wireless mouse sound

Every once in a while, I start hearing a high-pitched sound when I move my mouse or scroll the mouse-wheel. It's not very loud to begin with, and when I try to figure out where it comes from, it gets quieter and disappears. Now that I'm writing about it, it's dead silent. So I'm still not sure if the sound comes from the mouse itself, the laptop, or my nearby speaker. It doesn't seem to be coming from the wireless receiver.

Search results show that I'm not the only one with this problem. It may possibly be due to coil whine.

Update: It's definitely not coming from the speakers either. It's got to be either the mouse or my laptop. And maybe it only happens when my mouse is in a certain position relative to the laptop... Maybe the wireless signals are causing something in the laptop to vibrate?

Update #2: I figured it out - the noise is coming from the mouse itself!

data security things

I've generally felt that access-locked posts on DW and LJ were fairly secure. But it occurred to me recently that unless you use https to submit your post, it is still sent unencrypted over the internet. Whenever someone in your access list reads it, unless they are using https, it is also sent unencrypted. Therefore, anyone sniffing traffic could potentially capture the text and read it. I should check whether DW and LJ fully support https now; the last times I checked it, it was only partially supported.

I suppose posts are also stored unencrypted on the servers, so that they might be vulnerable to hacking. This DW news post from 2010 seems to indicate so. I guess it would be hard to encrypt posts, considering that they need to be visible not only to the author, but also to anyone the author gives access to.

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Because Thunderbird always prompts me for a password when I bring it up, I've had a vague feeling that my email was secure. That's silly, as I know that when I cancel the password prompt a few times, I can read mail that's already been downloaded; only new mail won't be downloaded. I was also under the mistaken impression that the mail was at least stored in encrypted form on my hard drive (though obviously, there's no point in that, as one can simply open Thunderbird and read it from there).

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I hadn't realized that the original TrueCrypt project had shut down last year, until reading about it on the above linked Thunderbird page. The circumstances around the shut down sound quite suspicious (even though they might not be). It makes me start thinking of all kinds of possible subterfuge and conspiracies. Even regarding the audit that was done on the code, which as pointed out by one of the comments on that page, was limited in scope.

I never did get around to installing and using TrueCrypt myself. It's been one of those things I'd always wanted to do, sort of, if I had more time.