phyxr.com

Well, here we are at a new Web Hoster.

The reason for the move was the repeated infection of sites hosted by the previous hoster (Bluehost) and their refusal to admit any responsibility at all for the security of their servers.

One thing that struck me as I moved some dozen sites was how simple and quick it is to do these days.  It appears that consumer pressure and technology have resulted in a slick and speedy process.

When I first changed host providers, over a decade ago now, it involved a large amount of research, an exchange of snail mail, multiple phone calls, and almost a month to complete.

This week I did everything in a couple of days, and could have managed it in a day had I not had to work and sleep.

If you have any problems with the site please let me know via an email to phyxr at phyxr dot com.

This appeals to me. It’s the sort of information revolution I’d like to see succeed. Have a listen to the talk below, it’s worth a few minutes of your time.

Navigating the Age of Democratized Media conference keynote from FreedomBox Foundation on Vimeo.

The FreedomBox Foundation is a Delaware non-profit founded in February 2011 to support and coordinate work on the FreedomBox project, which aims to to return control of digital communications to individuals and take it away from the corporations that spy on people as a way of life and the governments that use control over communications to stifle political organization and dissent. More information and updates can be found at http://freedomboxfoundation.org

The British government has instigated a program of monitoring of its peoples internet traffic that will give them unprecidented access to everyones private communications and internet habits.
Whilst the government takes money from its citizens in tax to pay for the project they desperately try to gloss over the real powers they are granting their “officials”.
The “Mastering the Internet” plan allows all IP communications data to be freely gathered and processed without any kind of consent. It also allows interception of communication content as and when they see fit.

So successful are the British government at lying to their citizens that most people arn’t even aware this is happening.

Read GCHQs non-denial denial about their activities here.

The information held on every child in the country on the UK government’s supposedly secure child protection database will, it seems, be legitimately available to upwards of a million people. That’s around 1 person in 40. So, were you to be in a pub on a busy friday night you might see a dozen or more faces of people who could access all the information held on the database about your children.
And this is before any loss of data that may occur such as this loss of 25 million child benefit payment records.

Research funded by the US government is looking at how to use everyday lighting as a way of providing wireless data access.

The initiative is known as the Smart Lighting Engineering Research Centre, and will be located at Boston University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of New Mexico. The US National Science Foundation is stumping up $18.5m in funding.

The information would be transmitted by flickering the LEDs like very fast signal lamps. The data flicker would not be visible to humans.

Are the worlds leading chip manufacturers, China and Taiwan, embedding hardware trojans and backdoors  into the chips they supply the rest of the world with?  Well the US certainly thinks it’s a possibility.

Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff recently said “Increasingly when you buy computers they have components that originate … all around the world,” he also said. “We need to look at … how we assure that people are not embedding in very small components … that can be triggered remotely.”

What amuses me about this is that the US would certainly be looking at doing this, or doing it already, were their chip manufacturing industry successful enough to give them the opportunity.

Tilera’s latest iMesh processors have 64 identical processor cores, or tiles, on one chip.  Each of these can run a full OS opening up possibilities for large numbers of virual machines running simultaneously.

Whilst the cores don’t support floating point math and thus are not suitable for your typical supercomputer applications, they are being used in digital multimedia, networking and wireless networks applications.

And I recall being well chuffed when I created an 8 node beowulf cluster of 486 CPU based PCs…

Find out more about Tilera here.