Well, if you ever watched scifi movies then you know of one of the first issues in communication with an alien species is language, infact we do not even need to go into space to have this issue – event though English has become sort of a universal language here on earth it can still be a problem to communicate with people from different countries, they may not know English or be very bad at it – so you are back to hand gestures and drawings. Now hand gestures and drawing may be great fun if you have ample time and the spirit is high, but in a pinch it’s not the best way to go.
If you have ever watched Star Trek you know they have this wonderful gadget – the Universal Translater – a contraption that translates alien languages in real time… Well, it’s no longer as far fetched as it sounds 😀 Skype to the rescue, Skype has been working on a near real time vocal translation addon to their popular communications software, and now they have something to show for it – it may still be in the very early stage but it’s a first step in the right direction. Links below to a narrative on this as well as a youtube clip.
http://sl.readmydamnblog.com/Ssb5tT
YouTube video;
http://sl.readmydamnblog.com/1x5as9Z
Some other fun site on the same subject.
http://sl.readmydamnblog.com/1tGR4eR
So what is up with Truecrypt?? Something fishey is indeed going on, their website www.truecrypt.org has been taken down and is now just redirected to; http://truecrypt.sourceforge.net/
My initial thought was that they had been hacked, but that does not appear so – the redirect happened several days ago and had it been a hack I would have expected it to be fixed by now. So something more serious seem to be going on. I read and heard several different ideas on what is going on ranging from protest against the XP end of support, Lavabit a like case, to NSA infiltration.
My personal “favorite” is that it is and internal powerstruggle in the Truecrypt team, the team has always been very secretive and roumers are that then internal power balance in the team has not always been the best. It is thus likely that the team somehow ended up imploding and subsequently just abandoned the whole thing.
I do feel that if the case is internal power struggels, then the team defaced their own gravestone, why would you not give a good explanation on your website as to what happened instead of having people be suspicious as to possible NSA infiltration etc.
Shame on you Truecrypt team, this exit is just plain irresponsible, grow up and face the music.
A summery of what is known, a repository of the “original” truecrypt files and some additional useful insights can be found on the GRC website;
http://sl.readmydamnblog.com/1xgFhIK
N
ow I have for the longest time been way to occupied to do a lot of reading on Reddit – which is actually a shame as there is lots of good info flowing around in there.. But anyhow, I came across a neat little trick which might be wellknown to you Reddit sharks out there, but I did not know it so I’ll share 😀
See the thing I hated was that in order to get to the groups that interests me I had to logon and then do several mouse clicks afterwards.. Might not sound like a major undertaking, but if you are busy then everything that takes mouse clicks may put you off..
Then I discovered that you could actually embed the groups you wanted to see in the URL and hence bookmark it!? Now I have one bookmark with the mail groups I want to read and thats it… Nice..
A few examples;
First one group;
http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin
Now a bunch of groups, you see you just add a “+” sign and the groupname..
As mentioned, this is likely childsplay to Reddit know-it-all’s but to me it is a real neat trick.