timbl suggests that everyone should have a URL. Not that I get all that semantic web crap, but if a Knight of the British Empire commands, I can hardly refuse – the consequences might be terrible indeed.

So, from now on, my URL is http://www.themel.com/foaf.rdf#me. If you have a URL too and think that it might be reasonable to have me link with it or have suggestions on other fun stuff to put in my FOAF description, don’t hesitate to let me know.

Today’s physics lecture was the last for this semester, and so we got to watch the classic Tacoma Narrows Bridge movie. Lovely footage – look here [DE] for lame video quality with low-fi music and dramatic commentary or here for supreme video quality and a silent movie.

They should have movies like that for all the topics – I’m pretty sure no one will think resonance isn’t worth thinking about after this.

The fine people at quintessenz have come up with a fun generator [DE] to produce valid SVNR’s (Austria’s equivalent of an SSN that look like credible misspellings/misreadings of your real one.

The goal seems to be messing with systems that assume social insurance numbers as valid global identifiers and keep the unwanted crosslinking to a minimum. While it’s rather well known that such numbers make lousy authenticators, they’re rather ideally suited as personal identifiers, and I doubt that the activities of a few hackers will do much to stop their use as such. Still, the existence of the generator highlights a rather likely design flaw in such systems, and I consider using it good security practice – there’s no way my bank or the random cigarette promotion needs to access social insurance information. Making the use of personal identifiers more expensive is a good thing, since it’ll probably make system architects consider whether they actually need personal information before simply deciding to use it because it’s there. I’ve got a list of backup social insurance numbers in my wallet now, and the next time I need one I’ll try and see what happens…