Slashdot has a script that bans your IP address if you pull their RSS too often. I'm at ETCON, where I'm sharing a public-facing IP with hundreds of Slashdot readers who are all pulling /.'s RSS. So I have been banned, along with all of them, for 72 hours.

Link

Link

(Thanks, Tim!)

"silver plastic molded Terminator Arnie and big-armed Last Action Hero Arnie get to know each other. Terminator is just two molded pieces of thin silver plastic, but Last Action Hero is a high quality articulated doll, with holes through his clenched hands which once clearly locked into something; a car, perhaps, or one of his enormous weapons."

Link (Thanks, Steffen!)

Link

Query comes into custom httpd, Google Web Server ("gwis")

Sent in parallel to several places:

* Index server, "every page with the word 'apple' in it -- a cluster that manages "shards" or "partitions" (everything starting with the letter "a") and then load-balancing replications for each. Have to calculate intersections for multiple-term queries

* Doc server, copies of webpages -- whence page-snippets are served in results. Sharded and replicated for scaleability and redundancy

* Misc servers: QuickLinks, spell-checkers, Ad server (first two are small servers, ad server is humongous)

Link

Business 2.0's blog reports that Atkins was skinny and healthy just before he died, no matter what the scandal-rags (which have been reporting that he was 60lbs overweight with heart disease at the time of his accidental death) say.

Link

(Thanks, Joshua!)

The source of these vulnerabilities is insufficient s...

Asking favors is fundamentally different than offering them. People gain by being bridges. Thus, to be able to tell you about a job gives me whuffie in our relationship. Feeling pressured to connect you to an open job makes me uncomfortable. In all of the networks described above, the bridge got to control the information flow. In Milgram's "Small Worlds," if you didn't know that i knew the target person, you may not have tried to pass it on to me. If you don't know that i am dating someone who has something that you want, you won't try to pressure me into giving you access to it. Thus, i can choose when to reveal my connections in a situation where i can come across as being helpful, rather than being put in a position to feel cornered. Revealing the network shifts the power.

Link

The e-mail standard doesn't trouble me as much, but the phone call one certainly does. Just because one person (who isn't even the copyright owner) calls your company on the phone to complain about something on your servers generally shouldn't, in my mind, trigger "knowledge" liabiliity generally. Perhaps the caller specifically mentioned Ellsion, but the opinion isn't clear about that.

Link

Here's an example scenario: A mail arrives at your super-barbed-wire-protected mail gateway. The gzip-compressed attachment - only 7k big - is grabbed by the anti-virus scanner, looking for any suspicious signatures. It starts to decompress it and BANG - the resulting file, over 100 gigabytes, crashes the AV scanner and completely fills the hard drive partition in the process.

Fortunately, a good number of the AV scanners that AERAsec tested aren't too vulnerable, but some require patching. Similarly, sending a gzipped-HTML bomb to a browser will crash a fair few of them. Not so scary, then, but nifty in an admirably-nasty way.

Link

I love this pic from ETCON.

Link

The response is an attempt to "configure the users" -- constrain behavior to acceptable behavior with messaaging, kicking people off, etc.

This won't work: you can't tell a hacker not to hack. These kids are social hackers. You can stop some bad behavior, but you chase off your best users, too.

Dating doesn't happen because you're in a dating context. Dating arises out of real contexts.

Taking away fakesters didn't make Frienster more real. Friendster is unreal because people never remove their friends, even if they never see them (the exception is when you break up, ironic, because ex-lovers are strong ties!).

Link

Link

Manifesto: Don't build applications. Build contexts for interactions.

The architecture of entertainment has been shaped by the idea of immersion.

We try to design places for people to play, but play is about people, not places.

Link

Link

It's the 10-second rule: if you can't file something in 10 seconds, you won't do it. Todo.txt involves cut-and-paste, the simplest interface we can imagine.

It's also the simplest way to find intercomation. EMACS, Moz and Panther have incremental search: when you type a "t" it goes to the first mention of "t", add "to" and you jump to the first instance of "to", etc.

This is being added to Longhorn (Unix geeks, we've had this since Jan 1 1900, and it will go away in 2038).

Power-users don't trust complicated apps. Every time power-geeks has had a crash, s/he moves away from it. You can't trust software unless you've written it -- and then you're just more forgiiving.

Text files are portable (except for CRLF issues) between mac and win and *nix.

Link

Broadcasting started out as a pirate technology. But as rights holders we'd rather not have bar owners and radio stations ringing us up and asking us for permission each time they wanted to play a song, because it would cost us more to answer than phone than it would gain us in revenue. So the US broadcast industry went to rights holders and created this bundled price with bundled choice, a sort of 'theme park admission fee' for content that allowed that cable operator, or satellite operator, or radio station, or bar to use the content without seeking permission.

Link

This "Spiderman completist" has scanned the covers of basically every funnybook on which Spidey appears (over 4,000!) and posted them to the intarweb.

Link

(via Smartpatrol)

Later in last week's argument, Judge Thomas took Frackman's argument (knowledge - ability = contributory infringement) to its logical conclusion by asking whether he thought Xerox should be held liable when a UCLA student uses a photocopier to make infringing copies. Here's what happened to Kroft in '83:

Justice Stevens: Under your test, supposing somebody tells the Xerox people that there are people making illegal copies with their machine, and they know it. What are they supposed to do? ... Your view of the law is that as long as Xerox knows that there is some illegal copying going on, Xerox is a contributory infringer?

Kroft: To be consistent, your honor, I'd have to say yes.

Justice Stevens: A rather extreme position.

Link

Comcast also released a letter sent to Eisner indicating that Eisner had personally rejected Roberts' offer to enter into discussions about a merger earlier in the week.

The letter from Roberts called it "unfortunate" that Eisner was not willing to enter into discussions. "Given this, the only way for us to proceed is to make a public proposal directly to you and your board," the letter stated.

Under the merger, Comcast said it would issue 0.78 of a share of its stock for each Disney share, and Disney shareholders would retain 42 percent of the combined company.

Link

Link

(Thanks, Thomas!)

So sit down -- and listen to me
No one wants see their product become ancient history
BEFORE you start rushing to build those interfaces
your best bet is make a set :: of simple use cases

They should describe what users actually do
and if that's unknown, run a contextual inquiry too
Because your interface will never be easy to follow
lest you build it to match up with their cognitive models

Link

(Thanks, Oliverw!)