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I’m not blind to the benefits of drones, and I’m not blind to the sobering realities of aerial survivability in the early moments of a conflict with a modern military. But, as this Wired article demonstrates, we can’t let ourselves think that we can rely entirely on joystick-wielding Nintendo jockeys either.

I think this will be revealed as only the tip of the iceberg with regards to the way these drones can be exploited. Security pro-tip, kids: if you can access and control something from remote, so can the other guy, it’s just a matter of how long it takes him to figure out how to do it.

So, it seems to me that maybe drones are like anti-biotics: the more you use them, and the more the enemy gets to learn about them, the less effective and more dangerous they become.

I’d like to announce two new Facebook groups I’ve created:

Web 101: [link] The idea with this group is to build a collaborative community of professional developers and businesspeople who need to learn how to adapt their business to 21st Century realities. The thought had occurred to me that too many developers don’t know how business works in the real world, and certainly, I run into a lot of clients who don’t know how business works online.

Obviously, the side benefit is networking and cross-pollination between web-oriented people and more traditional businesses. I’m very keen to see what happens when we draw the two groups together without the pressures of deadlines and deliverables!

Web Symposium: [link] This group is by invitation only, and aims to serve the professional design/development community. As with Web 101, the goal is to see what free-form ideas can be derived by taking away deadline and delivery pressures and just putting genuine professionals in the same place to talk. Folks are encouraged to apply for membership, but be prepared to supply a professional portfolio as a means of gaining admittance; subsequent members will be voted on by the membership (or by a committee; that’s still up in the air.)

I subscribe to several financial newsletters, and I got one today that linked to a post that made my blood boil a bit, wherein the author seizes on Time Magazine’s having named Ben Bernanke as “Man of the Year” as evidence that “American culture rewards bad behavior”.

It seems we cannot learn the actual lessons taught by the ongoing economic meltdown. Instead, the money men seem determined to sort the causes of this mess into neat ideological categories, prepackaged to divert blame from the originating causes, and onto their favorite bugaboo “lib’rul Democrat” boogeymen.

Somehow, their narrative goes, loosening credit to poor families on the part of FannieMae and FreddieMac single-handedly caused the Great Recession. Deregulating the financial and insurance industries, somehow, did NOT have anything to do with this. Somehow, the creation of a $600 TRILLION derivatives market –a market entirely consisting of imaginary products backed only in the loosest of senses by tangible goods– didn’t cause this mess, when that market happens to represent TEN TIMES the GDP of the ENTIRE WORLD. Continue reading…

So, I recently got a DVD from Netflix that wouldn’t play. Of course, I immediately flagged it as such on the Netflix website, which as everyone knows is phenomenally well-designed with a very high degree of thought placed into every widget, button, and tab. And Netflix delivered the replacement DVD just a day later. No surprises there.

I decided to hold onto the damaged DVD until the replacement came, because I like to hoard the occasional Netflix envelope as a hedge against ones that come damaged in the mail. I’m always afraid that one of them will get torn out of their little red envelopes by an unscrupulous mail handler or by sheer accident.

When I went to send the replacement and the damaged DVD back in the same red envelope, I put little Post-It notes on them describing which DVD was damaged, and which was not. And then I pretty much forgot about it.

But Netflix didn’t. Continue reading…

I was downloading a series of free add-ons for a particular piece of software, when I was forced into downloading it from one of those “file hosting” services. This got me thinking, because it was mildly annoying to have to use such a service for a file that was only 1.8 megabytes in size, after a sixty-second wait due to my not being a “Premium” member.

Of course, hosts like RapidHost and their kind derive a large amount of their traffic from, shall we say, less than fully legal data. But to see something that was 100% legal, and 100% free, being offered on such a service….well, suffice it to say I spent the 60 seconds thinking, I hope, somewhat productively.

Because this is a market that “old-school” traditional web hosts can handle, as well. The people putting files like these on download services do not need privacy; in my specific case, they actually had it linked from their online profile. And they probably have an account on that service, which means they’re willing to pay for the service. Continue reading…

Oddly enough, this actually is a feature and not a bug. It hinges on the Single Sign-on feature linking Plesk Billing and Plesk itself. Plesk is trying to redirect to the Billing side to take login credentials.

Just open ports 11443/11444 on your firewall, and you’re good to go.

More info here.

So, it’s old news now, but I’ve found myself thinking a lot about the recent purchase of the Pontiac Silverdome in Detroit, Michigan for the paltry sum of $583,000USD.

Every time I think about it, I kick myself for failing to take this opportunity to buy my own stadium. I can’t explain why that is, exactly, but there it is. I don’t even know what I’d do with it if I had it (invite 80,000 of my closest friends over, I guess), but there’s a part of my brain that just seems wired to want to acquire something big that can be had cheap.

I then found myself wondering why the hell one of America’s 360 billionaires didn’t buy it. Because if I was a billionaire, I’d have bought it –just because– and had it torn down and trucked to me piece by piece and rebuilt. What the hell would I need to explain to anyone about this? I’m a billionaire, and this is my stadium. End of discussion.

The thought occurs to me that America needs a good old-fashioned crazy/eccentric billionaire. The kind that spends astonishing sums on really bizarre things. Not like, Island-of-Dr.-Moreau crazy, but more like Howard-Hughes-before-the-jars crazed/brilliant. The best we got now is Robert Downey, Jr. and Christian Bale playing eccentric, but “troubled”, billionaires. We need a real one.

Billionaires of America, your country needs you.