Electronic voting https://www.eff.org/issues/e-voting
Your ballot is encoded to your public key (all citizens have a public/private key pair?) and your private key is your newSSN, which is long enough that it actually provides secure encryption (unlike current 9-digit SSNs (perhaps your SSN is a hash for some longer number?))
And how cool it is that U of M ppl broke the released version so quickly and thouroughly, and how I wish I had been able to see that first hand.
NASA
- Discovery http://discovery.nasa.gov/
- Robonaut https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/464887main_Robonaut2FactSheet.pd&pli=1
- Waldos (explained 'em to a friend) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_manipulator
- fancy new chips -> the singularity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_A2
This guy's blog and so many amazing articles on it.
How cool http://news.ycombinator.com/news is and the fact that I only two days ago went through a huge list of reddit channels, customized my front page, and now surf it about as often as I check boingboing (and the fact that Google Reader is NOT an acceptable solution for my blog-surfing needs... and that I'll probably end up doing a large-scale data-gather on all options, then suffering with something mediocre until I suck it up and write my own)
My favorite reddits at the moment:
http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/ I have a special love for this one, actually
This excellent new(ish) gourmet organic resturaunt near where I live and how much I want to go there for dinner, since they've started serving dinner and cocktails.
http://code.mixpanel.com/amazon-vs-rackspace/ I.e. what sysadmins want from a cloud server, why they want it, how well different providers provide it, and what providers will do in the future- and the "style" of the providers.
Why I haven't gotten around to ripping this DVD of Sweeney Todd to a local version which I can use even while I don't have this inconvenient disc in my laptop, asking what I want to do with it every time I return from hibernation and confusing my startup processes by being potentially but not actually bootable. (Answer: how do you do that on Ubuntu, anyway? It's not something I've ever needed to do before. Put a bootable .iso on something, yes; burn a local copy of media from something, no. I'll pick a pretty tool and use it soon, yes yes.)
http://goo.gl/ and how amazingly excellent it is and why have I not been using this and look at all of the cool things that it can do! Although I was failing a copy-paste from it when my computer took a BSOD moment just a few minutes ago, so that's not really the best way to start a relationship.
The fact that attempting to connect to picasaweb.google.com while using Chrome and KB SSL Enforcer makes Picasa wibble and then give me a "no ssh available" error, and whether this is repeatable, and whether I have the patience to test it right now.
Also, (what I was trying to elucidate when I ran into the previous point)
How much space I have on Picasa, and how I'm thrashing my upload and need faster internet.
Space I have in Picasa: 81 GB In use: 14 GB (17.29%)
All of that 14GB is pictures, poster drafts, screenshots... mostly pictures. From the last 4 years. Mostly tagged, although not well-tagged.
My current upload speed: ...not sure, but probably less than 3Mb. This is not a recipe for success.
My irrational fear that ThoughtWorks will for some reason decide that I'm not worth hiring after all and try to break my contract- which, considering that I'm an easygoing kid with no real clout in the world, they could probably do pretty easily. Like, I said, irrational. It would be incredibly bad business sense, for one thing. But still, I do sometimes worry- especially when I fail at something technical or when I start digging into whitehat exploits. Because, yanno, anything whitehat could be blackhat with a flip of an intention.
How cool the revamp of http://torrentfreak.com/limewire-resurrected-by-secret-dev-team-101108/ is and whether I should try to install it on my W7 just to see what it's like. I did use LimeWire when I was a freshman, and probably while I was a sophomore, but I've lost all of my music and I live basically off of Pandora with a small local stash of celtic rock for when I have no network connection. I don't have any motivation to improve my torrenting situation. -shrug- The vast majority of the music I listen to is impossible to torrent because there are no peers for it. Maybe I should start uploading it, but I'm too lazy to do illegal things without a strong idealogical motivation.
The above leads to: BearShare, the RIAA paid torrenting site. Wait wtf rly? Yes, rly. http://www.bearshare.com/ I guess if you don't care what you listen to, it's okay. There is some stuff on there which fits my picky sensibilities, but srsly... " over 15 million songs & videos" ...that's like bragging that your... er. The analogy I want to make here is forbidden by good taste. Anyway. Only the ignorant think that 15mil is a high number in this context.
Easy ways to kill Firesheep: http://blog.scaramanga.co.uk/2010/11/08/two-firesheep-denial-of-service-attacks/ http://www.scaramanga.co.uk/stuff/fireflood.c
Always always always choose the "Custom Install" option. You never know what strange toolbar crap will be in there.
My cussing habits and the fact that I should switch back to using something mild like "dammit" or "bloody hell" before I end up sitting next to people who think that saying "GEE-sus onna stick" is inappropriate when I'm caught up in my own thoughts and something startles me out of them.
On a related note, I want to explore this site in detail sometime. http://www.exploit-db.com/