brentashley

A very interesting technical paper on Passport, identifying numerous weaknesses.

I have a neighbour who was apparently quite a computer enthusiast all the way up to the 386 and Windows 3.1, but stopped short at the Web because in his words “‘W’ was 06 on mainframe punch cards, so you know what that makes WWW!!” (As it happens, the 0 on Hollerith cards meant +10, so I guess he’s terrified of 16-16-16. Must be some evil lawn fertilizer). He went on to warn against the web being the incarnation of the beast, don’t accept the mark, impending doom, yadda yadda.

Anyhow, knowing that it was the type of conversation I was keen to avoid, I did my usual in such a situation and made sure I was at least knowledgeable of the issues before dismissing it out of hand. So I had a read of the relevant biblical passages.

A local Toronto radio station has a contest to win a car. They give out these cryptic clues and you’re supposed to figure out where in the city they have chosen as the “spot” you’re looking for. I was absolutely certain recently that I’d found the spot. I decided where I thought it was, and from that point forward, I could rationalize every single clue to somehow be pointing right at that spot. Turned out that the place was actually 5 miles away and entirely different, but I was powerfully convinced that the clues pointed to the place I expected they should.

Where was I – oh yeah, Revelations. So, if you read the particular passages that mention the beast, his number, his control of all the languages, how the mark is necessary for all commercial transactions, and all that, while Passport is your selected endpoint, you can have a lot of fun making parallels.

Of course, I put absolutely ZERO credence into it. It’s just a fun diversion. Make what you will of it, preferably nothing.

I can’t believe this (sorry, 3MB) video of Steve Ballmer dancing around at an MS pep rally being a testosterone twit. What a complete freaking idiot. And I thought Larry Ellison was the biggest self-centered fucknut around.

Now that I find this explanation of punchcard codes I note that really 0 is used as a “zone” hole, sort of like ctrl, shift, or alt. I’m not going to correct it above because that would break my fertilizer joke, and I practically peed myself with glee over that one. I’d have to “un-pee” myself, and I don’t quite know how to go about that, so it stays, and damn the pedants.