2010 May 24, 6:26"What You See is What They Get: Protecting users from unwanted use of microphones, cameras, and other sensors," by Jon Howell and Stuart Schechter.
"We introduce the sensor-access widget, a graphical user interface element that resides within an application's display. The widget provides an animated representation of the personal data being
collected by its corresponding sensor, calling attention to the application's attempt to collect the data."
2010 May 23, 4:32"The ability to detect visitors' browsing history requires just a few lines of code. Armed with a list of websites to check for, a malicious webmaster can scan over 25 thousand links per second (1.5
million links per minute) in almost every recent browser."technicalprivacysecuritywebbrowser
2010 May 19, 7:17A creative-commons released comedy album. Heard him on the Nerdist podcast where he played live several of the songs you'd imagine someone having a tough time playing live. Humorous and is that Weird
Al I hear in Street Meat?musichumormike-phirmancccreativecommons
2010 May 14, 9:37New York Times article from May 15th 1910 titled "MEMBERS OF THE SUPREME COURT AS HUMAN BEINGS: When Not on the Bench They Are Pretty Much Like Other People — Characteristic Stores About Them". This
is the NYT 1910's version of US Weekly's current "Celebrities Are Just Like Us!" feature.humorhistoryarticlesupreme-court
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." artlegallawipshepard-faireyobeyinterview
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-strosscory-doctorowebookdrmamazonpublishingkindleapplebook
2010 May 6, 7:25Another subset of javascript and DOM access to make a sandbox: "FBJS is Facebook's solution for developers who want to use JavaScript in their Facebook applications. We built FBJS to empower
developers with all the functionality they need, and to protect our users' privacy at the same time."sandboxwebbrowserfacebookhtmljavascripttechnicalsecurityweb-sandbox
2010 May 6, 5:48New IDN TLDs are up. Try out http://xn----rmckbbajlc6dj7bxne2c.xn--wgbh1c/ (aka http://وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر/) in your favorite IDN implementing browser.idntlddnsicanntechnicalweblanguage
2010 May 3, 7:27Amazon has the most highlighted passages of Kindle users. Of course Dan Brown is all over that. But in 94th place of most highlighted is a passage from the 'Kindle Shortcuts' book on how to highlight
passages: "Go to top Notes and Clippings (Kindle 2) To create a highlight: use the 5-way controller to highlight the content you want to clip and then press the 5-way to save your selection...
Highlighted by 319 Kindle users"humorhighlightamazonkindletechnicalmeta