By Cory Doctorow at 2:21 pm Monday, Sep 10
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Hackers are fixing the odds in Internet Casinos. An attack in late August cost one casino 1.9
million dollars. I like them odds!
Link Discuss (
via Meerkat)
By Cory Doctorow at 12:59 pm Monday, Sep 10
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Thanks to Julian Bond, BoingBoing now has an experimental RSS feed! I honestly don't know enough about RSS to tell you how to do cool stuff with this (feel free to post a comment if you have ideas), but cool stuff most assuredly can be done.
Link Discuss (
Thanks, Julian!)
By David Pescovitz at 11:17 am Monday, Sep 10
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Bioluminescent pet fish from Taiwan!
Link It's another fine example of life imitating
art imitating life.
Discuss
By Mark Frauenfelder at 11:11 am Monday, Sep 10
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Is chess legend Bobby Fischer playing anonymously on the Internet, as a British chess grandmaster is claiming?
Link Discuss (Thanks, Barry!)
By Cory Doctorow at 10:10 am Monday, Sep 10
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Canada's hard at work on its own version of the craptacular DMCA, and the CanGov is soliciting feedback on their proposal from Canadians -- I've already sent them a copy of my essay on sf and copyright (
Link).
Link Discuss (
Thanks, Dan, Fred and Jean-Francois -- boy a lot of people thought I should know about this!)
By Cory Doctorow at 10:01 am Monday, Sep 10
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More info on the new copyright bill I mentioned here a couple weeks ago (
Link). This is some deeply sinister, poorly thought out shit. Under the terms of the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA), hardware vendors will have to build copy-protection into their gear, right at the drives and the controllers. People who plug a computer into the Internet that isn't compliant with the copy-protection stuff are liable for a $500,000 fine. Urp.
Link Discuss (
Thanks Dan!)
By Cory Doctorow at 9:45 am Monday, Sep 10
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Great Eric Raymond editorial on how to ask a question on a technical mailing-list.
Never assume you are entitled to an answer. You are not. You will earn an answer, if you earn it, by asking a question that is substantial, interesting, and thought-provoking — one that implicitly contributes to the experience of the community rather than merely passively demanding knowledge from others.
Link Discuss (
via Meerkat)
By Cory Doctorow at 9:39 am Monday, Sep 10
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Factories are starting to use "3D Printers" (AKA Fabbers, see last week's blog entry,
Link) to spot-manufacture replacement parts for critical manufactory apparatus. My great-aunt Lisa and great-uncle Bora used to have a machine-shop in the former Leningrad, where they made custom parts for cars and machines that were in short supply after Glasnost (they lost the shop when it was expropriated at gunpoint by the Russian Mob, who wanted the location: ah, sweet liberty!). Bet they woulda loved one of these.
Link Discuss (
via /.)
By Cory Doctorow at 9:32 am Monday, Sep 10
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Ha! My post about Wired News's coverage (
Link) of the new WiFi stuff is vindicated! A
week ago, Network World Fusion covered an IEEE initiative to define 802.11 cards and access-points that can handle both the new and the old WiFi standards.
Link Discuss
By Cory Doctorow at 9:24 am Monday, Sep 10
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Are you
hyperlexic? Hyperlexics read fabulously, understand spoken words poorly, and are badly socialized. Hrm.
Link Discuss (
via Making Light)
By Cory Doctorow at 9:16 am Monday, Sep 10
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Oh, the merry pranksters of the Internet have been having a fun time playing around with the White House's glossary of urban drug-slang (
Link), and none more so than the happy tricksters at the Brunching Shuttlecocks. They've created a Web-page parser (
Link) that will take any page, search for White House defined drug slang, and replace it with the White Houre provided definition. BoingBoing gets pretty funny in translation (it translated "Rave on!" as "Parties designed to enhance a hallucinogenic experience through music and behavior on!").
Link Discuss (
via Electrolite)
By Cory Doctorow at 9:07 am Monday, Sep 10
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JimWICH has posted an incredible series of photos of Greg Browne's whimsical and brilliantly executed Trompe L'Oeil murals in Palo Alto.
Link)
Discuss (
via Electrolite)
By Cory Doctorow at 8:47 am Monday, Sep 10
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Ever since I read Bradley Denton's
Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede (
Link) -- one of the greatest humorous sf novels of all time -- I've been obsessed with Buddy Holly. You will understand my disappointment, then, when I tell you that I was
not present at the Texas Tech-New Mexico football game where 49,000 people sang "Peggy Sue" in unison as the conclusion to a four-day Buddy Holly symposium.
Rave on! Link Discuss
By Cory Doctorow at 8:22 am Monday, Sep 10
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WAP sucks. Fine. But here's a cool WAP-app: next time you're standing somewhere cool and feel the need to write a haiku about it, visit this service and tap out your three lines on your keypad, then you can see the haiku that other visitors to the same spot have left -- invisible grafitti!
Link Discuss (
Thanks, hlr!)
By Cory Doctorow at 8:16 am Monday, Sep 10
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I have a real love-hate relationship with Wired News. The hate part comes in two flavors: I hate the stories that just gush about some nebulously defined bit of vaporware from a press-release (see this blog entry for an example:
Link) and then there're stories like this one, where Elisa Batista covers the new 802.11a wireless standard, which is nearly five times faster than existing WiFi networks.
The hook for her story is that making the switch will cost a lot of money, since 802.11b (the old kind) cards aren't compatible with 802.11a (the new kind) base-stations. The headline (which I'm sure she didn't write, which is why this is about Wired News, not Ms. Batista) is "Wi-Fi Cost May Be Sky High." It seems like total chickenlittling to me. This is a new system, and so of course you need to buy new gear to make it work. Upgrade paths in high-tech should not come as a surprise, but the headline and the lede for the story makes the whole thing come off as a kind of conspiracy to jack the consumer for a couple extra bucks.
Here's my take: New! WiFi! Gear! Fast as hell! Not compatible -- yet -- and here's how long people who maintain public WiFi networks (WUGs, Starbucks, LaptopLanes, hotels) say they're going to take to implement it, and how they plan on doing so. Link Discuss
