Charles Curley's Weblog

ClimateGate: 30 years in the making (Edition 1.1). Sounds like a thriller. Not quite. On November 17, 2009, the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit woke up to find its metaphorical fly unzipped: some 3,000 internal documents were leaked: ClimateGate. The result was a scandal of epic proportions. It was well timed, too: 2009 marked ten years of global cooling that the watermelons simply had not predicted with their models. Oops.

ClimateGate: 30 years in the making (Edition 1.1) is a timeline of the events leading up to ClimateGate. Get your copy now. It's just the thing for decorating your office.

I've update the Bare Metal Recovery writeup and scripts. This is mostly a maintenance release. I've cleaned up broken URLs and updated some of the commentary to reflect changes in technology. Enjoy.

I've added a new article, gpsdate. This article replaces the old article elsewhere on the web site and shows an updated version of the script.

This Perl script shows how to get the current time from a gps receiver.

Another reason to take your security seriously. A teenager in Hamburg, Germany, decided to throw a 16th birthday party for herself and a few friends. "A few friends" turned out to be more than 1600 (and 100 or so police) as the young lady neglected to check the privacy status of her party announcement.

Oops. The young lady should have checked the privacy status of her announcement, of course.

Fail: But would Facebook have been seriously inconvenienced if the default setting was the maximum privacy, and the user had to make a point of easing the setting? Has anyone at Facebook ever heard the word "failsafe"?