Monday, August 02, 2004

Goodbye Radio Userland News Aggregator, hello Bloglines I've been using bloglines as an aggregator for a few weeks now, and I've been really happy with it. Lessons learned from bloglines: How many subscribers I have relative to other feeds. I know this is not definitive, since it only includes bloglines users, but still more data than I had before. Who my bloglines subscribers are (this is a big deal!!! -- hey pat! nicely organized feeds bart!) Feed suggestions .. might be good. But mostly seem to be obvious (Dave W, Joel, etc) What other peoples _real_ reading lists are... not just the ones they've had time to update on their blogroll (my list and blogroll are way out of sync, and I expect that's common). It reminds me of how mind-bogglingly useful browsing the playlists of other Napster users was. Lars Pind moved his rss file url a while back... with Radio I needed to notice the absence of Lars' posts, then visit the tedious log pages and scroll through to find out why he's been on vacation for 4 months or so. Bloglines displays a red exclamation point by his feed to let me know that there's a problem. In addition to the valuable info, I feel that with the bloglines folder metaphor it's much easier to ignore feeds that I'm less interested in. Radio gives you a single feed-equalizing page-o'-posts. It's good to discriminate when it comes to information, but you have no facility for doing this with RU. I remember hearing people recommend this about when discussing Outlook rss agreggators (and related desktop clones ), but I wasn't interested enough in another desktop app to try them out. You know with any free service like this that eventually the other shoe will fall, but for now bloglines is highly recommended. 4:46:18 PM      comment []  trackback []

First cowster, now people It's easy to see why prison is a dangerous place, but less easy to see why it has to be one without accountability given the monitoring technologies (i.e. Windley's 'Cowster') that they now have access to, and the fact that privacy isn't much of a consideration. I hope in addition to the obvious goal of making sure prisoners don't get misplaced, a system like this makes it easier to protect them from each other. Maybe we'll learn something from these types of projects, beyond just how to keep better tabs on people. 4:21:41 PM      comment []  trackback []

Making the world safe for RFID "The goal is by 2010 to have most of the population in the first world to be carrying 3 to 10 RFID tags on their person whenever they appear in public" - Richard Smith slideshow from 2003 Usenix conference on hacking location. My friend started work as a development manager at a network security company recently. At a meeting, he mentioned something about a Boston Globe article about a FastLane security hole. The resident white-hat hacker said, 'They're just writing about Fastlane now? Geez, we were hacking that 3 years ago'. 10:39:50 AM      comment []  trackback []