I've talked in the past about reasons for concern about our ability to beat DRM systems. But I didn't make my case as well as I could have. So go read this — a very, very good post explaining why rosy optimism about amateur hackers' future success against Big Content is a less than sure thing.

Securing content on x86 is hopeless. But as processors inevitably get cheaper, faster and more ubiquitous, x86 will handle less and less of our computing. The systems that replace it will largely be either a) not general purpose, and therefore less documented/harder to access or b) properly secured.

I recently took apart a SmarTrip card — one of the RFID-based farecards that work on DC's buses and subways (and subway parking lots!). Those interested can have a look at a Flickr set of the proceedings here. A detailed writeup should be appearing on DCist soon (possibly tomorrow), so keep an eye out for that. My goal is to get this thing reliably mounted on my keychain, freeing my wallet of the SmarTrip card and bringing my ass one precious millimeter closer to seated equilibrium.

UPDATE: The longer DCist version is now online.

if you're sick of cute butterstick, you can go to this site, devoted exclusively to photos of adorable little animals. ben wolfson, are you in the habit of checking out kitten pics?

Finding a good FTP client is irritating. FTP is the type of thing that's almost worth leaving to the command line, but does benefit from a minimal GUI. But as soon as a good program becomes popular its authors decide they need to fill it with spyware, fees and unnecessary features. I used to use WS_FTP, then it stopped being free. I moved to CuteFTP, then its authors made it bloated with crap. I switched to SmartFTP, but it's recently also become filled with junk (and crash-prone).

So now I'm using FileZilla, and I'm pretty pleased with it. It's open source — hopefully the absence of a profit motive will keep it from getting junked up.

after tommy posted that enormous, terrifying, veiny-handed, panda-psychosis-induced photo of me below (thanks boyfriend!) i feel compelled to link to my flickr stream, where just this afternoon i uploaded a backlog of photos of me and my eminently photogenic family and fat doggie from thanksgiving. i can't believe my brother's in the navy and my sister will head to uva soon. lord, i'm old!

As Catherine mentioned, we finally went and saw the panda cub. He was cute. People cooed. Good times, all having them, etc. It was a close thing, though — if not for the dedicated zoo staff's willingness to harass young Butterstick, we would've just had a view of some rocks. Which, while adorable by rock standards, would have been kind of a letdown.

I knew better than to try to compete with the Nabob's action shots, so I just took some video instead. It turns out that my camera's zoom function works really, really badly when you're shooting movies. Oh well. Cleanliness is next to Godliness is next to Mysteriousness is next to Blurriness is next to Fuzziness, and that is, after all, why we've declared this ball of fur to be our new golden calf (although he's probably pretty filthy, so I'm not sure if that the transitive property actually holds all the way through this construction).

Anyway! You can get the panda viewing experience without paying $40 for a FONZ membership if you click here (MPEG, 16.6MB).

PS: Catherine and I promise to try to stop making horrible panda-related post titles. Or at least we'll try to try.

tommy, charles and i hit up the butterstick exhibit today, and boy howdy, it was great. not that i'd have expected anything else. we had to wait in line for about ten minutes, and there was palpable tension between the 12:20 group (us) and the 12:30 group when it seemed apparently that some from the later group might try to sneak ahead of us devotees who DESERVED TO BE FIRST. i thought a panda riot might break out.

anywhere, when we got in the viewing room, butterstick had apparently ensconced himself behind a rock, impossible to even get a glimpse of, and the guide told us to wait for a few minutes for he would surely come out. my heart sank when nothing happened, because i definitely thought the zoo would shrug and say, tough shit, panda lovers, you'll have to come back another time because we are sure not as hell going to disturb our goldmine of panda fur from his beauty rest. but they did! yay! a zoo worker came in, scooped up butterstick and brought him to the front of the glass for a walk-by viewing. the collective "OOOOHHHH" that escaped from everybody's mouths, from the 3-year-olds to the grandpas, was truly adorable. i told tommy that if only we'd send baby pandas to iraq, everything would be hunky dory there in a few days. then the zoo worker placed him on a rock where he rolled about and collapsed his head in his paws, like, "holy CHRIST, these people, with the camera flashing, do they EVER FUCKING STOP?" then he rolled himself off the rock into a pile of hay and went to hide behind a different corner. butterstick was sleepy. we all went to the panda video monitor station and watched him on the tv as he tried to find a comfy position to nap in. he was beyootiful. then i went and bought a butterstick magnet from the shop, though i could have had my choice of 32 billion iterations of the stuffed panda. not to mention butterstick xmas cards. too bad i already bought mine.

after the panda viewing tommy and i went a little crazy and visited the great apes, the small animals and the reptiles, along with the bonkers toddler elephant who spent the entire afternoon maniacally playing with a hollow metal ball chained to the wall. guess things get lonely when you're not the adored baby panda. aw.

UPDATE: unrelated, sort of, but the flickrblog pointed me towards these amazing monkey photos - go here, enter the site, and click on the monkey photo. go through them all - they're really profoundly strange and beautiful.