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From The Register, news of security breaches via back doors (the kind with knobs and hinges), left open for smokers:

In a recent social engineering test undertaken by UK-based security consultancy NTA Monitor, a tester was able to easily gain access to a corporate building through a back door that was left open for smokers. Once [...]

By way of InstaPundit, here’s an interesting description of the struggle behind the scenes of a controversial Wikipedia page. The summary is provided by James Purtilo, a CS Professor at UMD College Park. He notes, in particular, one of the dangers when such material is frozen and not flagged with any sort of disclaimer:

When journalists [...]

I see that Amazon is taking pre-orders for a new edition of Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action:

I grabbed a well-used copy of a ‘63 hardcover edition off eBay a couple of years ago, not wanting to shell out $60+ for a freshly minted one. The new edition is paperback, but may be a bit less [...]

Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is coming up in my reading queue, so I recently went back and re-read his 2002 “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm”.
“Coase’s Penguin” is the paper in which Benkler coined the term peer-production to describe open-source software [...]

Roanoke-based Pixel Optics is developing some intriguing new vision technology, with the potential to let people go beyond 20/20:

There are no moving parts. These lenses will provide the ability to see more naturally and clearly. They are “dynamic” (changing optical power) vs. lenses that are “static” (fixed optical power), which are found in current ophthalmic [...]

Frederic Bastiat opens his essay, What is Seens and What Is Not Seen, with the following words:

In the economic sphere an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. [...]

Here’s an interesting (and active) forum discussing HDTV in the greater Roanoke/NRV/SWVA region. In a good example of internet-enabled disintermediation, there’s a fair amount of interaction between HDTV users and tech-types at some of the local TV stations. Browsing the forums for other regions, such conversations seem to be quite common.
It’s clear that everybody involved [...]

This is an experiment with using a blog to keep track of notes on technology, particularly software development, and economics, particularly the Austrian variety. I am particularly interested in the theme of “spontaneous” or “emergent” order, ideas who roots go back (at least) to Scottish Elightenment thinkers like Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson, were developed [...]