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Yellow Dots of Mystery: Is Your Printer Spying on You?

2008 Oct 23, 11:27Informative and humorous video on the topic of printer tracking dots. "Most color laser printers and color copiers are designed to print invisible tracking codes across every single printed page of their output. These codes reveal which machine produced a document and, in some cases, when the document was printed or copied."PermalinkCommentshumor video security privacy eff printer

Presidential Election 2008 FAQ

2008 Oct 13, 10:53"This is an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions list) for the 2008 United States Presidential Election. I need to disclose up front that I am an Obama supporter. However, with the exception of the very last question, this FAQ is designed as a collection of factual information (such as the latest poll results) and of analysis that is as objective as possible."PermalinkCommentsvia:kris.kowal politics election obama mccain

THOMAS Publishes Permanent Links (Another Recommendation Realized) | The Open House Project

2008 Oct 10, 3:35Apparently thanks to the Open House Project, US legislation can now have real and permanent links. I'm kind of surprised that legislation would exist so freely on the Internet without real links. The Open House Project is "a collaborative effort by government and legislative information experts, congressional staff, non-profit organizers and bloggers to study how the House of Representatives currently integrates the Internet into its operations, and to suggest attainable reforms to promote public access to its work and members."PermalinkCommentsinternet url link uri politics

Facebook | Help Center

2008 Sep 24, 6:37Info on how to get at what RSS feeds Facebook provides. "Facebook allows you to subscribe to a variety of rapidly updating content on the site. You can easily keep track of all of your friend's status updates, posted items and notes." I'd like a RSS feed of my news feed please.PermalinkCommentsrss facebook reference help

Yahoo! Search Blog: Yahoo! Chats with Semantic Web Expert, Ben Adida

2008 Sep 16, 3:57Interview with Ben Adida on RDFa: "...RDFa is ready. It has just been approved by the W3C as a Candidate Recommendation, with the specific text of the specification and a brand new Primer published on June 20th. Y!: What can I do with RDFa? BA: You can tell the world what various components on your web page mean by marking up things like: The title of a photo Your name and contact information The license under which you're distributing your latest MP3 The ingredients of a cooking recipe The price of an item A gene on which you recently wrote a paper ... Anything that you want to make more machine-readable"PermalinkCommentsrdf microformats yahoo semantic interview ben-adida semanticweb via:felix42

Re: [DNSOP] Public Suffix List

2008 Sep 10, 1:32Discussion on IETF DNS mailing list about Mozilla's Public Suffix list and what they should do ultimately. "I'm inclined to suggest: Gather and hard-code your list into Firefox, and also provide a mechanism by which domain authorities can publish information which overrides your list for their domain."PermalinkCommentsidn domain firefox publicsuffix ietf mozilla tld

Neatorama - Blog Archive - Pet Your Chicken Through the Internet!

2008 Sep 3, 6:15"National University of Singapore's Mixed Reality Lab is fast becoming my favorite in cutting edge (and a little wacky - okay, a lot) research. Take, for instance, this project titled Poultry Internet, where a chicken is outfitted with a special dress that lets its owner pet it over the Internet." Johnny Cat writes: "Kudos to Gonzo for inventing this." I can't get to the actual site with the info on the project but it is available on the Wayback Machine.PermalinkCommentschicken humor internet virtual-reality mixed-reality

Internet Explorer Beta Feedback

2008 Sep 3, 12:44This is the public site for logging and tracking IE8 Beta bugs. Read access is available to all. Write access requires acceptance into the Technical Beta program. Check the blog for info on joining that.PermalinkCommentsie blog ie8 bug development microsoft

MSN Video - IE8's Videos

2008 Aug 28, 10:57Apparently we've got some videos showing off IE8 features. Some are the kind you would expect: informative with music. Others are trying to be funny. Those aren't nearly as lame as I would have expected.PermalinkCommentsvideo microsoft ie ie8

IE8 Beta2 Shipped

2008 Aug 27, 11:36

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is now available! Some of the new features from this release that I really enjoy are Tab Grouping, the new address-bar, and InPrivate Subscriptions.

Tab Grouping groups tabs that are opened from the same page. For example, on a Google search results page if you open the first two links the two new tabs will be grouped with the Google search results page. If you close one of the tabs in that group focus goes to another tab in that group. Its small, but I really enjoy this feature and without knowing exactly what I wanted while using IE7 and FF2 I knew I wanted something like this. Plus the colors for the tab groups are pretty!

The new address bar and search box makes life much easier by searching through my browsing history for whatever I'm typing in. Other things are searched besides history but since I ignore favorites and use Delicious I mostly care about history. At any rate its one of the things that makes it impossible for me to go machines running IE7.

InPrivate Subscriptions allows you to subscribe to a feed of URLs from which IE should not download content. This is intended for avoiding sites that track you across websites and could sell or share your personal information, but this feature could be used for anything where the goal is to avoid a set of URLs. For example, phishing, malware sites, ad blocking, etc. etc. I think there's some interesting uses for this feature that we have yet to see.

Anyway, we're another release closer to the final IE8 and I can relax a little more.

PermalinkCommentsmicrosoft browser technical ie8 ie

Facebook Profile Views Application - Failed Idea

2008 Aug 21, 11:24

I had an idea for a Facebook app the other day. I wondered who actually looked at my profile and thought I could create a Facebook app that would record this information and display it. When I talked to Vishu though he said that this wasn't something that Facebook would be too happy with. Indeed the Platform Policy explicitly disallows this in section 2.8. This explained why the app didn't already exist. Its probably for the best since everyone assumes they can anonymously view Facebook profiles and would be irritated if that weren't the case.

On the topic of assumed anonymity, check out this article on the aggregation and selling off of your cell phone data including your physical location.

PermalinkCommentstechnical facebook privacy cellphone extension

Dr. Horrible Link Roundup

2008 Aug 10, 3:33

Doctor Horrible's Sing Along Blog is an Internet only show you may have already watched and heard everything about. If you missed this somehow, its a musical by Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly) staring Neil Patrick Harris as an aspiring super villian who can't get up the courage to talk to his laundromat crush. Its very funny, fairly geeky, and on the Internet so of course I've enjoyed it thoroughly and have some links to share. It surprised me how many blogs that I don't usually see posting the same things telling me about it: first on Eric's blog, then The Old New Thing, and even Penny-Arcade.

Dr. Horrible's again available online via Hulu with commercial interruption.

Check out the official fan site. They link to such things as the owner of Dr. Horrible's house. He had appeared on Monster House, a reality show about remaking people's homes like Monster Car or Pimp My Ride is about remaking folk's cars, and had his house turned into a evil scientist's lab. Consequently its a perfect fit for Dr. Horrible and in return the owner appears in one of the final scenes and in the credits as the 'Purple Pimp'. Apparently the purple suit is his. Also on his blog you can find out what's happened on that big chair that appears in the show. All I'll say about that is, good thing Neil Patrick Harris wears a lab coat while sitting on it.

At the recent Comic Con some attendees took video of the Dr. Horrible Comic Con panel (video clips contain spoilers) some of which I've grouped together. Besides the videos containing the creators and stars of the musical who are all hilarious (see Felicia Day's comment on twittering) there's also some excellent bits about a possible second installment and information on the impending DVD. To finish off this series of Dr. Horrible links check out this Venn Diagram of Felicia Day's work.

PermalinkCommentsdr. horrible doctor horrible humor link roundup

Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

2008 Jul 15, 3:47Lots of meta info on 'Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog', Joss Whedon's Internet only hilarious and awesome project.PermalinkCommentshumor geek super-hero internet media video tv joss-whedon neil-patrick-harris nathan-fillion

Street Use: Phone Mining

2008 Jun 19, 4:25Its the 90s version of the information economy: "He has noticed a new behaivor among his native hosts. If they are young, they want to borrow his phone and mine if for goodies they can copy."PermalinkCommentsmobile phone data technology blog kevin-kelly

A jerk you'll want to buy rags from. - By Seth Stevenson - Slate Magazine

2008 Jun 19, 4:21Funny quotes + Billy Mays coverage! "He appears to be saying 'I am a carnie huckster, you know it and I know it, but that's OK because this product is that good.'"PermalinkCommentstv infomercial advertising article

Firefox Mobile Concept Video on Vimeo

2008 Jun 12, 10:45Neat stuff for a Mobile Firefox concept: "A demo of an experimental UI for Mobile Firefox by Aza Raskin, Head of UX for Mozilla Labs. See azarask.in/blog/post/firefox-mobile-concept-video for more information."PermalinkCommentsbrowser interface video firefox mobile ui phone

Leaking Information Through Delicious

2008 May 18, 6:45

While re-reading Cryptonomicon I thought about what kind of information I'm leaking by posting links on Delicious. At work I don't post any Intranet websites for fear of revealing anything but I wondered if not posting would reveal anything. For instance, if I'm particularly busy at work might I post less indicating something about the state of the things I work on? I got an archive of my Delicious posts via the Delicious API and then ran it through a tool I made to create a couple of tables which I've graphed on Many Eyes

I've graphed my posts per week and with red lines I've marked IE7 and IE8 releases as stated by Wikipedia. As you can see, there doesn't seem to be much of a pattern so I suppose my concerns we're unfounded. I use it for both work and non-work purposes and my use of Delicious isn't that consistent so I don't think it would be easy to find a pattern like I was thinking about. Perhaps if many people from my project used Delicious and that data could be compared together it might be easier.
For fun I looked at my posts per day of week which starts off strong on Mondays and decreases as the week goes on, and my posts per hour of day. It looks like I mostly post around lunch and on the extremes I've only posted very late at night twice at 4am: converting media for the Zune, and Penn's archive of articles. In the morning at 7am I've posted only once: document introducing SGML.PermalinkCommentsmanyeyes graph cryptonomicon delicious

Sightseeing in Liberty City - a set on Flickr

2008 May 13, 10:55"A side by side comparison of a photo tour in New York City and Liberty City...crazy details! More coming soon!"PermalinkCommentsvia:infosthetics architecture game gta nyc new-york photo videogame

Scottsdale, Arizona Plans

2008 May 4, 10:14Some things to consider doing and other essential information for Claire and Lloyd's wedding in Scottsdale Arizona.PermalinkCommentstravel scottsdale arizona me

Homemade GPS jammers raise concerns

2008 Apr 22, 4:33Reaction to Phrack's howto on GPS jammer. Sounds like the article wants to make it into a bigger issue than it is: "Information in the article that appears in the current issue of the online hacker magazine Phrack potentially puts at risk GPS devices usePermalinkCommentsgps gps-jamming phrack government
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