By Cory Doctorow at 6:42 pm Tuesday, May 20
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Five tips for tricking the resume-sorting software used by big companies into flagging your application as promising.
1. Lift key phrases from the job listing on the website and put them in your resume. Also be sure to use them when filling out online questionnaires.
2 Be sure to mention your critical job skills early and often. That way, your key selling points are read by the HR software as both recent and frequent experience.
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By Cory Doctorow at 6:40 pm Tuesday, May 20
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Good Kuro5hin article on writing scripts that will trap the RIAA's webcrawlers. The recording industry dispatches these indexers to discover infringing MP3s and uses the results to auto-generate officious, threatening letters to site-owners. These scripts trap the RIAA-bots in endless loops that feed them fake "suspicious" results, which will force the RIAA to change its methodology to actually certify that the files they've identified are indeed infringing.
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via Futurismic)
By Xeni Jardin at 3:43 pm Tuesday, May 20
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The Pentagon has renamed its $54 million "Total Information Awareness" program to "Terrorist Information Awareness."
Link,
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Thanks, Burk)
By Cory Doctorow at 2:44 pm Tuesday, May 20
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The Tennessee Digital Freedom Network has put together a grassroots organizing site to rally opposition to the Tennessee version of the "Super-DMCA." This site is a model of how it should be done -- an excellent informational and organizing resource.
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(
Thanks, Adina!)
By Cory Doctorow at 12:12 pm Tuesday, May 20
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Here's an online Java version of the old Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Infocom text-adventure game. I have very fond memories of pecking away at this for days on my Apple ][+.
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via The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the Twenty-First Century)
By Cory Doctorow at 11:14 am Tuesday, May 20
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Check out this prototype keyboardless data-entry system: coils of smart wire spiraled around the fingers like the windings of a tfillin that track the air-typing of their wearer to allow for data-entry without obtrusive twiddlers or keyboards.
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via Ambiguous)
By Xeni Jardin at 9:57 am Tuesday, May 20
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Article in today's
San Francisco Chronicle about QBox's recent Power Tool Drag Races, and other Bay Area machine-art groups like SRL:
NASA engineers aren't the only science-minded hobbyists attracted to events such as the Power Tool Drag Races. The Silicon Valley brain trust, the biotech community, the special-effects wizards of the film and video-game industries and the large-scale conceptual artists who make Burning Man a futuristic wonderland each year have all helped make the Bay Area the undisputed global home of kinetic art.
For Charles Gadeken, founder of QBox, the nonprofit organization that sponsors the drag races, such workshop whimsy is the next creative frontier. The whining motors and harsh "Mad Max" setting of such events are part of the appeal. "Original art is always ugly," Gadeken said a few days after the races. "It's crude, new, still developing. That's where this is. . . . There are very few happy, bouncy, fuzzy robots."
Link to
SF Chron story,
photos,
Discuss, (
Thanks, Greg!)
By Xeni Jardin at 9:39 am Tuesday, May 20
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The designer of this casemod, which took nearly a year to construct, says: "A few months back I was looking through pictures of casemods at various websites when the idea came to me, 'why not put a fish tank in a the top of a full tower case?' I decided to research it some and see if the idea would work. Since I had never attempted any form of case modding, I had a lot to learn. I read a variety of articles on things such as cutting holes, painting, adding LEDs, and making Plexiglas windows. I decided to give it a try."
Link,
Discuss , (
via sixdifferentways, and thanks Susannah!)
By Xeni Jardin at 9:08 am Tuesday, May 20
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I was fabric-hunting in LA's garment district yesterday with my business partner -- we run an
online design company that sells cool furniture -- and I stumbled on
this.
I asked fabric dealers about it, and they told me Ho Couture is huge. Pimp jackets for postmodern playas. Dealers stock two kinds of material for this: first, patterns like the "mudflap girl" (far left), or pinup chyxxors (right). Next, really cheesy fake fur (also shown at left). Leopard, Zebra, whatever, but also outrageous day-glo polkadot fur, like this. Puke-inducing. Think, "Barney, with the measles, after two hits of X." Ghettofabulous designers combine the materials into long smoking jackets and other "pimp" garments. Photos here. Discuss
By Cory Doctorow at 8:40 am Tuesday, May 20
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Good editorial on how the US is entering into a treaty with Singapore that will require the US not to revise the DMCA.
The US has a long history of revising its copyright laws to "harmonize" with the Draconian provisions of foreign copyright, and going beyond foreign laws. Of course, then the foreigners revise their copyright to match and exceed ours, and the whole cycle starts again.
But this is a new one: we're setting up treaties with foreign powers that limit what our own Congress can do. What's more, we're setting up these treaties at a time when bills are being circulated on the Hill that would eliminate the worst provisions of the DMCA.
It's pretty sickening to watch the efforts of democratically elected lawmakers being undermined by petty bureaucrats who ride in the pockets of the entertainment lobbies.
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(via Lessig)
By Cory Doctorow at 8:33 am Tuesday, May 20
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RIAA Radar is a bookmarklet that will tell you whether a CD for sale on Amazon was produced by an RIAA member-company or an independent.
ust as people can currently find out where some products come from and who made them (Is this banana organic? Does this milk contain GMOs? Were these clothes made in a sweatshop?), it is important to have that knowledge for as many consumer goods as possible. Knowledge is power, and knowing where the product came from can (and should) influence what you buy...
Why is it important to know if an album was released by an RIAA member or not?
That's possibly a fairly long answer, but just the highlights of the RIAA's practices involve price-fixing, blaming its poor financial state on unfounded digital piracy claims (and in turn, blaming its own consumers), lobbying for changes that hinder technological innovation and change copyright laws, underpaying the artists it represents, invading personal privacy to enforce copyrights, and dismantling entire computer networks just because of their ability (of their users) to share copyrighted files. Feel free to visit the RIAA and Boycott-RIAA.com to learn more.
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Thanks, Jason!)
