George Orwell Vs. Big Brother: Guess Who Wins

Thanks to @pharmagossip for tweeting the original photo of a surveillance camera at the home of the late great George Orwell, author of the dystopian novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four" about a totalitarian surveillance state.

(There's no link to cheezeburger here because their automatic resizing was making it difficult to read the memorial, so I made this manually with GIMP. This image has been resized to fit the screen, but the full-sized image is available.)

Heartbleed? Ehh...

found on memebase

I hope this isn't your reaction to Heartbleed, but I'd understand if it was. To be honest, it seems to me that a lot of organizations were too lazy to send out alerts to advise people to change their passwords. I only got 1 notification, and I'm sure there were more that patched their systems.

Have You Heard The Latest 'Chadder'?

from here (source image)

I don't know if McAfee is going for irony points or what, but naming a secure messaging technology "Chadder" seems a little weird.

Dogs And Cats Guarding Together. Which Is Scarier?

found on the zooom

I actually think mentioning the cat here sabotage's the effectiveness of the dog as a deterrent (the dog might not be good enough so we've also got a cat). But if you happen to have a big cat (a lion, or tiger or something) then I suppose anyone who breaks in can't say they weren't warned.

Lonely Fence Is Lonely

from here (source image)

While there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, there's also such a thing as too little. If you cut corners too much you won't be able to keep the bad things out.

Do You Choose To Have Your Privacy Invaded By Using Technology?

It's nice to see PBS Idea Channel try to tackle the issue of online privacy. There are certainly those who will claim that you do make this choice when you use technology, but I tend to agree with Mike that the choice isn't as simple as it sounds and in some ways isn't really much of a choice at all (unless you're OK with cutting yourself off from a lot of the ways people interact with each other nowadays).

One nit pick, though, is that although Mike framed it this way, it's not the Internet that's necessarily insecure, it's computers themselves that are necessarily insecure. As the infosec saying goes:

If it runs software then it's vulnerable. If it's connected then it's exposed.

Big Brother's Worst Enemy

from here (source image)

Thanks to Jenni Leder for tweeting about this great face painting story. I've seen pictures before where people painted lines and funny angles on their face with the idea that it could foil facial recognition, but this example of faces within faces looks like it could make a computer throw a fit.

I Heartbleed NSA

found on Hackajar on Everything

It appears that Robert Imhoff has come up with quite a nice looking graphic that you can put on stickers (and presumably other things) to commemorate the Heartbleed bug and the theories about the NSA using it.

Unfortunately, it appears he's only doing the image and not actually setting up a store for you to buy the stickers themselves like I would have done. I guess if you want it on a sticker (or a T-shirt, or something else) you'll just have to upload the image to a printer yourselves and have it made that way.

(Hint for Robert: it doesn't cost you anything to set up a store at CafePress or Zazzle or any number of other similar sites)

There's Only One Person Creating Fear Here

from here (source image one and two)

I don't know what it is with Eugene Kaspersky and the Die Hard 4 movie plot, but as I recall from the movie, the person who vehemently warned that the country was vulnerable to attack subsequently went on to prove it by attacking the country.  He wasn't the hero that Kaspersky likes to style himself as, he was the villain. Maybe Kaspersky should keep that in mind the next time he gets the impulse to mimic the character Thomas Gabriel's reputed behaviour.

Keep It In Your Pants

found on the meta picture

The best place to hide something is somewhere that people won't or don't want to look.