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Saturday, March 20, 2004
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Yahoo! News - Technology
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| 1. |
Online Socializing Not for Everyone (AP). AP - Rachel Gillman has always had a lot of friends. But thanks to the latest Web craze, known as social networking, she now has friends of friends — and friends of friends of friends. |
| 2. |
Tech Fair Hawkers Woo the Geek-Wary (AP). AP - At this year's CeBIT technology fair, computer and telecoms companies are trying to muffle the jargon — aiming their pitches at people indifferent or even hostile to geektalk who still love the gadgets. |
| 3. |
Critics Decry Interior Internet Shutdown (AP). AP - The court-ordered shutdown of many of the Interior Department's Internet connections is depriving American Indian children of educational opportunities and preventing public input on land management decisions, a leading senator and environmentalists say. |
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Slashdot
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| 4. |
Why Programming Still Stinks |
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NewsIsFree: Security
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| 5. |
Internet Providers Should Find Their Way to IMAP (washingtonpost.com) |
| 6. |
WORM_RANDEX.CJ |
11:13:06 PM 
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10:12:46 PM
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9:12:26 PM
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Yahoo! News - Technology
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| 1. |
'Witty' Worm Wrecks Computers (washingtonpost.com). washingtonpost.com - A quickly spreading Internet worm destroyed or damaged tens of thousands of personal computers worldwide Saturday morning by exploiting a security flaw in a firewall program designed to protect PCs from online threats, computer experts said. |
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Slashdot
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| 2. |
New Nano-ITX Boards Shown At Cebit |
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SecurityFocus Vulnerabilities
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| 3. |
Vulnerabilities: Belchior Foundry VCard Authentication Bypass Vulnerability. Belchior Foundy vCard is a web based e-card application that allows users to send electronic cards through email. It is implemented in PHP with a MySQL database back end... |
8:12:06 PM
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Slashdot
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| 1. |
2004's Science Talent Search Winners Are In |
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NewsIsFree: Security
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| 2. |
Netsky.b Virus |
7:11:48 PM
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6:11:25 PM
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5:11:05 PM
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Boing Boing
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| 1. |
Nerdy Bay Area dream-jobs. Claris sez, "A collection of cool geeky companies located in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, from anime/manga publishers to videogame companies to special effects shops. Best of all? Direct links to the job opening pages of each site, whenever I can find 'em. Might as well work somewhere cool, right?"
Link
(Thanks, Claris!) |
| 2. |
Mark Cuban blogs inside NBA referee stats. Those of you who are basketball fans will understand the considerable significance of this blog-post. |
| 3. |
X-rated miniature railroad models.  If I asked you to form a sentence using the words "train" "sex" and "fantasy," this would probably not be the result -- but for every oddity there is a fetish, and a website to prove it. This German manufacturer of model railroad components caters to adult hobbyists who like teeny-tiny sex with their teeny-tiny trains. And a visit to this online discussion forum reveals that other companies are creating similar "adult" scenes -- some even more explicit:
"At the Neuremburg Toy Fair, Viessmann announced an electronic drive that moves the lady figure on one of the 'Sexy Scenes'. The venerable company Faller took things even further. They announced a kit of a 'night club' that includes five Preiser-style figures of 'hostesses'. On the small picture one of them can be seen receiving a 'guest'."
These guys put the "ho" in "HO Gauge."
Not safe for work or children, although the naughty bits are ZENSUR-ed.
Link (Thanks, Vann!) |
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Slashdot
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| 4. |
eBay Fraud Vigilantes |
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SecurityFocus Vulnerabilities
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| 5. |
Vulnerabilities: WFTPD Server GUI Remote Denial Of Service Vulnerability. WFTPD is a popular FTP server developed by Texas Imperial Software for Windows systems.
WFTPD server front end GUI has been reported to be prone to a denial of service.... |
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NewsIsFree: Security
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| 6. |
PluggedIn: USB Gizmos, Gadgets and Trinkets Abound |
| 7. |
Are Biometrics Coming to a PC Near You? |
| 8. |
Secunia Advisories - March 19 |
4:10:45 PM
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Boing Boing
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| 1. |
40 drunkard milestones. This Modern Drunkard list of 40 Things That Every Drunkard Should Do is very good. I like "Sit in on an AA meeting" and "Extravagantly overtip a bartender," but this one is my fave:
7.) Buy a crowded bar a round.
For no reason at all. Jump up on a barstool and shout it loud: "A round for the house! On me!" Make sure you have a good toast ready, because, for once, they'll all be listening.
Link
(via Fark) |
| 2. |
Uncovered - The Whole Truth About the Iraq War.  Uncovered is a documentary about the way the White House distorted the truth in an attempt sell the American public and the rest of the world on its pre-emptive war on Iraq. I already thought that Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, and the rest of that gang were being sneaky about it, but this DVD nailed it for for me. The reason Uncovered is so persuasive is that the director wisely chose to interview only "insiders" for the documentary -- CIA analysts, weapons investigators, Pentagon officials, and former White House counsels. Their comments on the administration's exaggerations and spin are devastating. According to the director, even people who support the war in Iraq become angry after watching Uncovered, because it exposes the Bush administration as a pack of thoroughly corrupt liars. Link
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| 3. |
Accountant sues Google so that his license suspension won't show up in searches. Mark Maughan, an accountant, is suing Google to get it to change PageRank so that searching for his firm doesn't return the California Board of Accountancy's report of the time he had his license pulled for a month. Oh yeah, that's gonna work: because there's nothing I look for in accountant more than blinkered pig-ignorance of the workings of the Internet and a callous disregard for the neutrality of search engines.
Link
(via Fark) |
| 4. |
General Ursus bust. 
At $200, this resin bust of Planet of the Apes's General Ursus is impossible to justify as an acquisition, but it is going into the list of things to buy after I make my first trillion.
Link
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| 5. |
Movie monster busts by Tom Savini. 
Another item to add to the first-trillion shopping list: $450 busts of famous movie monsters by special effects wizard Tom Savini (I have a concrete casting of a Vincent Price life-mask that Savini made in storage, awaiting the end of my gypsy wanderer days).
Link
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Slashdot
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| 6. |
MSN Rolling Out New Search Engine In July |
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SecurityFocus Vulnerabilities
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| 7. |
BugTraq: Concerning The Recent Invision power Board Issues. Sender: GulfTech Security [security at gulftech dot org] |
| 8. |
BugTraq: Re: Any dissasemblies of the Witty worm yet?. Sender: Kostya Kortchinsky [kostya dot kortchinsky at renater dot fr] |
| 9. |
BugTraq: Re: The witty worm. Sender: Gadi Evron [ge at egotistical dot reprehensible dot net] |
| 10. |
Vulnerabilities: OpenBSD isakmpd Multiple Unspecified Remote Denial Of Service Vulnerabilities. isakmpd is the IKE key management daemon provided with OpenBSD. isakmpd is used when negotiating security associations in authenticated or encrypted network traffic and i... |
| 11. |
Vulnerabilities: GlobalSCAPE Secure FTP Server SITE Command Remote Buffer Overflow Vulnerability. GlobalSCAPE Secure FTP Server is an FTP server that runs on Microsoft Windows operating systems.
A buffer overflow vulnerability has been identified in the server that m... |
| 12. |
Vulnerabilities: YABB/YABB SE Multiple Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerabilites. YaBB (Yet Another Bulletin Board) is freely available web forum software that is written in Perl. YaBB SE is a freely available, open source port of Yet Another Bulletin ... |
| 13. |
Vulnerabilities: YABB SE Multiple Input Validation Vulnerabilities. YaBB SE is a freely available, open source port of Yet Another Bulletin Board (YaBB). It is available for Unix, Linux, and Microsoft Operating Systems.
Multiple vulnera... |
3:10:26 PM
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Boing Boing
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| 1. |
Dr Gray's libel-threats backfire. Gavin Sheridan has been threatened by "Dr." John "Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus, I am From Uranus" Gray for declaring that Gray was a fraud whose degrees came from a diploma mill. Gray's lawyers demanded a retraction and reserved the right to sue for libel anyway.
Well, in an act of increasingly common Internet judo, Sheridan posted the nastygram, and the collective outrage from other Web-writers has spread the news of Gray's bullying -- and the dirt behind his degrees. Threatening to sue in order to silence a critic has simply spread the criticism much, much farther.
For example, have a look at this post in the Washington Monthly, in which Gray's credentials are attacked further:
Gavin's post says none of his degrees are from accredited universities. The lawyer's letter says only that Columbia Pacific was an approved university.
This is a considerable difference, since until 1989 pretty much
anyone who felt like it could call themselves a university in the state
of California. A few years after this changed, Columbia Pacific was
shut down when it was found to be what is colloquially referred to as a
diploma mill.
So then, was Columbia Pacific ever accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, the accrediting body for western universities? And what about the
Maharishi European Research University in Switzerland, where Gray got
his BA and MA?
Nope. As the producers of Inside Edition verified in a show aired last November, none of these are accredited universities.
You know, as the possessor of a bona-fide fake Doctor of Divinity from the Universal Life Church, this really steams me. I worked hard to get my fake degree, so that I could add that all-important Dr. to the front of my name, becoming Dr. Cory Doctorow. Reverend Dr. Cory Doctorow. People like Gray give people like me with fake degrees a bad name. We aren't all bullies, you know. Some of us are quite proud of our fake education. Proud of our fraud. We don't sue people who call us out on it. We take those people out for drinks and thank them. Because we're proud. Very, very proud.
I would be remiss if I failed to point out this exhaustive run-down on the standard of education that Gray's alma maters hold themselves to:
* One master's-degree student was given credit for "a learning contract describing how he would continue taking dance lessons and watch dance demonstrations in order to improve his skills as a Country Western dancer."
* A Ph.D. dissertation written in Spanish was approved by four faculty who cannot speak the language.
* One dissertation "had no hypothesis, no data collection, and no statistical analysis. A member of the visiting committee characterized the work as more like a project paper at the college freshman level." The dissertation, The Complete Guide to Glass Collecting, was 61 pages long.
Link
(via Dan Gillmor) |
| 2. |
SF inner-city robots team needs help to get to the USFIRST finals. Dana sez, "This is the blog of The Boilermakers, a team of high school roboticists from an inner-city San Francisco school. The team recently qualified for the USFIRST finals in Atlanta by beating more experienced and better funded teams at the Portland regional competition. The Cinderella story is in danger of ending prematurely, though, as the team doesn't have the funds to attend the event. They are currently attempting to gather enough funds to make it to Atlanta, but are running out of time. The blog has a Paypal link for donations."
Link |
| 3. |
Gigantic aquatic pill-bug. This is the biggest damned pill-bug I've ever seen.
Ever heard of a pill bug? They are more regionally known as doodlebugs and roly-polys. They're those little bugs that curl up into a perfect little ball when you mess with them. I had great fun with them as a kid. I thought it was so cool that a bug could turn into a ball.
Well, they're not actually bugs -- they're crustaceans. This guy up here is a very close relative of the roly-poly, only it lives in the deep sea along the ocean floor. It's just like the ones you found under rocks as a kid, only it's really fucking big. It even rolls up into a ball!
Link
(Thanks, Juju!) |
| 4. |
Cool comic art-strip "Piercing".  "Piercing," a dark, beautiful, wordless>David Gaddis.
Link (Thanks, Susannah) |
| 5. |
Six years of kottke.org. Jason Kottke's blog turns six today!
Except for the basics (eating, sleeping, remaining alive), I've never stuck with anything for six years straight, so it's hard for me to believe I'm still here doing this. Six years!
Link |
| 6. |
File-sharing kills crap record stores, promotes great ones. Good Wired News piece on the kinds of mom-and-pop record stores that benefit from file-sharing, treating it as promotions for their hand-sold, campus-cred merchandise.
"The file sharing, the Internet -- just makes them music junkies," Wiley said.
Paul Epstein, owner of Twist & Shout, a store in Denver, agreed that piracy has helped his bottom line. He said it's like radio, another form of promotion that spurs sales.
"File sharing is a danger, but it really turns a lot of kids on to music," he said.
Link |
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Slashdot
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| 7. |
Worlds Largest Scale Model Solar System? |
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SecurityFocus Vulnerabilities
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| 8. |
Vulnerabilities: AIX Make CC Path Local Buffer Overflow Vulnerability. AIX make is a utility used to automate multiple source file compilation operations.
make has been reported to be prone to a buffer overflow vulnerability, the issue is r... |
| 9. |
Vulnerabilities: AIX Getlvcb Command Line Argument Buffer Overflow Vulnerability. AIX getlvcb is a utility used to display logical volume control block information.
getlvcb has been reported to be prone to a buffer overflow vulnerability. The issue pr... |
| 10. |
Vulnerabilities: AIX Putlvcb Command Line Argument Buffer Overflow Vulnerability. AIX putlvcb is a utility used to rebuild logical volume control block information.
putlvcb has been reported to be prone to a buffer overflow vulnerability. The issue pr... |
| 11. |
Vulnerabilities: Apache Web Server Multiple Module Local Buffer Overflow Vulnerability. A vulnerability has been reported to exist in Apache that may allow a local attacker to gain unauthorized access by executing arbitrary code on a vulnerable system. The c... |
| 12. |
Vulnerabilities: OpenSSL ASN.1 Large Recursion Remote Denial Of Service Vulnerability. OpenSSL is a freely available, open source implementation of Secure Socket Layer tools. It is available for the Unix, Linux, and Microsoft platforms.
A problem has been... |
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NewsIsFree: Security
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| 13. |
Ref: NGSSoftware Advisories NISR19042004a and NISR19042004b |
| 14. |
Re: Samba 'smbprint' script tmpfile vulnerability. |
| 15. |
Any dissasemblies of the Witty worm yet? |
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About Internet/Network Security
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| 16. |
Secunia Advisories - March 19. March 19 saw eight new Secunia Advisories ranked with a Medium or higher criticality. There were a couple straggling vendors with updates for the OpenSSL vulnerability. There were also three vulnerabilities ranked as Highly Critical including one for Norton Internet... |
2:10:07 PM
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Boing Boing
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| 1. |
Impossible Japanese pencil carvings. Website documenting the creation of some insanely implausible carvings -- made from common #2 pencils, in Japan.
 "According to their forms,they are divided into 4 types
- Double spiral, Chain,
Ring and Kikko that may be called a honeycomb
pencil.
Others like Six-fold spiral,
Extensible and
Triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon
are considered to be variations based on one of those 4 types.
[...] We are required to be skilled enough for delicate woodwork in carving out
a pattern like some kind of a tracery without making any miscut on the naked
lead inside."
Link (Thanks, CJC) |
| 2. |
QTVR pano: Ice Climbing.  Photographer and QTVR enthusiast Hans Nyberg says:
"Ice Climbing in the Pyrenees was shot by Ignacio Ferrando Margeli. To make it, Ignacio hanged on for 2 hours in -8 C , 17 F."
Link to Quicktime panorama, Link to more great QTVRs in this month's issue of VRMag. (Thanks, also, Michelle!) |
| 3. |
Robolympics: Send us your photos!. 
I'm hunched over a lonely laptop, drowning my sorrows in soymilk and anime DVDs, wishing I were in San Francisco right now -- watching mindbogglingly awesome robots strut their stuff at the Robolympics. Pathetic, I know. But if you are fortunate enough to be at the event with digital imaging gadgetry at hand, point me to your photos on the web! I'll post 'em here on BoingBoing. Please don't e-mail me photo attachments, though. Thanks!
Link to Robolympics website |
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Slashdot
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| 4. |
IPv6 Rollout Japan, China in 2005 |
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SecurityFocus Vulnerabilities
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| 5. |
BugTraq: Ref: NGSSoftware Advisories NISR19042004a and NISR19042004b. Sender: Sym Security [secure at symantec dot com] |
| 6. |
BugTraq: Re: Samba 'smbprint' script tmpfile vulnerability.. Sender: Gerald (Jerry) Carter [jerry at samba dot org] |
| 7. |
BugTraq: Any dissasemblies of the Witty worm yet?. Sender: Nicholas Weaver [nweaver at CS dot berkeley dot edu] |
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NewsIsFree: Security
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| 8. |
Romotes - Coming to a town near you. |
1:09:46 PM
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12:09:26 PM
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Boing Boing
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| 1. |
Movable Type and NTT. The Movable Type folks have inked a deal with NTT -- mazeltov, goys!
Weblog software leader Six Apart announced that NTT Communications, Japan's largest telecommunication company, has licensed Six Apart's popular TypePad software to power NTT's forthcoming "Blogzine Weblogging Service."
Link
(via Joi) |
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CNET News.com
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| 2. |
There's one born every minute. A New Yorker film critic has written "American Sucker," a book about the greed and fantasies that led him to lose his shirt during the dot-com boom and bust. |
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Yahoo! News - Technology
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| 3. |
Indian railways to give staff high-tech mobiles to limit accidents (AFP). AFP - The Indian Railways, the world's largest employer, will introduce advanced mobile telephones for train staff to cut down on its high accident rate, a report said. |
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Slashdot
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| 4. |
New Dr Who Actor Named |
11:09:05 AM
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Ars Technica
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| 1. |
AOL blocks spammers' sites. In an effort to thwart the rising spam tide, AOL starts blocking access to spammers' websites. By Fred "zAmboni" Locklear. |
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Boing Boing
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| 2. |
Movable Type and DoCoMo. The Movable Type folks have inked a deal with NTT DoCoMo -- mazeltov, goys!
Weblog software leader Six Apart announced that NTT Communications, Japan's largest telecommunication company, has licensed Six Apart's popular TypePad software to power NTT's forthcoming "Blogzine Weblogging Service."
Link
(via Joi) |
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Yahoo! News - Technology
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| 3. |
Slot Machine Looms in EU-Microsoft Case (Reuters). Reuters - Microsoft Corp. software designed for,
of all things, cash registers and slot machines played a
persuasive role in the European Union's landmark antitrust case
labeling it an abusive monopolist. |
| 4. |
Intel Strips 'Gigahertz' from Computer Chip Names (Reuters). Reuters - Taking a page from automobile
marketers, Intel Corp. will now assign model numbers to its
chips and eliminate measurements of raw speed from its product
names, the world's largest chip maker said on Friday. |
| 5. |
PluggedIn: USB Gizmos, Gadgets and Trinkets Abound (Reuters). Reuters - Back in the 1990s, when the
computing industry banded together to develop an easier and
faster way to connect peripheral devices to computers, they
expected the new technology to be used for printers and
cameras, not rubber duckies. |
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Slashdot
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| 6. |
Six Months Old, Eight New Organs |
| 7. |
Hack This, Please |
10:08:47 AM
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Boing Boing
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| 1. |
Dr Grey's libel-threats backfire. Gavin Sheridan has been threatened by "Dr." John "Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus, I am From Uranus" Grey for declaring that Grey was a fraud whose degrees came from a diploma mill. Grey's lawyers demanded a retraction and reserved the right to sue for libel anyway.
Well, in an act of increasingly common Internet judo, Sheridan posted the nastygram, and the collective outrage from other Web-writers has spread the news of Grey's bullying -- and the dirt behind his degrees. Threatening to sue in order to silence a critic has simply spread the criticism much, much farther.
For example, have a look at this post in the Washington Monthly, in which Grey's credentials are attacked further:
Gavin's post says none of his degrees are from accredited universities. The lawyer's letter says only that Columbia Pacific was an approved university.
This is a considerable difference, since until 1989 pretty much
anyone who felt like it could call themselves a university in the state
of California. A few years after this changed, Columbia Pacific was
shut down when it was found to be what is colloquially referred to as a
diploma mill.
So then, was Columbia Pacific ever accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, the accrediting body for western universities? And what about the
Maharishi European Research University in Switzerland, where Gray got
his BA and MA?
Nope. As the producers of Inside Edition verified in a show aired last November, none of these are accredited universities.
You know, as the possessor of a bona-fide fake Doctor of Divinity from the Universal Life Church, this really steams me. I worked hard to get my fake degree, so that I could add that all-important Dr. to the front of my name, becoming Dr. Cory Doctorow. Reverend Dr. Cory Doctorow. People like Grey give people like me with fake degrees a bad name. We aren't all bullies, you know. Some of us are quite proud of our fake education. Proud of our fraud. We don't sue people who call us out on it. We take those people out for drinks and thank them. Because we're proud. Very, very proud.
I would be remiss if I failed to point out this exhaustive run-down on the standard of education that Grey's alma maters hold themselves to:
* One master's-degree student was given credit for "a learning contract describing how he would continue taking dance lessons and watch dance demonstrations in order to improve his skills as a Country Western dancer."
* A Ph.D. dissertation written in Spanish was approved by four faculty who cannot speak the language.
* One dissertation "had no hypothesis, no data collection, and no statistical analysis. A member of the visiting committee characterized the work as more like a project paper at the college freshman level." The dissertation, The Complete Guide to Glass Collecting, was 61 pages long.
Link
(via Dan Gillmor) |
| 2. |
Dr Who gets grungy. 
Christopher Eccleston has been tapped to be the scruffiest Dr Who ever.
Link
(via Wonderland)
|
| 3. |
Semi-ruggedized laptops for 10% more. Interesting war-porn piece on the Panasonic ruggedized Toughbook, a laptop that, in its most extreme configuration, can survive being run over by a truck. Those boxen cost $5000, but a "semi-ruggedized" version, which is specced with "spill-resistant keyboards, hard casings, and gel-encased disk drives" is only 10 percent more costly to build than a standard machine.
Analysts say 20% of mainstream laptops fail in the first year, usually because of accidental damage. That rises to 35% once a notebook leaves its docking station and to more than 50% for machines that are used outdoors or on shop floors. But the failure rate of rugged or semi-rugged machines is just 5%.
Link
(Thanks, anonymous person!) |
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| 4. |
AOL Blocking Spammers' Web Sites |
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NewsIsFree: Security
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| 5. |
WORM_AGOBOT.MH |
9:08:27 AM
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8:08:06 AM
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Slashdot
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| 1. |
Live-Action Anime: Casshern |
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BBC News | Technology | UK Edition
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| 2. |
Mercenary game upsets Chinese. China has banned the sale of a computer game on the grounds that it discredits the national image. |
| 3. |
Robots battle to be the best. Thousands of robots are descending on San Francisco to compete in the first Robolympics. |
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Wired News
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| 4. |
U.N. to Russia: Ratify Kyoto!. The United Nations urges Russia to reconsider its belief that Kyoto is an economic straitjacket and sign up. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan says the stalling of the protocol is 'a major hurdle to effective global action.' |
| 5. |
Record Stores: We're Fine, Thanks. The recording industry may protest, but some owners of independent music stores say file trading is good for business. Katie Dean reports from the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. |
| 6. |
Mass Extinction Not Inevitable. Two recent studies suggest that the Earth is experiencing its sixth great extinction. Although that's a bad thing, it's not a done deal. A Q & #038;A with conservation biologist Stuart Pimm by Stephen Leahy. |
6:37:36 AM
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Yahoo! News - Technology
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| 1. |
Microsoft Facing Sanctions From EU (AP). AP - Microsoft Corp. is facing a world of troubles. The European Union is on the verge of imposing burdensome sanctions against the company, as antitrust challenges nag the software titan at home and in Asia. Plus, stiffer competition looms from open-source products led by the Linux operating system. |
| 2. |
Turbo-powered wireless Internet service aims to blow past competitors (AFP). AFP - A new warp-speed wireless Internet service called WiMax looks set to give more established competitors a run for their money but investors, burned in the new economy debacle, are still skittish. |
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NewsIsFree: Security
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| 3. |
Credit card data breach probed at BJ's stores |
| 4. |
Bagle Virus Sweeps Networks |
1:35:55 AM
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Boing Boing
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| 1. |
Using your friends' hashed addressbooks to fight spam. LOAF is a novel approach to spam-filtration. The idea is that you send a one-way-hashed version of your entire address book along with every message you send. This allows all your friends to create a privacy-complete list of all the people in their friends' trusted correspondants' lists. When mail comes in, it is flagged as originating with one of your known correspondants, or one of their known correspondants, or a total stranger, helping you prioritize your inbox. The authors of the paper have written a list of known attacks against this system:
Ex-Girlfriend attack
While a LOAF file is hard to reverse-engineer, it's designed to answer the question ``did this person ever send email to X?''. In some cases, that's a question you don't want people to be able to ask. To avoid exposing the fact that you are corresponding with certain people, you have three options:
- Don't use LOAF.
- Create a blacklist of addresses for LOAF to pass over when generating a filter.
- Set a false positive rate high enough to give you plausible deniability: ``Oh, honey, don't be ridiculous. I certainly never wrote to X, that must be a false positive'' will work, but you must be sure to read the caveat about keeping a constant filter size in Dictionary attack below.
Marc Canter attack
The technique is similar to getting a perfect score on the SAT by filling in every oval on the SAT exam sheet - you provide a Bloom filter consisting entirely of ones, and every email address checked against it will match.
Sending an overloaded filter does not help you get accepted by new correspondents, but once you are added to their list, it will make you appear to know everyone. One possible solution to this spoofing problem is to impose a maximum density.
Link
(via Kottke) |
| 2. |
Whence three-letter airport codes?. Good essay explaining the origin of airport codes such as YYZ, LHR, ORD, and SFO.
Some special interest groups successfully lobbied the government to obtain their own special letters. The Navy saved all the new 'N' codes. Naval aviators learn to fly at NPA in Pensacola, Florida and then dream of going to "Top Gun" in Miramar, California (NKX). The Federal Communications Committee set aside the 'W' and 'K' codes for radio stations east and west of the Mississippi respectively. 'Q' was designated for international telecommunications. 'Z' was reserved for special uses. The Canadians made off with all the remaining 'Y codes which helps explain YUL for Montreal, YYC for Calgary, etc. One of the special uses for 'Z' is identifying locations in cyberspace. What am I talking about? Well, an example is ZCX the computer address of the FAA's air traffic control headquarters central flow control facility. ZCX is not an airport but a command center just outside Washington D.C., that controls the airline traffic into major terminals.
Link
(via Kottke) |
| 3. |
Hidden Goatse in Unreal Tournament 2004. 
Goatse is an infamous Internet gross-out image (google for it if you must, but be warned: this is a sight you can't un-see). It has become iconic in geek cycles, so it's hardly surprising to find its echo in this screenshot from Unreal Tournament 2004. Unsurprising or no, it still evoked a beavisoid huh-huh-huh reaction from this correspondant.
Link
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| 4. |
MP3 of SXSW Friendster keynote. Here's an MP3 of Jonathan "Friendster" Abrams's SXSW keynote on YASNSes.
42.6MB MP3 Link
(via Apophenia) |
| 5. |
Hukilau: a 3-day tiki festival in Fort Lauderdale. 
Hukilau 2004 is the third annual 3-day tiki festival, to be held at Fort Lauderdale's Mai Kai tiki bar (where I celebrated my 30th birthday!) from September 23-25. Featured entertainment includes tiki carvers, live exotica, custom swizzlesticks and matchbooks, and gigantic, flaming novelty cocktails. Oh, and hula dancers, a tiki merch exhibition, a cruise, fishing, and did I mention novelty cocktails? I wonder if there's any grant money available to attend this...
Link
(Thanks, Swanky!)
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Yahoo! News - Technology
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| 6. |
T-Mobile to Launch 3G in May (Reuters). Reuters - T-Mobile, Europe's
second-largest mobile phone operator, will start selling
third-generation (3G) multimedia handsets from May and hopes
the service will boost revenues, it said on Thursday. |
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Slashdot
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| 7. |
Builder.com Writers Outsourced to India |
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NewsIsFree: Security
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| 8. |
News: Report: Phishing attacks on the rise |
| 9. |
Apple developing Remote Desktop 2 |
12:19:05 AM
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© Copyright 2004 Gregg Doherty.
Last update: 4/3/2004; 12:17:05 AM.
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