anonymity experiment

here is another interesting article I read regarding privacy in the new age

excerpts:

...Tall and friendly, Hoofnagle has an enthusiastic way of talking about privacy violations that could best be described as “cheerful outrage.” He laid out my basic tasks: Pay for everything in cash. Don’t use my regular cellphone, landline or e-mail account. Use an anonymizing service to mask my Web surfing. Stay away from government buildings and airports (too many surveillance cameras), and wear a hat and sunglasses to foil cameras I can’t avoid. Don’t use automatic toll lanes. Get a confetti-cut paper shredder for sensitive documents and junk mail. Sign up for the national do-not-call registry (ignoring, if you can, the irony of revealing your phone number and e-mail address to prevent people from contacting you), and opt out of prescreened credit offers. Don’t buy a plane ticket, rent a car, get married, have a baby, purchase land, start a business, go to a casino, use a supermarket loyalty card, or buy nasal decongestant (4). By the time I left Hoofnagle’s office, a week was beginning to sound like a very long time.

I didnt know that Pseudoephedrine (nasal decongestant) can be used to make methamphetamine.

Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?

just now read an article in nytimes titled: 'Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?' found it interesting so thought I'd share a few excerpts here, read the full version here.

excerpts:

...But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way.

...Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment ... overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.

The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”

“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.

At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, “I decided to write this book.”

U2 in IMAX 3D and Junoon at National Geographic

U2 released a 3D video of there Latin America tour, which is in IMAX theaters these days all I can say after seeing it is that it’s a show not to be missed, we saw it at the Johnson's IMAX theater in National Museum of Natural History and it was a blast, the sheer size of the screen, combined with the IMAX 3D projection technology made every detail of the concert performance stand out, the boys still have a lot of punch left in them, production quality of the whole show is really good (you don’t expect any less from the Irish band) though after seeing their live performance with Mary J Blige in the 2006 Grammys (where Bono seemed to be struggling just to be heard over Mary) I couldn’t help but think there isn’t anything more that U2 can do, yet they keep coming back better than the last time.

I think a good way to discourage video piracy for movie production houses is to make everything in 3D so that people who pay a ticket to watch that movie in cinema really get a leg up over those watching it on home theater systems (plus it would be hard to make pirated copies off of cinema screening which would cripple any efforts of releasing the movie on the DVD/internet before it even hits the cinema in many countries) Johnson IMAX Screen Size: 62.7 x 85.3 ft. / 19.1 x 26 meters.

Junoon's Salman Ahmad will be performing live in the nation’s capitol Friday 22nd February 2008, this is one show I don’t intend to miss, now here is an idea, wouldn’t it be cool if we can have a summer concert series in Rock Creek Park's Carter Barron Amphitheatre with artists such as Abida Parveen, Salman Ahmad and perhaps Fuzon. I think it’s the ultimate venue for artists who really work with the crowd. I might just do that the next time I take a break from my regular schedule (I wonder if I can convince CARE or Red Cross to fund such a charity event).

my woes with the new machine

its been almost a month with the new computer, the issues I have had so far are:

1- I cannot control the volume on the optical/spdif output, that means my objective to eliminate the receiver remote control is in jeopardy, in lay-man terms the computer sends out all six audio channels (5+1) to the receiver using AC3 or DTS format, these formats are the original unaltered audio signal and to make changes to the volume it would need to uncompress the sound modify it with new volume info and then re-compress it, this would effect the audio quality so its not done this way, the sound card lets the audio pass unaltered all the way to the receiver, the only straight forward work around to that problem is that I take the six individual analog audio outputs from my computer and plug them to my receiver/amplifier, for this I would need to buy a new receiver as the existing SONY STR-K740P doesn't accept individual audio channel inputs (it accepts optical and coaxial), I wonder if the audio signal on HDMI cable is AC3/DTS or something else, if it behaves well, it can be another viable solution.

2- I am still using legacy IDE instead on SATA AHCI mode which if I enable would let me plug in hard drives with out starting/stopping the machine, plus it supposedly have a more intelligent Queuing algorithm, which should translate in to more efficient seeks, this problem is still outstanding, no drivers out there seems to be able to fix the issue.

3- the 720p flat screen displays currently in the market have a max Resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels, my VGA card sees the flat screen as a generic nPNP monitor and hence doesn't let me set the max res to 1366x768.

4- I don't use the native Denovo Edge method of connection, since I need the bluetooth functionality so
I run a small binary that changes the IDs of the bluetooth dongle in the registry so that windows Vista views the dongle as bluetooth, this is not a very elegant solution as when the machine comes out of sleep mode it doesn't always connects seamlessly to the keyboard.

5- the price for internal HD_DVD drives and Blu-Ray are still prohibitive.

6- vista 32 bit cannot address 4GB memory

I would consider the project complete once I have all these issues resolved, I will update this same blog with any resolutions that I come up with.