Blayne Sucks

Threat Level is reporting that John McCain would continue the Bush administration’s policies of warrantless wiretapping. For the uninitiated: The NSA has conducted warrantless surveillance of Americans with the help of some telephone companies such as AT&T. I have previously blogged about whether AT&T should be retroactively granted immunity for the actions. [...]

Although I’m sure this is old news by now (I apologize - I have been extremely busy the last couple of months), I did want to post briefly to say that I was announced as the winner of Bruce Schneier’s Third Annual Movie-Plot Threat Contest. As I posted in that thread, I am surprised and [...]

As a former member of the Purdue Society of Professional Engineers Rube Goldberg team, I was extremely pleased to see that they recently won the national competition! If you have never heard of the Rube Goldberg competition before, then you’ll definitely want to check out this summary page that describe the history of the [...]

I just ran across a post on Concurring Opinions that rocked me back in my seat. The full text of two of Dan Solove’s most popular books are now available online for free. The Digital Person and The Future of Reputation are both fantastic books. I have been meaning to reread them [...]

Last weekend I was able to see a documentary called Helvetica. Although most people I’ve recommended it to this past week have been less than enthusiastic in their feelings towards watching a documentary of a typeface, I strongly urge anyone reading this to give it a fair shot. It is a short documentary [...]

Although Ed Felten has recently gotten tons of press about his research group’s recent analysis of breaking hard drive encryption, I wanted to talk about some research that he’s done previously on electronic voting for several reasons. First, I mentioned voting in my last post. Second, I have blogged about electronic voting here [...]

One of the most highly charged pieces of legislation that has been passed by Congress in recent years is the Protect America Act. Probably the only good thing about it is the sunset provision that ensures it will expire in its current form unless Congress acts to renew it or make it permanent. [...]

I have talked about some of the things I would like to see in electronic book readers before. I have a feeling that this is a list that is fundamentally incomplete simply because I haven’t sat down and actually analyzed the problem from an engineering standpoint. However, I read something on Cult of [...]

In a recent IBM commercial, the company implies that virtual worlds are a fad and, as a result, a waste of both time and money. For those who haven’t seen it, the commercial starts with an employee showing off his avatar to someone else, presumably a boss. The employee is all pumped about [...]

For many people the idea of reading a book about a mathematical proof right after finishing a semester in a Computer Science graduate program would be an apt definition of torture. First, I am not one of those people. Second, Fermat’s Enigma really isn’t a book about math so much as [...]