I was browsing my google reader feed today and came across this frightening little link: New way of social engineering on IRC

From that headline it might sound like some sort of vague web 3.0 social networking thing. Until you realize that social engineering is actually a hacker euphemism that’s been around since before there was a web 1.0. It basically means lying, what security experts call exploiting a vulnerability between the chair and the keyboard. Why spend the time and effort hacking into a system to plant a virus, when you can just sweet talk some idiot who works there into installing it for you? A lot of the biggest “hacker” attacks of the past few years have actually been social engineering attack, scammers with quick tongues exploiting the credulous rather than computer code.

And here we have a new way of automating it. Continue reading

Well, the primaries have come and gone, and the experts are all passing judgment on the implications of this latest leg of the horse race we call American politics. Given that November’s midterms are likely to be a referendum on Obama and the Democrats’ handling of what has to be one of the toughest honeymoons in the history of the presidency (Lincoln might have had it tougher. Maybe.), everyone is reading the tea leaves looking for signs of what’s to come.

While it’d be a stretch to call me an expert on anything, I thought it might be fun to sum up the things I took from this election cycle. Without further ado, The Clear and Absolutely Incontrovertible Facts About the 2010 Primaries:

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In front of the Federal courthouse on First Street, across from a parking garage that services a small comedy club, just two blocks from San Jose State, and less than a block from the light rail station, there stands a monument.

It is not, by monument standards, particularly monolithic. A long rectangle of bronze, roughly the height of a man and the length of three with their arms outstretched, it’s dull brown surface isn’t eye-catching. It’s covered in relief carvings, but someone can easily walk past it without seeing them, such is the lack of contrast.

In a way that’s somewhat poetic. The monument is meant to commemorate the forced deportation to camps of some 110,000 Americans to camps during WWII because of their ethnicity. It wasn’t until 1988 , some forty years later, that this event was formally acknowledged. Now, although it’s no secret that the Japanese American Internment happened, I remember it being covered in about two paragraphs in my high school history class. Two paragraphs on one of the worst civil rights abuses ever perpetrated by this country, amid countless paragraphs of breathless praise for the war effort, for America’s defense of democracy in the face of tyranny.

How fitting then, that a mostly ignored tragedy should have a mostly ignored monument.

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