links for 2009-08-21

This leads me to a fairly important conclusion: the can of worms — the hackable, fakable, fallible DNA database — is already here, and the law of bureaucracy says it isn't going away. But it needs to be secured. To do so, it's essential that it not be used as an authentication tool for identifying individuals. Moreover, DNA evidence can no longer be seen as sufficient on its own to secure a conviction in court. Online checks will still have a place — but only if they're used to match individuals against evidence found at crime scenes, and even then, only as an indicator (not as evidence in its own right).

If you like to monitor your system using age-old command line tools like uptime and top, you want the free GeekTool on your Mac. Today we'll cover how to automatically embed command output, text files and even monitoring images - like web site traffic charts - onto your Mac desktop with GeekTool.