Romanticism Corner: Song by Cole Porter

Ev'ry time we say goodbye I die a little.
Ev'ry time we say goodbye I wonder why a little.
Why the gods above me who must be in the know
Think so little of me they allow you to go.
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When you're near there's such an air of spring about it.
I can hear a lark somewhere waiting to sing about it.
There's no love song finer,
But how strange the change from major to minor.
Ev'ry time we say goodbye I die a little.

Tech Corner: Anyone Can Be a Hacker

. The image above is a screen seen by amateur hacker and cyber-thieves who use this easy-to-use kit to devise ways to create a bot-net. Their hacks attack thousands of personal computers in private homes. In creating malicious bot-nets designed to steal personal information, all they have to do to customize their attacks is to click on some check-boxes or radio buttons to "order" the type of computers they want to attack. For example, they can use the program's powerful search engine to browse through their victims' machines and find detailed information , such as which banks they use. The chart above shows that Internet Explorer is the most heavily attacked browser software of all.

. "You don't need to have knowledge of programming or networking protocol stacks. You just need to know who you want to target, click a couple of buttons and there you have it," said Christopher Elisan, senior researcher at botnet detection firm Damballa.

. As web-based tools and kits that can be obtained over the internet have improved, the drudgery associated with hacking has morphed into simple, convenient products that untrained people can use to get into the business of stealing from other people over the internet--both money AND information.

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From an article in the SF Chronicle Business section on Sunday March 14th.

From The Infinities

. . ."relives the time of his father's death . . . as if a close-packed flotilla were putting out to sea." He recalls that his father died at Christmas and he helped his mother bake a cake, "measuring out the ingredients on the black iron weighing-scales with the brass weights that were cool and heavy as he imagined doubloons would be," and how, when his mother's tears fell into the mixing bowl, "making three tiny grey craters in the white mixture," the embarrassed boy took over the mixing as his mother sat down and wept, her tears quickly dissolving into the other ingredients as he asked himself: "but what did it mean, completely mixed? . . . how would he know when that moment of perfect distribution had been achieved?--how would he know the instant to stop mixing in order not to upset the equilibrium and throw everything back into disorder?"
. In this tragic scene, which goes on for several pages, we see a character in formation, coalescing itself around grief, a boy sensing and testing his powers of imaginative abstraction as he discovers a permanent refuge from unfiltered feeling. "Yes," says Hermes, and not without a certain bitter irony, "we gods were there with him even then."
. Inspiration--whether in mathemathhics, love, science or art--often comes with a cost to those closest to us."
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--Quotations from "The Infinities," a novel by John Banville (Alfred A. Knopf) 273 pages; $25.95, as reviewed by Jacob Molyneux in the Books section, SF Chronicle Sunday March 14.