Blog Entries
Porn pranksters have a field day with YouTube injection flaw
Jul 5, 4:23Cross-site scripting attack on YouTube over the weekend: "That turned out to be as simple as using two script tags in a row (<script><script>fun scripting stuff goes here!), as noted by F-Secure researcher Mikko H. Hypponen on Twitter—the first of the two tags would get stripped, and the second was allowed through."
File-sharing has weakened copyright - and helped society
Jul 1, 3:33"By charting the production of new books, new music albums, and new feature films over the last decade, the authors tried to see whether creative output went up or down in correlation with file-sharing." They find that creative output is going up while piracy also increases. But this is correlation not causation. They can't say there wouldn't be more creative output with less piracy. Regardless, still an interesting statistic.King's Quest returns in The Silver Lining | THINQ.co.uk
Jun 29, 6:40A fan made Kings Quest sequel gets an official go-ahead: "After negotiations, the C&D [cease and desist] has been officially rescinded, and Phoenix Online has been granted a non-commercial license to release The Silver Lining!"ThinkGeek :: Blurgh! The ThinkGeek Blog - Officially our best-ever cease and desist
Jun 21, 1:15"We'd like to publicly apologize to the NPB for the confusion over unicorn and pork--and for their awkward extended pause on the phone after we had explained our unicorn meat doesn't actually exist."Shepard Fairey - Interview Magazine
May 10, 8:59Iggy Pop interviews Shepard Fairey, including his Obama HOPE poster and AP lawsuit:"... but the American public is generally pretty superficial, so an image like that just allows them to project whatever limited idea they have onto it. Obviously, not everyone is like that—I actually think there were a lot of people who were bummed by the image because they felt it was shallow propaganda."
"If I spend time conceiving and making a piece of art and somebody else sees that it has market value and replicates it in order to steal part of my market, then that’s not cool. But the way I make art—the way a lot of people make art—is as an extension of language and communication, where references are incredibly important. It’s about making a work that is inspired by something preexisting but changes it to have a new value and meaning that doesn’t in any way take away from the original—and, in fact, might provide the original with a second life or a new audience."
CMAP #9: Ebooks
May 10, 8:43Charles Stross on the intersection of ebooks and the publishing industry. Includes the answer to the misinformed question "why are you charging so much for access to the file your authors emailed you?" Also includes this quote on Cory Doctorow "... Cory is a Special Snowflake with EFF superpowers and New York Times Bestseller mojo which make him immune to the normal laws of man and nature."Schneier on Security: The Effectiveness of Air Marshals
Apr 11, 3:51"In fact, more air marshals have been arrested than the number of people arrested by air marshals." Its easy to get awesome stats like this when talking about lawlessness on airplanes given its great infrequency.Tao Effect Blog » Blog Archive » Steve Jobs’ response on Section 3.3.1
Apr 11, 2:16Lots of links, info, and thoughts on Apple's change to the iPhone SDK terms of service that now state "Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript..." Means no other languages or third party platforms...EricLaw's IEInternals : HTTP/HTTPS Port-Blocking in WinINET
Mar 26, 5:16Interesting point that web browsers block HTML FORMs from submitting to some ports in order to avoid malicious servers from getting clients to do their dirty work. Of course it requires the host on the other side of that port to be able to interpret the HTTP request as something relevant to the protocol they actually expect.Marc Rotenberg: Brandeis in Italy: The Privacy Issues in the Google Video Case
Mar 9, 5:35Comparison of US claim 'the tort of appropriation' to Google video case in Italy.No, you can’t do that with H.264 « Digital Diary of Ben Schwartz
Feb 4, 2:01On the crappy licensing of the H.264 and MPEG codecs in popular video encoding software.How Flash Drives and Social Engineering can Compromise Networks
Jan 22, 1:44"He seeded the customer's parking lot with USB flash drives, each of which had a Trojan horse installed on it. When the employees arrived for work in the morning, they were quite excited to find the free gadgets laying around the parking lot. Employees eagerly collected the USB drives and plugged them into the first computers they came across: their own workstations."crayons « Weather Sealed
Jan 18, 3:11Crayola's Law: "The number of colors doubles every 28 years!" With chart depicting Crayola colors over the years.Official Google Blog: A new approach to China
Jan 12, 9:02"We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China."Public Domain Day
Jan 6, 3:41Public Domain Day sounds neat. Not just celebrating the public domain but celebrating new works now available in the public domain every Jan 1st. But we'll have to wait at least nine years to celebrate in the US. We need to get the copyright lifetime to match up with retro things regaining popularity -- like when big band music was briefly popular again.Get cached images from your visitors | Diovo
2009 Dec 15, 2:01"Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror fame) was in for a horror when he realized that his server crashed and his data was gone and due to some reason, the backup mechanism was not working. ... So what should Jeff do now? Since Coding horror is a high traffic blog, I think there is a way to get back at least some of the images." Reconstruct the HTML from Google's cache, change the HTTP server to tell the client it has the correct cached image for all the images, add script to the HTML to grab the images and send them back. Awesome idea. Of course now I want to setup Fiddler to swap in random images...
Some rights reserved