2010 Jan 28, 4:00Jonathan Zittrain on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, artificial AI, and related topics.
jonathan-zittrain video amazon mechanical-turk mechanicalturk technical 2010 Jan 22, 1:44"He seeded the customer's parking lot with USB flash drives, each of which had a Trojan horse installed on it. When the employees arrived for work in the morning, they were quite excited to find the
free gadgets laying around the parking lot. Employees eagerly collected the USB drives and plugged them into the first computers they came across: their own workstations."
via:ericlaw security usb windows social-engineering computer technical 2010 Jan 21, 12:53"Of course the word "Amateur" comes from the French word "to love". Good enough reason for me to participate. And you?"
internet culture net-culture web social blog 2010 Jan 19, 2:21"In the latest of an occasional series of demoscene-related posts on GameSetWatch before, AteBit's Paul 'EvilPaul' Grenfell presents a multi-part retrospective on 2009's best demos - starting out
with the top ten real-time PC demos of the year."
demo demoscene graphic game videogame video programming 2010 Jan 15, 7:05Section 4 has a summary table with all the various special use IPv4 address blocks.
reference rfc ipv4 ip internet ietf 2010 Jan 12, 9:02"We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could
operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China."
google china politics privacy censorship internet web search 2010 Jan 5, 7:42
I've made a WPAD server Fiddler extension and in a fit of creativity I've named it: WPAD Server Fiddler
Extension.
Of course you know about Fiddler, Eric's awesome HTTP debugger tool, the HTTP proxy that lets you inspect, visualize and modify the
HTTP traffic that flows through it. And on the subject you've probably definitely heard of WPAD, the Web Proxy Auto Discovery protocol
that allows web browsers like IE to use DHCP or DNS to automatically discover HTTP proxies on their network. While working on a particularly nasty WPAD bug towards the end of IE8 I really wished I
had a way to see the WPAD requests and responses and modify PAC responses in Fiddler. Well the wishes of me of the past are now fulfilled by present day me as this Fiddler extension will respond to
WPAD DHCP requests telling those clients (by default) that Fiddler is their proxy.
When I started working on this project I didn't really understand how DHCP worked especially with respect to WPAD. I won't bore you with my misconceptions: it works by having your one DHCP server
on your network respond to regular DHCP requests as well as WPAD DHCP requests. And Windows I've found runs a DHCP client service (you can start/stop it via Start|Run|'services.msc', scroll to DHCP
Client or via the command line with "net start/stop 'DHCP Client'") that caches DHCP server responses making it just slightly more difficult to test and debug my extension. If a Windows app uses
the DHCP client APIs to ask for the WPAD option, this service will send out a DHCP request and take the first DHCP server response it gets. That means that if you're on a network with a DHCP
server, my extension will be racing to respond to the client. If the DHCP server wins then the client ignores the WPAD response from my extension.
Various documents and tools I found useful while working on this:
proxy fiddler http technical debug wpad pac tool dhcp 2009 Dec 18, 2:27"...this week we launched an improvement to Google Maps India that describes routes in terms of easy-to-follow landmarks and businesses that are visible along the way. We gathered feedback from users
around the world to spark this improvement to our technology, and we thought we'd give you a glimpse at our thinking behind this launch."
google map geography geo india 2009 Dec 16, 9:41"This sort of model should remind you of 1-piece click-out toys packaged with action figures such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Michael Johansson specializes in parodying this particular moment in
toydom by creating life-sized models with that molded-plastic “break-apart and play” action specifically in mind."
art sculpture design product commodity parody 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."
video history politics government public-domain internet-archive 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."
cellphone android google app contest 2009 Dec 3, 1:54Uses Amazon's mechanical Turk program to test framing: "Framing the outcomes in positive vs. negative terms produced a reversal of participants’ preferences for the two programs. In condition 1, the
majority of respondents (69.4%) favored Program A, exhibiting risk aversion. In condition 2, the majority of respondents (65.3%) favored Program B, exhibiting risk seeking."
via:pskomoroch science experiment social risk security mechanicalturk amazon 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 Nov 29, 1:53Fictional characters with beards. "Bearded: Brock Samson, Bearded: Robocop, Bearded: Hellboy, Bearded: Boba Fett, Bearded: Black Mage, Bearded: Wario, Bearded: Clint Eastwood, Bearded: Batman"
humor art beard facial-hair hero brock-samson robocop batman boba-fett 2009 Nov 23, 11:33A map of the sciences generated via science web portals: "Over the course of 2007 and 2008, we collected nearly 1 billion user interactions recorded by the scholarly web portals of some of the most
significant publishers, aggregators and institutional consortia...The resulting model was visualized as a journal network that outlines the relationships between various scientific domains and
clarifies the connection of the social sciences and humanities to the natural sciences."
via:pskomoroch visualization science map graph 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, 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 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 2009 Oct 27, 9:47"We're excited to announce that you now have the choice to get Google Voice with your existing mobile number OR with a Google number." You can use their voicemail features with your existing phone
number.
via:connolly google voice phone cellphone voicemail blog 2009 Oct 5, 8:44Brief history of the Luddites. "Are we all Luddites now? ... If you are reading this essay on your laptop or iPhone, chances are that you aren't an unemployed weaver staring starvation in the face."
Also: "The Luddites didn't oppose technology; they opposed the sudden collapse of their industry, which they blamed in part on new weaving machines." So the TV and newspaper associations and Rupert
Murdoch are Luddites.
history technology luddite
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