On The Verge, Joshua Topolsky interviews Neil deGrasse Tyson on the Badass meme which results in animated GIFs ready for meme-ification. Including this one from BrettBrown of Joshua calling it.
“On The Verge is ready for a lot of things, but we clearly weren’t ready for renowned astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, who stopped by to talk space exploration, life as a meme, and why he carries a slightly-illegal laser with him at all times.”
Field producer Melissa Galvez speaks to Susan Crawford, Micah Sifry, Nicco Mele, and others to find out how the grassroots campaign to bring down SOPA/PIPA was built, and what it says about organizing on the internet.
Intro to the world of the 0day exploit market.
recommendations on how Internet Service
Providers can use various remediation techniques to manage the
effects of malicious bot infestations on computers used by their
subscribers.
Detection and notification recommendations.
With Facebook changing its privacy policy and settings so frequently and just generally the huge amount of social sites out there, for many of us it is far too late to ensure our name doesn't show up with unfortunate results in web searches. Information is too easily copyable and archive-able to make removing these results a viable option, so clearly the solution is to create more data.
Create fake profiles on Facebook using your name but with a different photo, different date of birth, and different hometown. Create enough doppelgangers to add noise to the search results for your name. And have them share embarrassing stories on their blogs. The goal is to ensure that the din of your alternates drowns out anything embarrassing showing up for you.
Although it will look suspicious if you're the only name on Google with such chaff. So clearly you must also do this for your friends and family. Really you'll be doing them a favor.
Interesting article on an expert attempting to modify an article on Wikipedia. Sounds like an issue when presented in this fashion, but looking at it from Wikipedia’s perspective, I don’t know how they could do better.
This is Django Reinhardt’s Gypsy swing from the 30s and 40s on archive.org and it is all in the public domain. I didn’t know the term for the genre so it took me a while to find this.
FTA:
The MPAA is getting pretty desperate, it seems. MPAA boss Chris Dodd was out trying to defend censoring the internet this week by using China as an example of why censorship isn’t a problem. It’s kind of shocking, really.
“When the Chinese told Google that they had to block sites or they couldn’t do [business] in their country, they managed to figure out how to block sites.”
“One in three people in Switzerland download unauthorized music, movies and games from the Internet and since last year the government has been wondering what to do about it. … The overall conclusion of the study is that the current copyright law, under which downloading copyrighted material for personal use is permitted, doesn’t have to change.” Wow, that sounds like almost reasonable and understandable copyright law.
“including driver updates to enable Internet sharing on some models such as the HTC HD7” Just upgraded and saw this. Very cool.
From the document: ‘Appendix B. Implementation Report: The encoding defined in this document currently is used for two different HTTP header fields: “Content-Disposition”, defined in [RFC6266], and “Link”, defined in [RFC5988]. As the encoding is a profile/clarification of the one defined in [RFC2231] in 1997, many user agents already supported it for use in “Content-Disposition” when [RFC5987] got published.
Since the publication of [RFC5987], two more popular desktop user agents have added support for this encoding; see http://purl.org/
NET/http/content-disposition-tests#encoding-2231-char for details. At this time, only one major
desktop user agent (Safari) does not support it.
Note that the implementation in Internet Explorer 9 does not support the ISO-8859-1 encoding; this document revision acknowledges that UTF-8 is sufficient for expressing all code points, and removes the requirement to support ISO-8859-1.’
Yay for UTF-8!
Shortly after joining the Internet Explorer team I got a bug from a PM on a popular Microsoft web server product that I'll leave unnamed (from now on UWS). The bug said that IE was handling empty path segments incorrectly by not removing them before resolving dotted path segments. For example UWS would do the following:
A.1. http://example.com/a/b//../
A.2. http://example.com/a/b/../
A.3. http://example.com/a/B.1. http://example.com/a/b//../
B.2. http://example.com/a/b/The URI RFC allows path segments of zero length and does not assign them any special meaning. So generic user agents that intend to work on the web must not treat an empty path segment any different from a path segment with some text in it. In the case above IE is doing the correct thing.
That's the case for generic user agents, however servers may decide that a URI with an empty path segment returns the same resource as a the same URI without that empty path segment. Essentially they can decide to ignore empty path segments. Both IIS and Apache work this way and thus return the same resource for the following URIs:
http://exmaple.com/foo//bar///baz
http://example.com/foo/bar/baz
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