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Tuesday, February 03, 2004 |
Emer3g1ng L0ft, an ETCON crashspace in the tradition of Emerging Man. 
At last year's O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference,
Danny O'Brien, Quinn Norton and Jon Gilbert invited ten people to come
pitch tents in their nearby backyard, where there was WiFi, water, and
electricity. They called it Emerging Man, a cross between Emerging Tech and Burning Man. They even had a geodesic dome.
This year, ETCON
is being held in San Diego and the kids don't have a backyard to throw
open to the public, so I suggested that they get in touch with the DachB0den crew, the hacker group who run the wonderful ToorCon, an astounding tech-security conference at which I spoke last year.
One thing led to another, and DachB0den has opened up its wicked hacker loft (here are my pictures of the space from the ToorCon afterparty in September) in downtown San Diego as a communal crashspace for some of this year's ETCON attendees.
The roster filled up fast, but as with the Emerging Man space, there's
every reason to believe that the Dachb0den loft will become a social
nexus for this year's ETCON, and there's also every reason to believe
that there will be some dropping out and shifting around, so don't give
up hope if you're looking for an ETCON crashpad.
There is, of course, a Wiki wherein the whole affair is being planned. I love watching this stuff come together.
Link
(via Oblomovka)
[Boing Boing Blog] 
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Daring Fireball's OmniWeb Public Beta 1 review.
I don't know about high functioning :-) but I definitely have at least
three to four times as many tabs and windows open in Safari than most
users. Definitely going to have to check the beta out. I'll probably
hold off to beta 2 though!QUOTE OmniWeb
is clearly targeted at high-functioning users; people who read more web
sites, open more windows, and use more tabs. OmniWeb is to Safari as
Final Cut Express is to iMovie. Neither Safari nor iMovie are in any
way “software for dummies” — they’re both very capable apps, suitable
for the vast majority of users. But both can be stretched thin by
high-end users, who are willing to forego a bit of simplicity to gain
powerful features. UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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Explore your privacy with Swipe.
Chris sez, "Swipe focuses on automated collection of personal
information. You can read the barcode on your driver's license, request
your personal information and opt-out from commercial databases, and
with the 'data calculator,' determine how much your personal
information is worth to direct marketers. It's neato torpedo."
Link
(Thanks, Chris!) [Boing Boing Blog]
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MSFT ships a metadata stripper for Office. It appears that the MPAA writes memoes to the FCC on behalf of the powerful Senate Commerce Committee chairman Fritz Hollings.
How do I know this? Because last year, Hollings sent a letter
to Chairman Powell urging him to open proceedings into the
apocalyptically stupid Broadcast Flag, and the memo was released as a
Word file.
Word files contain tons of metadata about their creation and
revision, including things like the name of the person to whom the
version of Word used to create the document was registered, which is
how we busted Hollings. NTK
sometimes pulls apart the Word-based press-releases coming out of the
UK government and shows how the New Labor taskmasters are rewriting
(and upbraiding) the Old Labour bureaucrats who produce the initial
drafts.
After years and years of this sort of humiliation, MSFT has
finally gotten wise and shipped the "Remove Hidden Data" add-in for
Office XP/2003, which "you can use to remove personal or hidden data
that might not be immediately apparent when you view the document in
your Microsoft Office application."
Of course, the "add-in" only cover a couple recent flavors of
Office and doesn't work on the Mac, so for the rest of us, there's
still a pretty good reason not to use Word for any sensitive electronic
document dissemenation.
And, of course, it remains to be seen whether the "Remove Hidden-Data" function actually removes all
the hidden data -- MSFT has devoted so much engineering to obfuscating
its file format to lock out competitors from shipping a compatible
word-processor, there's really no good way to evaluate this claim.
Link [Boing Boing Blog]
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Visual Readers' Advisory.
"A cool network map of book-buying patterns yields this insight to Valdis Krebs:
'(P)olitical books are preaching to the converted...if you are working
a 2004 political campaign what do you do with this information?... All
you can do is focus on the edge nodes and the bridges.' " [EdCone.com]
I want a map like this for readers' advisory in SWAN, NoveList, etc. [The Shifted Librarian]
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Another Question: If every American put 3% (climbing to 10%) of their income every year into bonds/stock and were paid only the dividends/interest (or any return of the capital in excess of 7%) what would our society look like? Here is the basic idea. My thinking: second or third generation inheretances could be the road to easy street for most of us if invested globally. This suggestion is based on the idea that the US can turn itself into an investor nation that rides the work of the rest of the world, we would have it made. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Top Tip: Install a new OS?.
Please help! I have an older system which now runs WIN-ME and I have an
opportunity to install WIN 2000 PRO. Can you walk me through the
necessary steps? [Extremetech]
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ActiveRenderer 2.0.   Marc Barrot has emerged from his Fencing career with a new version of ActiveRenderer that supports the OPML coming out of Matt and Paolo's k-collector. It's quite cool.
ActiveRenderer is what I use to structure this blog in outline form.
There are all sorts of tricks and things you can do with it - depending
upon how nerdy you are. Marc is now reading RSS channels from a myriad
of sources and spitting out OPML faster than you can say "Dave Winer invented Outlining."
Connecting up with our friends product - k-collector -makes it even cooler. [Marc's Voice]
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© Copyright 2004 William J. Maya.
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