cia page 5 - Dave's Blog

YouTube - 2010 Dodge Challenger "Freedom" 60-Second Commercial

2010 Jun 12, 2:40The American's succeeded with the revolution thanks to the 2010 Dodge Challenger. This makes me eager for Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter.

A quote from Sacramento Credit Union

2010 May 14, 8:52It really is an actual quote from the Sacramento Credit Union's website: "The answers to your Security Questions are case sensitive and cannot contain special characters like an apostrophe, or the words “insert,” “delete,” “drop,” “update,” “null,” or “select.”"

Out of context that seems hilarious, but if you read the doc the next Q/A twists it like a defense in depth rather than a 'there-I-fixed-it'.

technical security humor sql

face.com developers site » Documentation

2010 May 10, 9:08A facial recogonition web service. Cool possibilities...

api development free photo face facial-recognition technical

Shepard Fairey - Interview Magazine

2010 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."

art legal law ip shepard-fairey obey interview

CMAP #9: Ebooks

2010 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."

charles-stross cory-doctorow ebook drm amazon publishing kindle apple book

Code Standards | Isobar

2010 May 2, 3:14"This document contains normative guidelines for web applications built by the Interface Development practice of Isobar North America (previously Molecular)." Glad to see coding styles and best practices for HTML, CSS, JS, associated HTTP headers etc etc etc

code css html html5 javascript web browser programming development technical via:kris.kowal

Ars Colloquium: the official ACTA treaty draft and your reactions

2010 Apr 21, 6:47"After years of secrecy (and the occasional leak), a draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) treaty has finally been released by negotiators. We've delved deep into the treaty, highlighting its numerous problems. Indeed, there's a lot not to like about the treaty: Internet disconnections, anticircumvention prohibitions, and even the ability for rightsholders to get injunctions if they can show infringement is imminent."

arstechnica acta privacy internet todo government politics piracy technical

California Wedding Planning Trip

2010 Apr 11, 2:34

Sarah and I are just back from a successful wedding planning trip to California. We now have cake, food, officiant, makeup, and some other things. Planning weddings is tough. It was also, of course, a pleasure to see my parents who made home made pasta -- yum!

wedding parents family weekend

Easy: Connect your RSS or Atom feed to Google Buzz

2010 Mar 12, 1:28

It was relatively easy, although still more difficult than I would have guessed, to hook my bespoke website's Atom feed up to Google Buzz. I already have a Google email account and associated profile so Buzz just showed up in my Gmail interface. Setting it up it offered to connect to my YouTube account or my Google Chat account but I didn't see an option to connect to an arbitrary RSS or Atom feed like I expected.

But of course hooking up an arbitrary Atom or RSS feed is documented. You hook it up in the same manner you claim a website as your own via the Google Profile (for some reason they want to ensure you own the feed connected to your Buzz account). You do this via Google's social graph API which uses XFN or FOAF. I used XFN by simply adding a link to my feed to my Google profile (And be sure to check the 'This is a profile page about me' which ensures that a rel="me" tag is added to the HTML on your profile. This is how XFN works.) And by adding a corresponding link in my feed back to my Google profile page with the following:

atom:link rel="me" href="http://www.google.com/profiles/david.risney"

I used this Google tool to check my XFN connections and when I checked back the next day my feed showed up in Google Buzz's configuration dialog.

So more difficult than I would have expected (more difficult than just an 'Add your feed' button and textbox) but not super difficult. And yet after reading this Buzz from DeWitt Clinton I feel better about opting-in to Google's Social API.

technical atom google buzz rss social

YouTube - Galactica: Sabotage Comparison

2010 Mar 11, 11:50Side by side comparison of the BSG+Sabotage mashup and the original Sabotage music video. Cool remix certainly although it really must be watched in this side by side comparison form to be appreciated. By itself the remix isn't really coherent.

bsg video humor music music-video sabotage beastie-boys

A Practical Attack to De-Anonymize Social Network Users

2010 Mar 8, 1:50Paper suggests history stealing to find what popular social networking site groups a visitor to your web site belongs to and stats on how easy it is to then uniquely identify the visitor on the popular social networking site.