There's something grimly fascinating about this Blackhatworld forum in which spammers are discussing with comradely zest the best means of overcoming the new Craigslist phone-verification technique that prevents duplicate listings being posted in CL forums. There's the whole spectrum of netly emotion here: technical generosity; greed; self-pity; quick anger. They could be talking about debugging a video-driver, except that they're talking about turning a beautiful community service into a pile of shit.

They've just started doing this in the computer services section too. I'm seriously freaking out now because I make the majority of my income off that section. I'm a freelance designer.

I don't know how I'm going to pay my bills if I can't find a way around this. Anyone have a suggestion? Please?

Link

Here's a magnificent grid showing how a humble rock would be displayed by an enormous variety of video games' rendering engines, executed with affection and wit (Fipi Lele pointed out that the Zork version would be, "There is a rock here."). The rock is the perfect, Sluggo/Zippy-esque subject for this kind of comparison, absolutely bang-on.

All I know about this image is that Kotaku apparently published it in April, 2006. Oh, and that it rocks. So to speak. Link (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Geoff sez, "A reader emailed me about this amazingly weird town in Belgium where, due to how the town was divided back in the 12th century, parts of the village are actually now Dutch. In other words, you have this weird island-effect - check out the map - where pockets of the Netherlands exist within the larger matrix of a Belgian town. These sovereign pockets are only big enough to hold a few houses, though - and the houses differentiate themselves, nationalistically, by including coats of arms on their fronts. They even have separate postal services! It's like something straight out of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. What's more, because laws differ in the Dutch parts of the town, restaurants apparently used to close at different times - but in some cases this simply meant that you had to move to another table, thus crossing the national border. " Link (Thanks, Geoff)

Happy Trinity Day: on this day in 1945, the first atomic bomb was detonated in Alamogordo, in Los Alamos, NM. Celebrate with a mushroom pizza.

Don't miss Ellen Klages's award-winning Green Glass Sea, the best story ever written about trinitite (the radioactive green-glass "rocks" made from sand fused by the Trinity detonation) and remember, you can buy the stuff online!

With gallows humor, the Los Alamos physicists got up a betting pool on the possible yield of the bomb. Estimates ranged from zero to as high as 45,000 tons of TNT. Enrico Fermi, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1938 for his work on nuclear fission, offered side odds on the bomb destroying all life on the planet.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, was under no illusions about what he and his fellow physicists had wrought. The effects of the blast, the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT, moved the intellectual Oppenheimer to quote from the Bhagavad Gita: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one. Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds."

More prosaically, Dr. Kenneth Bainbridge, site director of the Trinity test, said: "Now we are all sons-of-bitches."

Link (Thanks, Evan!)

(Image: Wikimedia Commons)

CAPTCHAs -- the technology used to stop spammers from using computers to sign up for email accounts and the like -- are thoroughly broken; spammers and researchers are finding better and better ways to get computers to recognize the word-soup. Computerworld's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has a good feature on what happens now:

According to Nagle, waxing sarcastic, "Several commercial products are now available to overcome those little obstacles to bulk posting. A tool called CL Auto Posting Tool is one such product. It not only posts to Craigslist automatically, it has built-in strategies to overcome each Craigslist anti-spam mechanism." It's not the only one. There are, he added, "other desktop software products [such as] AdBomber and Ad Master. For spammers preferring a service-oriented approach, there's ItsYourPost." The result? "The defenses of Craigslist have been overrun. Some categories on Craigslist have become over 90 per cent spam. The personals sections were the first to go, then the services categories, and more recently, the job postings."

Link (via /.)

If you're in Silicon Valley this week and want to have some legal-type fun, you could drop in on the Lenz v. Universal hearing (dress nice, behave yourself!) in which EFF will be arguing that Universal should be punished for sending a bogus copyright threat to a mom who posted a 29-second youtube of her adorable toddler dancing to Prince's "Let's Go Crazy."

EFF represents Stephanie Lenz, who uploaded a 29-second clip of her son dancing in the family kitchen to the Prince song, "Let's Go Crazy," which is playing on a stereo in the background. Remarkably, Universal Music Publishing Group claimed that the video infringed its copyrights, and had the video yanked from YouTube. Lenz's lawsuit against Universal seeks to hold the company accountable for misrepresenting that her fair use violated its copyrights.

Link (via Recording Industry Vs. the People)

Craftster user Chris Wass knit an entire Wonder Woman costume (complete with bracelets!) for ComiCon. Alas, I won't be there to see it in person this year, but I'm already subbed to the Flickr tag and can't wait to do some virtual cosplayer watching. Link (via Craft)

Sara Hillenberger's knitted woolen organs have a cashmeresque delicacy that makes them almost yummy-seeming. If all organs looked like this, organ-meat would make the jump from dog-food to mainstream delicacy. Link (via Craft!)

I'm not sure what Chinese string this restaurateur fed to the translation software used to to generate the giant sign hanging over the entrance, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't: TRANSLATE SERVER ERROR. Ah, the special problems of translations into other alphabets. Link (Thanks, Mark!)

Update: In the comments, Insect Hooves adds, "OM NOM NOM. I love their Segfault Chicken. And their Short Stack Overflow is to die for. Ooooh, and their 404 Not Pound Cake (foghorn)"