...more recent posts
I saw Craig Venter (president of Celera Genomics) on Charlie Rose last night. Seemed like a decent incredibly smart guy. Still, he made me feel very uncomfortable by not answering the questions about why they are filing so many patents.
Did you hear the Verizon strike conspiracy theory? Supposedly their research showed that the new name was not catching on with the public. So they "manufactured" the strike, forcing the name to be repeated over and over for a few weeks in the media. Now everyone knows Verizon. :-p
If you use the internet, you probably already know all about trolls. I keep meaning to write something a bit longer about them, becasue it is a pretty interesting phenomenon. You can see some (arguably very bad) trolls talking amongst themselves here (warning: lots of stupid, juvenille, possibly offensive stuff mixed in with a couple of interesting bits.) Anyway, the longer discourse will have to wait, but I'm bringing this up because I'm wondering if a whole web site can be a troll? I'm thinking of this one in particular. It's perfect troll material (at least for slashdot.) Here are a few of my favorite quotes.
"The settlement in the Cyber Patrol case reported yesterday is in danger since it was learned that the hackers who created the 'cphack' virus are part of a neo-Socialistic cult that renounces individual ownership of software.Neo-Socialistic cult, eh? Well, how about this one:
"This new medium of the Information Superhighway--created by brave Cold Warriors in the struggle against Communist aggression..."Yeah, I know about DARPA, but saying it was...oh nevermind (IHBT)...The insanity continues:
"According to the Rutherford Institute, the number of sites with anti-Christian content has risen by over 350 percent during the period from 1997 to 1999. Most of these sites are created by self-styled Satanists or 'free thinkers'."Isn't there a law against that free thinking stuff? Anyway, my point is (you knew I had a point, right?) if you can't tell the difference between a seriously raving lunatic, and a troll, isn't it better just to consider it a troll? All those politicians aren't really serious (come on, how could they be,) they're just trolling. Once you see things this way, the solution is easy: don't feed the trolls. Don't pay any attention. They are trying to get that predictable rise out of you. I think I like this outlook. Now I can just forget about politics and get back to mastering regular expressions.
I'm guessing this might be enough to make some politician step in and knock a little wind out of these overly litigious corporations. (If you don't know: a judge recently ruled for the MPAA against the "hacker" magazine/website 2600 for linking to the DeCSS software code which makes it possible for people running linux to watch DVD's. Now it turns out that CNN (which is owned by Time Warner which is a part of the MPAA) has links to the same software.)
Another cool thing about google I never knew: if you enter
links: http://www.somesite.org into the search field you get a listing of all the pages that google knows of pointing to somesite.org.
New books:
Permutation City by Greg Egan
Mastering Regular Expressions (O'Reilly - owl) J.E.F. Friedl
I know you are probably all wondering "Hey, I wonder how the work on the new office in Jim's building is going?" Well, it's funny you should ask, because I've got a few pictures. You see, I woke up the other morning with a terrible pounding in my head. I groaned, not sure why I should have such a splitting hangover. Then I realized I didn't. There really was a pounding in my head, and it was Louis driving a sledgehammer into the side of the building over and over again. Those things really echo in a tiny brick airshaft. Anyway, I quickly realized that the work on converting the basement was about to accelerate and I better get some shots while it still looks like a basement. So here you go. I guess these are the "before" shots. Check back in a month or so for the results.
What happened to Cam's CMS mailing list? I almost got crushed by the volume at first, and now not a single post for days. What gives? Maybe I was unsubscribed. Or maybe everyone decided it really wasn't so great after all? I was starting to think so. I had hoped it would be about people designing their own CMS's; but it turned out to be more about people debating the relative merits of different commercial packages. I can already read Dave Winer talk about frontier on his site. Did he kill the discussion by participating too much? Was the topic just too broad? Or is everyone just really busy right now, and I should calm down and wait for things to pick up again? You know, I was starting to expect those mails...
Double dose of sci-fi fact on /. today. First up, evidence for the existence of a salt water ocean under the surface of Europa. Not a very good discussion, so maybe click right to this UKTimes piece that was the original source of the story. Contact creeps closer. And secondly, a team of Australian biologists is preparing to clone the Tasmanian tiger. It's been extinct for 70 years. Probably best to skip the troll/slashbot wars on that one too, and jump right to the MSNBC story. And if you like these sorts of cloning, space exploration, search for extraterestrial life stories, let me once again plug the incredible sci-fi book Diaspora, by Greg Egan.
I think this is the shortest, most clear summary of the hole found in PGP. (A little on the technical side, but if you're clicking through on a story about security holes in PGP, that's probably what you're looking for.) Probably no reason to panic, but if you are using this sort of encryption, you better read up.