My neighbor's obnoxious sodium vapor street light

Singapore teen charged with stealing wireless internet access

Let me state for the record that stealing is wrong.

Now, lets examine the real nature of the circumstance...

My neighbor put up one of those obnoxious sodium vapor street lights on a pole that is close to my property. I will readily acknowledge that he is completely within his right to do so. Even if the light is an obnoxious eyesore. But here is the point of my rant...

Can my neighbor stop me from using the light emitted from his obnoxious street light? Hardly. He cannot control where the light goes. So I can sit out in my yard in the middle of the night and read the paper using his light if I want to...and he cannot stop me. Can my neighbor stop me from using the deterrent effect of a street light, his street ligtht, to reduce the possibility of crime in my neighborhood?

If my neighbor didn't want me to use his street light then he better direct it specifically on to his property. Or he should set the light to shine at a frequency that only he can see. Or he should turn the light off when he is not using it. Or...

My wifi network? Protected with a shared WEP key? Well, yeah... so what is your point?

I need to get a life...

I was curious so I signed up at Second Life. Learned to walk, talk and fly. Managed to stumble and tumble around for a while and then it hit me...like a ton of virtual bricks... allow me to elucidate...

05:00 Pager goes off - sent by my primary network management system - "Wake up call." Serves as my programmable alarm clock _and_ tests the paging system.

05:30ish...
First thing in the morning I usually check my PDA for my daily schedule and then wifi for my gMail. A quick read of the gNews followed by a check of my gReader feeds... kiss my lovely wife (the Saint) and then dropping teenagers off at highschool. Yes, I did remember my laptop, my cell phone, my PDA and my pager, thank you very much... "Make sure you e-mail me if your mother is going to pick you up after school."

07:00ish
Visual check of the Simplex Fire Alarm system on my way across the lobby, green is good. Check the snail mail. Checking for 'red-light' messages on printers, fax machines and copiers as I wind through the office. Through two locked doors to access my office and the network operations center.

Check the status of the network. Hobbit reporting which systems are on-line, which have system messages, which PCs have recently been rebooted. Hobbit also displays Server status - CPU loads, disk utilization, tcp connections and more. MRTG generates traffic graphs for key network connections. This big peak means the back-ups ran on schedule last night. This long sustained peak means that Sally is trying to send Halloween pictures to her sister again.

Fire up gReader on my main Slackware system (v.11 running KDE 3.5, tight) start in on the professional blogs...Trade Slicks (magazines) for the 21st century. Dock the laptop and fire it up... corporate e-mail - good the spam filter is working. Load the CCTV application - double check that all the cameras are on-line, good. Generate the Internet proxy report for last week and send a copy to the boss.

07:25 Pager goes off - sent by secondary network management system, "Morning staff meeting." Snag my first cup of office coffee then off to the morning briefing...

I need to get a life...yeah right, just what I need, a Second Life.

Security Alert: Privacy is dead!

Two (count 'em, 2) years ago I posted this (adult content) which was a repost of a "Privacy " rant that I had originally posted at Winextra.

Today I followed a link pointed to by noted security specialist Bruce Schneier which took me to an interesting article on Data Mining.