A lesson in democracy, CAC style

With my vacation out of the way (though not the blogging of the vacation, yet), I’m now realizing the things that I’ve been meaning to blog but haven’t gotten to yet. One is a very exciting opportunity in mid-November to provide a lesson in democracy to some visiting students from Charlotte.

A few weeks ago, Charlene Willard with the city’s Community Services department put me in touch with teacher Katy Field, Ninth Grade Class Dean of Providence Day School in Charlotte. Katy told me she was considering bringing her 9th grade class to Raleigh for a few days so that they could see how our democratic process works. Charlene told Katy about all the ways citizens can get involved through Raleigh’s unique Citizens Advisory Councils and Katy became determined to make CACs a big part of her program.
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Tropical Storm Isaac

Tropical Storm Isaac

I’ve been keeping an eye on Tropical Storm Isaac as it progresses across the Atlantic. Though it’s still a week out, there appears to be at least some chance that Isaac will reach North Carolina. Whether we have severe weather from this storm or not, we most likely will get a good soaking from Isaac next week.

Stay tuned (and for a look at the latest models, go here).

Little Raleigh Radio blows past Kickstarter goal!

Little Raleigh Radio exceeds fundraising goal


I was thrilled to check the Kickstarter page for Little Raleigh Radio this evening and see that we’ve blown past our goal of raising $10,000 to fund our studio! What an amazing milestone! LRR aims to bring a community radio station to downtown Raleigh and Kickstarter funding really does make it a community-owned station. It’s definitely community-built!

A Kickstarter project doesn’t get funded unless donations reach a certain level. Should LRR not reached its fundraising goal by the end of the month, we would have gotten no money at all.

The community’s support for LRR is inspiring and humbling at the same time. Our neighbors have entrusted us with their money and have bought into our vision. Now its up to us to provide the goods.

The money and the interest is there. This is really going to happen!

The case of the broken cooler door

A cooler mystery you’ll never find


I walked into the office break room morning to discover that the glass door on our drink machine was shattered. No one in the office seems to know what happened to it.

I speculated that the office cleaning crew might have accidentally busted it while cleaning the break room, but later as I thought about it I decided that didn’t make sense. The focus of the break was too high up the door to be from something like a vacuum. The break room’s floor is tile, too, so a vacuum wouldn’t be needed. The “point of impact” shows no penetration: the spot doesn’t show any inward or outward bend. The glass is shattered but the individual pieces are still held in place by the glass’s coating.
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Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger | Ars Technica

Dan Goodin of Ars Technica wrote an eye-opening piece on the astonishing state of password cracking. Passwords once thought a few years ago to be safe enough to outlast a century of cracking attempts can now be broken in a matter of days (or even hours) – with a $1000 computer, no less.

The ancient art of password cracking has advanced further in the past five years than it did in the previous several decades combined. At the same time, the dangerous practice of password reuse has surged. The result: security provided by the average password in 2012 has never been weaker.

A PC running a single AMD Radeon HD7970 GPU, for instance, can try on average an astounding 8.2 billion password combinations each second, depending on the algorithm used to scramble them. Only a decade ago, such speeds were possible only when using pricey supercomputers.

via Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger | Ars Technica.

Pussy Riot case shows Russia’s dark path

Last week, Russian authorities handed down a harsh sentance to the three members of the female punk band Pussy Riot, after the band staged an anti-Putin “punk prayer” in a Russian Orthodox Church. It shows the increasingly autocratic ways of Russian prime minister Vladmir Putin, who is apparently leading the country away from its experiments as an open society (while lining his own pockets at the same time).

Below is a statement from one of the band members which was posted to one of the band’s support groups on Facebook. She is absolutely correct when she writes that the country’s heavy-handed response to their stunt shows the Russian leadership’s fear of opposition.

I hope their case will wake other Russians to Putin’s looting of their country and their rights.
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Google Image search is creepy powerful

Google Image Search can read T-shirts


When I want to see if a particular photo on the web is of a real person or just a stock photograph (also of a real person but a model, of course), I like to plug that photo into Google Image Search (GIS). Google can now search the web for similar images and often if several duplicates of an image show up there’s a good chance that image is a stock photo.

In an effort to see if he is who he says he is, today I searched on an image of a man wearing a T-shirt. Google did not find any matching images to the one I provided, which was somewhat expected. What was not expected was that the Goog was able to identify the man’s T-shirt and provide links to stores selling that same T-shirt! Google’s search actually read the wording on this shirt and matched it up with others!

This capability is quite astonishing, and also quite worrisome. Google’s motto is “don’t be evil.” If the company chose, it could become the best friend of any repressive government.