2008 Sep 8, 11:40"Up and Then Down: The lives of elevators. by Nick Paumgarten". A story on elevators, the people behind them, elevator mishaps, etc. Interesting article.
article elevator history design newyorker 2008 Aug 29, 8:37"Two security researchers have demonstrated a new technique to stealthily intercept internet traffic on a scale previously presumed to be unavailable to anyone outside of intelligence agencies like
the National Security Agency." Described fixes all require significant changes to the software and probably hardware doing the routing. Ugh
wired article security internet bgp hack networking defcon 2008 Aug 28, 2:35Read about "Dress Like Raymond Day" (as in Raymond Chen of The Old New Thing) and 'The Microsoft Tie' at IBM.
microsoft humor article book 2008 Aug 27, 12:22IE8 Beta2 is now available. This blog post mentions some of the features I like best in this release, like the updated address bar, visual search suggestions, and tab grouping.
microsoft ie browser ie8 beta blog article 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.
technical facebook privacy cellphone extension 2008 Aug 19, 4:45Finally, .NET executables from a share! =)
dotnet development microsoft blog article 2008 Aug 18, 3:46Legal corner case bugs exploited for free rent in SF. "Getzow is getting pretty well known along the Polk Street corridor. Unlike other serial evictees, who move among different neighborhoods, all of
his eight evictions in San Francisco have occurred in a 20-block area known as Lower Nob Hill."
article legal rent house eviction san-francisco 2008 Aug 14, 4:29Scifi short story, "What's expected of us", by Ted Chiang. Younger cousin of 'The Riddle of the Universe and Its Solution'. FTA: "Civilization now depends on self-deception."
ted-chiang scifi time time-travel fiction via:boingboing 2008 Aug 14, 3:59"13 things that do not make sense, Updated 11:22 19 December 2007, From New Scientist Print Edition. Michael Brooks". Thirteen mysteries of physics and biology currently under contention.
science article michael-brooks biology physics 2008 Jul 22, 6:15Determine one's personality based on their home. Feels like pop science, fortune cookie results still fun though: "Sam Gosling, psychologist ... analysed photos from a handful of New Scientist
readers to see what he could deduce about their personalities
science psychology article personality 2008 Jul 18, 2:14So far I've enjoyed two of this person's articles. More to come?
blog cool monthly kevin-kelly 2008 Jul 10, 4:44More on IPETEE w/ some of the politics and commentary. "The Pirate Bay has ambitious plans to bring end-to-end encryption to all network activity..."
article encryption privacy security ip cryptography 2008 Jul 7, 5:26"888-8888. This was his new cell-phone number, and his greatest philonumerical triumph. The number proved unusable. It received more than a hundred wrong numbers a day."
apple prank wired article phone education steve-wozniak 2008 Jul 3, 1:32"Finally he cut the tape entirely, whereupon the world disappeared. However, it also disappeared for the other characters in the story... which makes no sense, if you think about it." That's what I
thought when I read that story
article essay fiction scifi philip-k-dick via:mach3 2008 Jun 30, 5:45Erik on writing for games vs books: "Even worse for game writers, the 98% garbage part of a game isn't even usually garbage because instead of reading something boring about the history of Belgium,
the "reader" probably gets to jump a Camaro over a dino
game humor interview valve portal article erik-wolpaw 2008 Jun 30, 11:13"Scene: The History lesson in school. The teacher wearily calls Microsoft Boy to his desk to try to discover where his homework is."
humor business article microsoft satire marketing via:oldnewthing 2008 Jun 19, 6:08Argh!! "Unfortunately for its users, the mail-rental outlet has decided to kill the profile feature in just a couple of months, a move that is already prompting an outcry around the Internet."
netflix article movie lame customer-service 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.'"
tv infomercial advertising article 2008 Jun 19, 1:00"The new compression technique, called variable bitrate compression produces different size packets of data for different sounds...VoIP streams are encrypted to prevent eavesdropping. However, a team
... has shown that simply measuring the size of packets
security privacy phone compression encryption blog article 2008 Jun 18, 3:57No details in the article other than remote code execution. Browsers are hard.
browser firefox security
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