Star Trek 2: warning - you can't unsee it

After the sucky Star Trek reboot, I assumed the series would get better. It didn't, the second installment in the series is much worse. If you are a fan of the Star Trek canon, do yourself a favor and don't see this movie. Once seen, it cannot be unseen.

Nobody reads the ToS -- not even those who write them

GoGo Inflight is running a promotion right now giving you free Internet access on airplanes from your Blackberry phone/pad. Even if you don’t have a Blackberry device, you can still get the free service by changing your browser identifier to match a Blackberry (instructions below). Here’s the question: is spoofing your browser ID like this in order to get free Internet service illegal under laws like the CFAA ("Computer Fraud and Abuse Act")?

That’s an interesting debate, but there is a further twist: GoGo Inflight’s promotion violates their own Terms of Service (ToS). According to the ToS, you need a "user account" to use the service. However, the Blackberry promotion doesn't give you one, because it triggers off the browser ID. Thus, even if you have a valid Blackberry (and aren't cheating), you are still technically in violation of the Terms of Service.

@AP hack: the stock market did not "plunge"

According to all press outlets, the stock market "plunged" today due to @AP getting hacked and reporting explosions at the White House. In fact, stock prices didn't change much at all. Below I've graphed today's S&P 500 stock price. As you can see, it's a flat line hovering within 1% of 1580:

A wonkish look at bitcoin economics

Bitcoin is an increasingly popular electronic currency, used both for legitimate and illegal transactions. Economists haven’t taken a serious look at bitcoin yet, so I thought I’d take a stab at it. In particular, I’m going to look at the “intrinsic value” of bitcoin, answering the question whether the recent rapid rise in price (to $240 at the time of writing this) is justified.

The TL;DR version is this: bitcoins have real value (they are not a fantasy), and that value is between $0.01 and $15000.

How to Dress Like a Cyber Warrior OR Looking Like a Tier-Zero Hero

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A lot of ink’s been spent lately on the idea of cyber warfare, cyber defense, the enemies, the allies, what would we do if we had a cyber Pearl Harbor, etc. As one of the foremost experts on all things cyber, I thought I would take a day to explain some of the finer points of this new realm of warfare and how to fit in.

Let me hadoop that for you

We are a tool using species. It started with sticks to knock down bananas. For the modern homo sapiens, it's tools like JavaScript and Hadoop.

Today, I was working on a technical problem. I came across this blogpost from 2012 that had close to the answer I was looking for, but it missed a key detail that was important to me.

Well, I follow the author on twitter, and the author follows me. So I sent him a tweet asking if he still had the data around, and whether he could analyze it again to solve my specific question. He responded with "Just let me run a quick hadoop query for you".

Minutes later, he posted the results of the query to GitHub that had exactly what I was looking for.

This all took place within 30 minutes from start to finish. It's possible because we tool using homos have opposable thumbs that can grasp the blogs, the twitters, the github, and the hadoop. I don't know how many servers @jedisct1 has at his disposal, but in theory, with a few keystrokes, he could reach into the cloud (like Amazon's service) and marshall a thousand machines equalling a million dollar super computer to answer this small question for me.

Ubuntu low-mem install for VMs

For those of you who play with virtual-machines like VMware, the Ubuntu server .iso contains an option for dramatically reducing the amount of memory needed. Using this option reduces the default installation's memory usage down to 66-megabytes. This is probably basic information for most of you, but I didn't know it, so I'm writing it up here.