Waves of heavy rains have been hitting the Sierra Mountains for weeks and recently caused a land slide in an area called Ferguson Slide (didn’t see that coming) on the Merced River near Yosemite National Park. The slide knocked down power lines, which gave authorities a reason to turn away visitors for most of this … Continue reading Yosemite Offline Due to Power Failure
Plastic hotel “key cards” with a mag-stripe are notoriously unreliable (at least 5% failure rate). They can easily be demagnetized and stop working, even by proximity to cell-phones and small fashion magnets (unlike payment cards, which are more resilient). I run mag-stripe payment card security tests and the hotel cards that sometimes use to calibrate … Continue reading Get a Free Hotel Room — Key Management Failure
It is time again for a look at why we celebrate Thanksgiving. Although I have made a guess once or twice before in past years, this year I noticed Wikipedia has a greatly enhanced entry. They filed it under “Legacy” for Sarah Josepha Buell Hale (October 24, 1788 – April 30, 1879). Right away you … Continue reading Thanksgiving History
It looks like Adam over at Emergent Chaos has been reading sociology (ethnomethodology is a sociological approach to language use) and finding out about linguistic anthropology. Although it is nice to see these ideas spreading from anthropology to sociology and into information security, I hope some also will dig into it enough to find and … Continue reading Identities and Community of Practice