Monday, August 12, 2002

81-year-old foils 2 burglars with derringer. Burglars tangled with the wrong 81-year-old Saturday morning. Roy Lee Hendricks, who lives on East 67th Avenue off Lake Otis Parkway, fought off two men who broke in and demanded his wallet. Hendricks shot one man in the arm with a two-shot, .22-caliber derringer, accidentally blowing off the tip of his own pinkie. Then he and a friend held the wounded man at gunpoint inside the house until police arrived. The other man escaped through a window. Nearly 6 feet tall and 200 pounds, Hendricks later said: 'I'd rather be a dead hero than a live coward.' During World War II, Hendricks parachuted into the fray at Normandy on D-Day with the 82nd Airborne Division. Later he fished for crab in the Bering Sea and longshored some. He lost the top of his thumb in a sawmill accident in the 1950s. [FirearmNews.com] Since Mr. Hendricks lives in Alaska (a free state) and chose to defend himself, he's now a live hero. Although given his service record, it's safe to say he was a hero already. I've noticed that many of the self-defense cases I read about involve people in their 80s. It's scary to think what will happen to the crime rate when people of that generation are no longer around to discourage criminals. comment () trackback ()  9:10:18 PM     Fortune's list of the greediest executives in America.  This is a list not to be on.  Two years ago, this list would have been called something more positive. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] Since I'm a libertarian rather than a socialist, I consider "greedy" a rather positive label. However, that's not what the list is really about. To quote from the Fortune page: Meet the 25 companies with the greediest executives. Of the big companies whose stocks dropped 75% or more from their boom-time peak, these are the ones where officers and directors took out the most money via stock sales from January 1999 through May 2002. In other words, this is really a list of executives who had enough sense to dump their ridiculously overpriced stock before the bubble burst. People who are angry with executives like this may say it's about "greed," but really they're angry that the executives weren't as stupid as they were. comment () trackback ()  11:57:38 AM     New York Times - Editorial Op-Ed: free registration required A Tale of Two Chinas. Taiwan should lead by example and encourage mainland China to become a nation where freedom of the press and democratic, fair elections are the norm. [Privacy Digest] As the first opposition leader in Chinese history to ascend to the presidency, Mr. Chen should not content himself with calling for a referendum on independence for a Republic of Taiwan. As a Chinese leader, he should recognize a greater mission ÷ he must take the opposition movement's experiences democratizing Taiwan to the mainland. As a Chinese leader, he ought to encourage mainland China to become a nation where freedom of the press and democratic, fair elections are the norm. A nice idea in theory, but I suspect that any attempt to follow this course would invite a Chinese invasion even more quickly than a formal declaration of independence. comment () trackback ()  9:58:37 AM     CNET NEWS.COM - PGP encryption defect uncovered. Researchers claim to have detected a flaw in a popular e-mail encryption technology that could allow hackers to read protected messages. The flaw occurs in software that uses Pretty Good Privacy, a tool for scrambling e-mail. However, in order to exploit the vulnerability, hackers must convince their targets to reply to a sabotaged e-mail message. Researchers working at "Columbia University" discovered the flaw, which requires a hacker to intercept and modify an encrypted message. If the recipient attempts to decrypt the message, he or she will be presented with a string of gibberish. If the recipient then replies to that message, saying, for instance, "what were you trying to say?" and quotes the string of gibberish, the attacker could use that response to decode the original message. [Privacy Digest] The CNET article simplifies a bit--in fact, the intercepted message must not have been compressed by PGP. This only happens when sending an encrypted file that was already compressed, such as a Stuffit archive. This is pretty rare in my experience. The attack also requires that the recipient quote back the gibberish message. Experienced and knowledgeable email users aren't likely to do that, but there are an awful lot of people out there who blindly quote entire messages when replying. comment () trackback ()  9:50:47 AM     Hey hey hey, Paolo is opening his store. Here's the intro. Maybe I'll do a couple of tools, just for a little Tuesday lunch money, and to help bootstrap Paolo's store. [Scripting News] He's trying to sell Radio UserLand tools for 29 Euros. It will be interesting to see how well he does. comment () trackback ()  9:40:10 AM

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