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Paleo-Future - Paleo-Future Blog - Burglars of the Future (1910)

2009 Dec 8, 12:02"This illustration, from the September 10, 1910 New York Tribune, imagines the rooftop burglars of the future. 'BURGLARS LEARN TO HANDLE THE AEROPLANE WITH PRECISION AND SILENCE: Our artist takes a look into the future and foresees the time when roofs must be secured as carefully as any other part of the home.'"PermalinkCommentshumor history burglar crime newspaper news

The Kickstarter Blog - The Mysterious Letters Aftermath

2009 Dec 8, 8:45"And then there’s Mysterious Letters, a Kickstarter project from two artists — Michael and Lenka — to mail everyone in the world a personal letter. It began in April with a small village named Cushendall in Northern Ireland, where the letters caused quite a stir"PermalinkCommentshumor art letter mail

Discontinued desktop 3D printers on the cheap Boing Boing

2009 Dec 8, 1:56More good gift ideas just in time for the holidays: "The Invision LD 3D-Modeler printer has been discontinued and is being sold off for $5,000 a throw -- it uses Laminated Object Manufacturing to produce low-rez 3D models"PermalinkComments3d printer purchase gift wishlist

Yahoo Issues Takedown Notice for Spying Price List | Threat Level | Wired.com

2009 Dec 7, 5:15"Yahoo isn’t happy that a detailed menu of the spying services it provides law enforcement agencies has leaked onto the web." ... "Cryptome also published lawful data-interception guides for Cox Communications, SBC, Cingular, Nextel, GTE and other telecoms and service providers. But of all those companies, it appears to be Yahoo’s lawyers alone who have issued a DMCA takedown notice to Cryptome demanding the document be removed."PermalinkCommentsprivacy security copyright yahoo dmca internet web surveillance

Latest ‘Square’ Details Include Free Dongles, Craigslist, Alyssa Milano | Epicenter | Wired.com

2009 Dec 7, 3:25Cool, I've been waiting for this: "Twitter creator Jack Dorsey’s Square application, which is like a smartphone PayPal for credit cards, attracted lots of warranted attention for its potential to enable peer-to-peer and merchant credit card transactions in the real world far beyond what’s capable today in most countries." Oh, never mind... "As a customer, all you need to buy from a Square merchant is a credit, debit or pre-paid card"PermalinkCommentscredit-card money via:louis cellphone square

Code: Flickr Developer Blog » Language Detection: A Witch’s Brew?

2009 Dec 4, 10:24Flickr dev. blog on the accept-language HTTP header: "It’s true that the Accept-Language header has a troubled history. Because of this, many developers regard it the way medieval villagers might have regarded a woman with a warty nose and a pet cat – it should be shunned, avoided and possibly burned at the stake." And this great anecdote: "In two and a half years of running as an international site, we’ve only ever had one case where it didn’t work. Helio, a cellphone company, had a browser was custom-built for them in Korea, and had its “Accept-Language” header hard-coded to always request Korean, something which led to much confusion for the Flickr users amongst their American customers."PermalinkCommentsflickr internationalization language accept-language http http-header development technical web

Watch America's public domain video treasures, rescue the public domain from paywalls Boing Boing

2009 Dec 4, 5:06"If you want to watch videos from the National Archives today, they try to talk you into buying a DVD from the official government partner, Amazon.Com...To demonstrate to the Congress that if we liberated this wonderful content people would really care, I forked over $251 for 20 DVDs and posted them on-line."PermalinkCommentsvideo history politics government public-domain internet-archive

Google Public DNS

2009 Dec 3, 4:52Having replaced HTTP with SPDY, Google digs deeper into the Web stack providing their own DNS servers. Also, as Waxy noted, you can't argue with the most memorable IP addresses I've seen: "Configure your network settings to use the IP addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as your DNS servers". Also check out their DNS server's DNS prefetching in the performance notes.PermalinkCommentsgoogle dns internet network security performance dns-prefetching technical

About a DROID: a review of Motorola's newest smartphone

2009 Dec 3, 2:39"Android 2.0 comes with a bevy of refinements to its connectivity features. These include VPN support, multiple account support, exchange support, HTML5 support, bluetooth 2.1, and quite a few more which can best be found in the Android Platform Highlights document."PermalinkCommentsandroid review droid motorola cellphone

Android Developer Challenge

2009 Dec 3, 2:20"We're pleased to announce the overall winners in the Android Developer Challenge 2. These winners were selected after two rounds of scoring by thousands of Android users as well as an official panel of judges. Please see our official page for more information about the challenge."PermalinkCommentscellphone android google app contest

Rotating Kitchen art piece Boing Boing

2009 Dec 2, 4:56I don't know art, but I know what I like. And I like kitchens that rotate along a horizontal axis.PermalinkCommentshumor video kitchen art rotate

shop.simplebits.com — Ampersandwich Tee

2009 Dec 2, 3:07
PermalinkCommentsvia:kottke humor shirt sandwhich ampersand typography tshirt gift shopping

How Robber Barons hijacked the "Victorian Internet"

2009 Dec 2, 3:00"These are tough questions, but the horrific problems of the "Victorian Internet" suggest that government overreach isn't the only thing to fear. In 1876, laissez-faire "freedom for all" meant (in practice) the freedom for Henry Nash Smith to read your telegrams if he didn't like who you supported for President. It meant freedom for Associated Press to block criticism of Western Union, and even to put potential critics and competitors out of business. And it meant freedom for a scoundrel to hijack the system at his leisure."PermalinkCommentsnet-neutrality internet government politics communication telegraph technical

HTML 5's Iframe Sandbox attribute

2009 Dec 2, 2:52Webkit just implemented this iframe element sandbox attribute.PermalinkCommentssecurity html html5 webkit browser web technical

Sprint fed customer GPS data to cops over 8 million times

2009 Dec 1, 9:40Wow: 'The fact that federal, state, and local law enforcement can obtain communications "metadata"—URLs of sites visited, e-mail message headers, numbers dialed, GPS locations, etc.—without any real oversight or reporting requirements should be shocking, but it isn't. The courts ruled in 2005 that law enforcement doesn't need to show probable cause to obtain your physical location via the cell phone grid. All of the aforementioned metadata can be accessed with an easy-to-obtain pen register/trap & trace order. But given the volume of requests, it's hard to imagine that the courts are involved in all of these.'PermalinkCommentsprivacy security gps phone cellphone government politics

Waooooooow, Ample SDK - <Glazblog/>

2009 Dec 1, 5:55A cross browser javascript implementation of SVG, XUL, portions of HTML5 and more. Check out their demos. "Ample SDK, a must-see: cross-browser (Gecko, Webkit, Opera, Chrome, and even IE 5.5+ !!), XInclude 1.0, XML Events 1.0, XML Schema, SMIL 3.0, REX 1.0, XBL 2.0 (!), SVG, XUL (cross-browser !), HTML5, XForms, ..., superb demos (SVG-based @shepazu in IE, wow...), dual MIT/GPL licensing terms, open-source"PermalinkCommentstechnical browser svg xul webkit opera ie javascript web html5

PSFK » Blog Archive » (Pics) Posterchild Finds New Uses for Old Phone Booths

2009 Nov 29, 1:58Phone booths get makeovers: "For Your Convenience Super-Hero Changing Station", "Coming Soon, improvements and upgrades to this public urination facility", and more.
PermalinkCommentshumor phone-booth cultural-disobediance graffiti new-york photo

Thanksgiving 2009

2009 Nov 29, 1:32

Pre Thanksgiving DinnerSarah and I had Thanksgiving dinner at our house the Sunday before. Sarah's parents and siblings came as well as my parents who came up for the a handful of days. It was our first time hosting Thanksgiving so I was a little nervous, but my parents helped us setup and get ready so of course it went well! I cheated a bit: I ordered a turkey online from Whole Foods where you can just tell them when you want to pick it up, they have it cooked and ready including garnish and you just need to warm it up. When we moved in together Sarah and I each had slightly different small dining room tables. Thankfully they're roughly the same height and width and we could put them together end to end and seat everybody with no room to spare. On actual Thanksgiving day we went over to Rachel & Anson's lovely new place for Thanksgiving and the annual game of Trivial Pursuit.

PermalinkCommentsturkey whole foods thanksgiving holiday

All bow before the mighty power of the nocebo effect – Bad Science

2009 Nov 28, 3:50The downside of the placebo the nocebo: "This is the amazing world of the nocebo effect, where negative expectations can induce unpleasant symptoms, in the absence of a physical cause.", "In two of them, the consent form contained a statement outling various gastrointestinal side effects, and in these centres there was a sixfold increase in the number of people reporting such symptoms and dropping out of the trial, compared with the one centre that did not list such side effects in the form."PermalinkCommentsnocebo placebo science medicine ben-goldacre

English Shellcode

2009 Nov 27, 6:10"What follows is a brief description of the method we have developed for encoding arbitrary shellcode as English text. This English shellcode is completely self-contained, i.e., it does not require an external loader, and executes as valid IA32 code."PermalinkCommentssecurity polyglot intel paper research programming hack obfuscation english language technical system:filetype:pdf system:media:document
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