Unless you’re a real die-hard fan of certain obscure technological practices, you’ve probably never heard of Bernie Spindel. He’s not exactly well-known; his only Wikipedia entry is over in the French edition, and it’s been a couple decades since anyone ever published anythin...

The treatment and handling of the most high-profile prisoners of war - or enemy combatants, or whatever else they’re being called this week - is reasonably well-known today; more has probably been written about the conditions at Guantanamo Bay than about any prison since the post-WWII flood of...

It’s been seven years since the first, last, and only series of anthrax (or other chemical- or biological-agent) mailings through the U.S. mail; it’s been seven months since the prime suspect in those incidents committed suicide. You probably don’t think about it a whole lot anymor...

Locally, there’s a bit of a debate brewing - with budgets slashes, the City wanted to close the least-used local library, at least temporarily; doing so would allow them to essentially leave the other libraries in town untouched, as far as funding and services go. Of course, some folks get the...

About a week ago, I posted a kind of offhand remark about how the “hackability” of non-wireless network hardware seemed to be largely under-explored, unlike the hundreds, literally, of wireless routers that have been hacked and modded. I pointed to obsolete - or at least “unsupport...

Hackedgadgets links to a quite clever homemade suitcase security system with, unfortunately, a pretty high potential to be mistaken for a bomb. It’s not that this - securing your bag - is necessarily a bad idea, but authorities worldwide tend to take a fairly dim view of people walking around ...

Here in Saint Paul, the police are evidently somewhat baffled by a recent wave of church burglaries, and the mass of information they’ve provided, such as it is, gives the world a chance to sharpen its information-analysis skills on some, well, real-world data. Crowdsource crime analysis? Why ...

Vinculum is a company you’ve probably never heard of; they’re apparently a not-terribly-well-publicized subsidiary of FTDI specializing in USB processors. Well, I - and they - say specializing, but Vinculum basically has just one product - a microcontroller called the VNC1L, which does o...

Backing up digital information is, obviously, an important task which every organization and business should undertake. Thing is, deciding what to backup isn’t as difficult as deciding who gets to make that decision. This holds especially true where email is concerned: it used to be that users...

I’m continually amazed at the things clever geeks can make odd bits of hardware do. Take, for instance, the Linksys NSLU2, or the many wireless routers that can be modified to do so many, many things their manufacturers never intended. Why run an Asterisk telephone server on a PC drawing 150, ...