Obit. [Naturally, Meat Hook Reality has a link. Update: Jeff Rowland has an unusal take: “Also I hope that Hunter S. Thompson is not regretting his decision at this point, and hopefully is feeling better.” Update 2: Doonesbury.com has a tribute in the form of reproductions of Uncle Duke’s 1974 appearance in the strip.]
Archive for February, 2005
It’s been a rough week, so here’s something calming for Sunday night: Rosemary Mosco’s bird dreams.
Erin catches up on ‘Alias’ episodes. “The upside of this season’s lame lack of plot is that each episode can by synopsized in under 10 minutes.”
mysql> delete from wp_comments where comment_approved = ‘0′;
Query OK, 95 rows affected (0.01 sec)
*sigh*
Mac users: I’ve compiled a version of uControl which allows it to operate (with scroll wheel support) under 10.3.8. Get it here: ucontrol_fix_10.3.8.zip. The bug (and the fix) are described here. Update: The official uControl version 1.4.6 now includes this patch (and requires OS X 10.3.8).
O’Reilly Network: Stewart Butterfield on Flickr.
So, partly for those reasons and partly because using the social network you can give people permission to add metadata to your photos, 71 percent of the photos have some kind of human-added metadata that was added in Flickr. That’s extremely high, even compared to software like Adobe Photoshop Album, which is designed from the bottom up to facilitate the adding of metadata. When you’re doing it for yourself, it’s like a chore, its drudgery. When you’re doing it as part of a community, in a collaborative way, it can still be a little bit of work, but the payoff is so much larger.
Salon writes about Flickr, del.icio.us, 43 Things, and the Force-like glue that binds them all together: a global namespace of user-defined tags.
What 43 Things does for personal goals, the bookmark-sharing site del.icio.us does for everything its users are interested in on the Net. Here, what people are looking at and saving from the Web becomes the basis for learning new things, and making connections with each other. “It’s like Friendster for knowledge as far as I’m concerned,” says Howard Rheingold. “I look to see who the other people are on del.icio.us who tag the same things that I think are important. Then, I can look and see what else they’ve tagged … And isn’t that part of the collective intelligence of the Web? You meet people who find things that you find interesting and useful — and that multiplies your ability to find things that are interesting and useful, and other people feed off of you.”
Read on: Steal this bookmark!
Phishing is an attack upon the user’s mind. The attacks exploit human frailties in recognizing trusted entities and confusion in the user’s mind about what trust applies to a particular entity. Defending against phishing attacks requires defending the user’s mind by bolstering the user’s ability to identify and track his trust relationships.
In response to the IDN sploit: YURLs and PetNames. Short version: Assign a name of your own choosing to the hash of the pubkey of a trusted resource. (Now how do you establish that trust relationship in the first place? That part’s always tricky—any trust system is elegant if you already know whom you trust.)
Update: The CapTalk mailing list has been abuzz about this problem. (start here; February archives)
[2:39] <dsandler> So, I don’t know how to respond to this: http://www.shmoo.com/idn/
[2:40] <dsandler> (the hack: using the Cyrillic ‘a’, which looks exactly like the Roman ‘a’, as the second letter in “paypal.com”)
[2:40] <dsandler> phished!
[2:41] <dsandler> So, what’s the answer here? Eliminate PunyCode encoding of so-called “international domain names”? Seems draconian. What you’d really want to do is come up with some way to trust a website above and beyond the orthographic appearance of its domain.
“It is no wonder that Kids These Days™ use IM to ask each other out — she can’t hear you stammer when you pop the question and when she turns you down she can’t hear you cry.”
06 Feb
2005
To A Theater Near You, In The Night, Is When He Comes, As It Turns Out
≡ 10:55 pm ≡ homestar
Those of us watching the Super Bowl for the most exciting movie trailer were looking in the wrong place. Coming soon from Videlectrix Films: Peasant’s Quest: The Motion Picture! (Another soon-to-be-hugely successful film adaptation of a video game.)
Someone’s taken it upon himself to photograph the double-Starbucks in River Oaks, on West Gray at Shepherd. (Non-Houstonites: the original location is mirrored across Gray by a drive-thru location.)
[Seen on delicious links tagged “houston”]
