Here’s an interesting new phishing scam:

Rather than posing as a bank or other online business, spear phishers send e-mails to employees at a company or government agency that appear to come from a powerful person within the organization, several security experts said…

…Unlike basic phishing attacks, which are sent out indiscriminately, spear phishers target only one organization at a time. Once they trick employees into giving up passwords, they can install Trojan horse programs or other malicious software to ferret out corporate or government secrets.

And this was interesting as well, which raises the issue of what constitutes an order from a commanding officer:

At the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., several internal tests found that cadets were all too willing to give sensitive information to an attacker posing as a high-ranking officer, said Aaron Ferguson, a visiting faculty member there.

“It’s the ‘colonel effect.’ Anyone with the rank of colonel or higher, you execute the order first and ask questions later,” he said.

But if on the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog, how can you tell that someone is a colonel, let alone your colonel? There’s a long tradition of written orders having to be obeyed, but have emails acquired that attribute by default? If so, it may need to be rethought, given the nature of the technology.

Speaking of Thomas James, he has an amusing tale from the Mars Society Conference.

[Update a few minutes later]

I was about to do a radio interview with a German radio station about evolution and intelligent design when I posted this, so I didn’t get a chance to finish the thought with a similar supporting anecdote of my own.

I have a dear old friend (who will remain nameless) who is also a victim of the Mac cult. He swears by his Mac, and professes hatred of PCs and a mystification about why anyone would buy them when they could have a Mac. But when he shows me things on it, there are invariably problems with it that, if it were my machine, would cause me to toss it into the sea in frustration. Yet he seems almost blind to it, even as he asks for help in doing things that it won’t let him do.

This is an interesting breakthrough in energy generation, but I doubt it will be practical for transportation. Though it does bring a whole new meaning to the old urban myth about running a car on water. In this case, beer might be more effective, as long as someone else was behind the wheel.

[Update at 5:15 PM EDT]

Eeeeuuuuwwww…

Here’s another application for this amazing liquid.

Food scientists working for the US military have developed a dried food ration that troops can hydrate by adding the filthiest of muddy swamp water or even peeing on it.

Dig in…

This is an interesting breakthrough in energy generation, but I doubt it will be practical for transportation. Though it does bring a whole new meaning to the old urban myth about running a car on water. In this case, beer might be more effective, as long as someone else was behind the wheel.

[Update at 5:15 PM EDT]

Eeeeuuuuwwww…

Here’s another application for this amazing liquid.

Food scientists working for the US military have developed a dried food ration that troops can hydrate by adding the filthiest of muddy swamp water or even peeing on it.

Dig in…

This is an interesting breakthrough in energy generation, but I doubt it will be practical for transportation. Though it does bring a whole new meaning to the old urban myth about running a car on water. In this case, beer might be more effective, as long as someone else was behind the wheel.

[Update at 5:15 PM EDT]

Eeeeuuuuwwww…

Here’s another application for this amazing liquid.

Food scientists working for the US military have developed a dried food ration that troops can hydrate by adding the filthiest of muddy swamp water or even peeing on it.

Dig in…

A potential cure for Alzheimers. Using a nasal spray. Here’s hoping.

Patrick Ruffini has some thoughts on the decade since Netscape’s IPO.

…and still busy with all the stuff I didn’t do on Friday and this weekend, but the Carnival of Tomorrow is up. There’s also lots of good stuff over at The Space Review today.

One of the things that I’m working on is a series of case studies for failure of complex technological systems, particularly where a failure cascades (perhaps inevitably) into others. Columbia is a good example, in which the fragile leading-edge TPS was damaged during launch, which resulted in initial burnthrough during entry, which caused more internal damage, which resulted in a bigger hole in the wing, which resulted in increasing asymmetric forces on the vehicle, which resulted in eventual inability to keep the nose pointed forward, which resulted in the destructive breakup of the vehicle from aerodynamic forces.

Is anyone aware of similar cases (preferably non-space, e.g., the Bonefish fire)?

RIP, Scotty.

Of course, given that he had Alzheimers, he may have been dead by any useful definition for some time, just as Ronald Reagan was, even if the empty shell of the body continued to metabolize. In many ways, I fear this disease more than cancer, because it robs you and your loved ones of what is essentially you, while leaving them with an ongoing burden that can only be relieved by the final, physical death, which cannot come too soon once the mind is gone.

This, to me, is a powerful case for euthanasia. We may (and I suspect, will) come up with a cure for Alzheimers in the sense of preventing the damage, but once the damage is done, there’s no repairing it–it’s information death, which is actually much more final than metabolic death.

[Update on Wednesday evening]

How appropriate. They’re beaming him up. So to speak.