Rants

I've got strong opinions on some subjects. If you're interested, here's a few expositions at length.

Restrictions on cryptography, key escrow and the people who say you don't need to keep things private.

On people who send documents in MSWord or other proprietary formats that aren't readily usable on anything other than the type of system the sender was using, or that contain executable code, or that just plain make assumptions about what the recipient has without the sender first checking whether those assumptions are correct.

My annoyance with Unisys and their actions regarding their patents on parts of the GIF graphics file format. Basically the reasons why I switched to using PNG instead of GIF on my site.

Recent denial-of-service attacks have attracted my attention to ISP routing and filtering policies. I've set up my own firewall, so I know what's possible and what's not, and it should be entirely possible to make most of these denial-of-service attacks nearly impossible to carry out. So why are they still happening?

You've probably heard of copyright infringement before. Usually it involves someone literally copying another's work, possibly making some superficial changes to it and claiming it as their own. The same thing can happen to characters, where one author takes and uses another's characters without permission. Recently, though, I ran into the inverse of this problem.

You've probably dealt with insurance companies. I think a bunch of things about insurance are broken.