Plan 9 from Plan B

I just put together a freshly installed VMWare appliance for Plan 9 and dumped it on the VMWare Marketplace. I was looking for a better solution for a distributed file system at my house, and am in the process of getting hardware together for a Plan 9 installation. In the meantime, I figured I'd get acclimated with the UI with this image, and a friend suggested I upload it so others may luxuriate in the alien beauty of Plan 9 from Bell Labs.

Twitterank and Password Sharing

ZDNet is running a story about how "promiscuous" (excellent adjective!) Twitter users can be; original story here, and Twitterank creator Ryo Chijiiwa's followup here.

This would have been a slightly better story if Ryo was a security researcher who was trying to make a point about password sharing, but no, that was just a side effect of his viral web service (according to him, over two thousand opt-ins in under five hours).

The fact is, Ryo is not the first to ask for your password. Facebook and LinkedIn have been doing it for a while, mainly to rifle through your webmail contacts list, and I'm sure they're not the only ones.

I've never really understood why anyone would say yes to this, or even why it's acceptable to ask. Kids these days with their loose passwords and their Internet promiscuity.