Here's a little something to sour your morning coffee with the acid taste of anxiety: an interesting piece by Joanna Rutkowska pointing out what she claims is an inherent security flaw in the X Window GUI model :

... Start another terminal window, and switch to root (e.g. using su, or sudo). Notice how the xinput running as user is able to sniff all your keystrokes, including root password (for su), and then all the keystrokes you enter in your root session. Start some GUI app as root, or as different user, again notice how your xinput can sniff all the keystrokes you enter to this other app!

I never knew this and am not aware of much discussion going on about the issue. Is this a fundamental flaw that Windows Vista addresses more successfully, as the author claims, or has the time truly come to do away with the X Window model and develop something else? Did the UNIX-Haters Handbook get this one right?

What do you get when you cross an enterprising and talented musician with a hardware hacker? For starters, you get Imogen Heap, a UK musician who wants to change how we interact with our equipment when producing and performing music . She says,

Fifty percent of a performance is racing around between various instruments and bits of technology on stage. I wanted to create something where I could manipulate my computer on the move wirelessly so that music becomes more like a dance rather than a robotic act like pressing a button or moving a fader.

And that's what she's doing. She's created a pair of technical gloves called Mi.Mu that use a series of sensors to can be connected to standard audio equipment to manipulate sound. Any budding musician that has crouched over his/her digital audio equipment fiddling with knobs, sliders, and faders ought to see the advantage in a new interface that allows you to express your music by moving your body, as well as the potential advantages in a stage performance.

Is this a more interesting future for the coming world of wearable computers and technology? And beyond hands, what can we do with this kind of technology?