, I wouldn't be able to use this "service" to share my own music.

Thanks for the warning, WD: I'll build my own NAS servers from now on. With drives from somebody else.

The perils of centralized blogging

Between Friends: The Perils of Centralized Blogging | Electronic Frontier Foundation

One of the paradoxes of current social software is how many of your closely-guarded secrets you are obliged to entrust to a third party. Take the social blogging site LiveJournal: its centralized server allows you to set blog posts to "friends only" or "private". To use this feature, you post these semi-confidential journal entries to LiveJournal's server, and rely on it to hide your thoughts from the most of the world using its centrally-maintained list of friends to control access. LiveJournal holds your secret data in trust, as much as you trust it to keep your public data available.

We give these companies a great deal of control over our privacy and our speech - and even if we trust that company with those responsibilities now, there are no guarantees that the pressures upon and motivations of that company will stay constant over time.

It's not just blogging sites, of course, as the recent Facebook fiasco demonstrates. Here's another Facebook incident (giving information to a user's employer), and an analysis of Beacon on Techdirt. There was a segment on KQED's Forum this morning about it -- I'll update the link as soon as they post the podcast version. (updated 12/7)

My online habits and assumptions were formed in the wide-open era of Usenet before the rise of the Web, where you didn't have to behave as if anything you posted would be public: that's how the system worked. The web has made it possible for people to think that a public website might keep some of their information private. Experience has shown that it's rarely a good assumption. Just because you're paying someone to take care of your data -- or your posessions -- doesn't mean they won't suddenly turn on you.

Cell phone spam

Apparently cell phones are no longer immune to telemarketers. And of course we now have to pay for the privilege of being spammed. Lovely.

Time to update my entries in the National Do Not Call Registry.

And I'm putting potential contacts on notice now: if spam starts to be a problem, I'm going to be leaving my phone off when I'm not expecting a call.

Update: -- that number has been in the registry since 2004.