San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza, between City Hall and the Main Library, is a beautiful public space with a bunch of flag poles. In addition to a handful in the corners of the plaza, there are two rows of nine of them along the central walkway, each flying a different flag.
Read more →Over on the EFF “Deeplinks” blog, I’ve just published my 100th post, an intro to the cryptographic property of perfect forward secrecy. One hundred strikes me as a nice big round number, averaging a little more than one a week since I started in November 2011. Here are some of my favorite posts of the first 100.
Read more →The Supreme Court released a decision earlier this month that I think history will reflect on as a mistake. In Maryland v. King, the Court held that suspects arrested for “major crimes” could have their DNA collected and stored.
Read more →Yesterday I posted a ship in a bottle from the 1922 book “Pirates,” and today I’ve had a chance to clean up a few more images, including most of the actual named pirates described in the book. The book seems to be scanned on a setting for text, and so the pictures require just a little bit of correction and cleaning. I’m pretty happy with the way these images turned out. Of course, since the book was released in 1922, all of these are in the public domain. So if you need a pirate drawing, go ahead.
Read more →Working on drones, and increasingly in the conversation around Google Glass, I keep hearing a common refrain from people who don’t understand other people’s concerns. “There are surveillance cameras on every corner in major cities, helicopters with cameras overhead, and constant tracking in a million other ways,” the argument goes, “and where is the outrage about those things?”
Read more →Bruce Schneier’s essay on today’s bombings in Boston helped shake me out of the daze I found myself in since hearing the news this morning. I am far away from Boston, and knew nobody in the blast radius, but the ability to keep refreshing feeds to read more news, hear more rumors, see more pictures, made the tragedy feel immediate.
Read more →Psy — he, of course, of “Gangnam Style” fame — is back with a second video called “Gentleman.” A day into its existence, it’s pushing 30 million views. Anyway, there are a few shots of a pretty incredible location that caught my eye. Psy and his crew are dancing on a set of steps, surrounded by shelves full of books.
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Earlier this week I was treated to a visit from some two dozen of San Francisco’s wild parrots, the cherry-headed conures that live on and around Telegraph Hill. It was pretty spectacular — I was sitting at the kitchen table by the window, and first one, then two, then maybe a half dozen landed right outside on my balcony, occasionally conferring with a larger group that had set down on the roof.
