not satisfied with ssl encryption and a no ip address logging policy, duck duck go is now running on a tor exit enclave. this is so the coolest search engine on the internet. gabriel weinberg, thanks very much :-)

is the association of chief police officers promoting fear with these two messages they had broadcast on UK national radio? it looks like that to me, even if the advertising standards authority wouldn’t publicly say so in their adjudication on the matter. check this out, straight from one of the broadcasts:

well, that is a close enough description of… me.   but my behaviour is not “anything suspicious”. and it certainly does not denote that i might be a Terrrist! if there is “anything suspicious” here, it’s the spreading by powerful people of misdoubt and anxiety, and the public promotion—not for the first time in the UK’s very recent past—of stasi like snooping

finally encrypted almost 100% of my computer’s hard drive (only a small boot partition remains unencrypted) using luks on the ubuntu alternate cd. sweet! thanks Paul for the initial prod, and tips along the way. hopefully no government or big corporation can resort to tactic number 538 in too many cases…

it’s easy to be sceptical of an individual who courts publicity through the big media corporations, but in the case of julian assange, it may be meet to make an exception; he does seem to be working hard to promote the public interest. i downloaded his insurance.aes256 file and hashed it thus:
$ sha1sum insurance.aes256
cce54d3a8af370213d23fcbfe8cddc8619a0734c
… but what is it

did i ever wince reading the uk government’s apology for continuing to use IE6 on their computers. yes, not just IE, it had to be IE6. the usual painful management speak followed up with the sort of excuses that can only be generated by people terrified of software. that web-page is promoting some severely stone-age computing practices. update: thanks to plandreamer for the trollface IEcon

attention please mr jeremy hunt

great news for the free internet: smokescreen is taking flash and outputting html5 and javascript. these hackers are up for more than just vid conversion. it seems they are looking to render anything flash can throw at them, at least in civilised browsers. great stuff :-) very much in alpha at the moment

democracy—to me, and to its inventors—is not when people vote for people: it’s when people vote for laws. that is why i think this looks a bit lame. lots of vague talk about how the best submitted ideas will inform government policy. that is not democracy. you have a democracy when a randomly selected group (something like a jury) agrees a question that is then put to the people, whose answer immediately becomes the law of the land. in england we don’t have democracy; we only have the choice to be obedient. the late initiative from the government is welcome, but nowhere near enough