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.
google dns internet network security performance dns-prefetching technical 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."
net-neutrality internet government politics communication telegraph technical 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.'
privacy security gps phone cellphone government politics 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.
humor phone-booth cultural-disobediance graffiti new-york photo 2009 Nov 29, 1:32
Sarah 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.
turkey whole foods thanksgiving holiday 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."
nocebo placebo science medicine ben-goldacre 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."
security polyglot intel paper research programming hack obfuscation english language technical system:filetype:pdf system:media:document 2009 Nov 27, 6:04"Megafonzies (coolness): We don’t know if Professor Hubert Farnsworth, inventor of the Finglonger, coined the term ‘Megafonzie.’ We can assume that one Fonzie is the amount of coolness generated by
Arthur Fonzarelli...", "Warhols (fame duration): 1 Warhol equals 15 minutes of fame, So if you’ve been famous for three years, that’s just over 105 kilowarhols..."
via:kottke humor measurement nerd 2009 Nov 24, 5:51"Metalink/HTTP describes multiple download locations (mirrors), Peer-to-Peer, checksums, digital signatures, and other information using existing standards for HTTP headers. Clients can transparently
use this information to make file transfers more robust and reliable."
http metalink url p2p http-header cache redirect reference technical 2009 Nov 23, 1:24"This week Bell Labs plans to roll out the Telephone, the first viable Telegraph alternative, but reports indicate they may not be ready."
via:waxy humor telephone telegraph internet 2009 Nov 23, 1:21"Je vous propose aujourd’hui de découvrir le travail de StarType, un ex typographe qui a connu le temps du plomb et travaillé dans de nombreuses imprimeries pour évoluer et devenir graphiste par la
suite."
typography advertising font french design history 2009 Nov 23, 11:47'Bill Gates is being taken on a guided tour of the product support department's new office building...Bill puts on a headset, sits down, and answers the phone. "Hello, this is Microsoft Product
Support, William speaking. How can I help you?"'
humor microsoft bill-gates raymond-chen support history 2009 Nov 23, 11:28"Thanks to the utilization of new technology, we're now seeing large-scale success in eliminating the need for passwords while increasing the successful registration rate at websites to over 90%...In
addition, after a thorough evaluation of the security and privacy of these technologies, the same techniques are being piloted by President Obama's open identity initiative to enable citizens to sign
in more easily to government-operated websites."
identity openid google security authentication facebook password via:connolly technical 2009 Nov 20, 7:20I think I'm stuck on the first part of the Ars review "so it has taken the netbook, which was already a crippled notebook, and crippled it even further by removing a ton of flexibility and
functionality". Still conceptually I like the idea and hope they figure out all their use cases.
google chrome video os web browser technical 2009 Nov 20, 3:08"WebKit nightlies now support the HTML5 noreferrer link relation, a neat little feature that allows web developers to prevent browsers from sending the Referrer: header when navigating either anchor
or area elements."
technical html5 html webkit link referer http http-header web browser 2009 Nov 20, 2:31YouTube now does automatic captioning in some cases and automatic timing in all cases. Automatic timing lets you upload a transcript with a video and YouTube will do speech to text and figure out
when the various parts of the transcript need to be displayed.
youtube video caption accessibility audio subtitles technical 2009 Nov 16, 7:40Part 11 (of 11?) in a series on why you shouldn't freak out about the transition from UCS2 to UTF16. The answer is: you're already doing it wrong.
technical ucs2 unicode utf16 text windows programming language michael-kaplan 2009 Nov 15, 6:17Once again a wonderful gift for a very small set of people I know but a bit pricey: "This package includes Bruce Schneier's custom action figure head mounted on a matching DiD or Dragon action figure
body with a choice of 2 different clothing styles. You can also buy Bruce Schneier's head on its own and fit it onto your own figurines."
humor action-figure bruce-schneier security gift purchase wishlist 2009 Nov 9, 11:39A montage of lines from movies containing the title of the movie. Worth it for the comments: "I'm just so tired of all these Star Wars." "That sounds really terrible. I will make sure write it all
down in my TYLER PERRY'S DIARY OF A MAD BLACK WOMAN."
humor video via:waxy movie film quote 2009 Nov 5, 2:07Two guys sponsored by MicroBilt to travel around the country and make totally awesome commercials for local companies. Includes such gems as Salt Lake Community Barbering & Cosmetology School:
"Your hairdo is only limited by your immagination. And how far along we are in the semester.", as well as Cullman Liquidation: "They're used. Some of them have stains. We cover that up."
via:boingboing video advertising commercial tv monthly
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