Burrowowl

Fear, uncertainty, and doubt have an advantage over reason in the short term. It is natural to treat change as dangerous. When encountering a new person, business, or technology that is seeking your trust, it is normal to withhold or deny that trust at first, looking for some indication that it is merited first. The above slickly-produced infomercial is an excellent example of this.

The purpose of trusted computing is to insulate computer hardware and software vendors from liability when end-user information is compromised in some way. Toward this end, the TCPA encourages certain practices regarding interaction between processes within a system or between systems. By implementing these practices it is theoretically easier to make tools that share information responsibly.

FUD dictates that should be viewed as a power grab by greedy corporations that want to sneak into your house and steal your Cheez-its. Clearly by implementing a chip on your computer that uses 2048-bit encryption, some diabolical cabal will be hijacking your World of Warcraft guild chat and putting your company’s trade secrets up on eBay.

The Against TCPA group may be well-intentioned but their claims are unsupported and their arguments are largely an appeal to anti-corporatism. Due to the nearly invisible way that Internet traffic is already routed past various parties, through unknown hardware to practically-unknown destinations, all based upon paper-thin chains of trust with ominous names like DNS and BGP, it seems to me that this is much ado about very little indeed. If you’re concerned about shadowy figures reading your email and poking through your top-secret communications, you would be well-advised to encrypt it yourself, establish VPN tunnels through various foreign connections, and wear a tinfoil yarmulke under your hat.

Love the mascot, though.

Transitional episodes have an odd effect on me. Most shows don’t have the courtesy to provide them, as it’s necessary to keep the story and character development moving forward, but I think Gainax was able to pull it off with the introduction of a new character, a dramatic (if temporary) shift in presentation style, and a little reshuffling of the deck.
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The other night I was exposed to a lovely little web game called Stick Remover. The instructions are in Japanese, but the controls are super easy. Use your mouse to remove support beams from a structure that suspends a star above the red line. Every time you remove a structure, you risk dropping the star too low. When you’re satisfied that you’d removed as many support beams as you can, click “next” on the upper right.

Five levels of fun. I scored 131, how ’bout you?

This weekend’s episode of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann has been action-packed, and full of the valor, burning passion, and forthright struggle we have come to expect through eight episodes largely comprised of excellence. This week, the series passes a major milestone, a waypoint that anybody could have seen coming, but one that feels like it came all too soon. The pacing and craftsmanship of Gainax shows through in this episode, as it wrenches the faithful viewer though emotional peaks and valleys, wrapping up with a poignant, appropriate ending.

I’m not in the habit of posting spoilers, but I’ll be flying my Gurren Dan flag at half mast this week.

Blizzard Entertainment has finally caved in to the inevitable, and in a bid to preempt military action by a rabid South Korean fanbase have announce that Starcraft II is far enough into development for a web launch.

Back in the stone age when the original Starcraft came out, my coworkers and I would stay late after work for multiplayer games, eschewing Battlenet and its uber-teenagers. I never cared for the Protoss and their rather impressive end-game abilities, preferring to get the fight started relatively early on. Sometimes this resulted in accusations of “Zerg Rush” cheapness, but really it’s just part of the game; I could never mount a credible defense against a well-built carrier force.

I look forward to seeing what they’re doing with the Terran and Zerg units. Blizzard apparently wants to trickle new information out on a per-faction basis, starting with my least favorite. I can wait, though.