Red Gate Software has launched a startup incubator in Cambridge. Free office space, internet access, room, board, advice, and pocket money. (I’m one of the people giving advice). For a first, it’s really free; Red Gate isn't taking stock in the companies it helps. “We think that getting to know smart people doing interesting things will, in the long term, be good for Red Gate. In the future, we might end up licensing your technology, investing in your company or maybe even buying it. Or maybe we won’t. Ultimately, all deals come down to relationships. So we want to build them.”

Well thats interesting.

New startup incubator in Cambridge, England - Joel on Software

I’ve wanted this forever. Google Reader just added a feature where you can send items directly to Twitter, Reddit, and a bunch of other places:

Note to self. Write one of these for Memestreams.

Google Reader adds “Send To” feature

I was particularly impressed with #8 and #28. If you're into the hard stuff, click here. The terminator story line, sans time travel, seems realistic.

Come with me if you want to live!

More Robots - The Big Picture - Boston.com

"Fair use is not a defense to trafficking in products used to circumvent effective technological measures that prevent unauthorized access to, or unauthorized copying of, a copyrighted work," she wrote. "[F]air use can never be an affirmative defense to the act of gaining unauthorized access.

This is bretarded!

RealNetworks court loss a reminder about limits of "fair use" - Ars Technica

More than half of the internet’s top websites use a little known capability of Adobe’s Flash plugin to track users and store information about them, but only four of them mention the so-called Flash Cookies in their privacy policies, UC Berkeley researchers reported Monday.

Awesome! Thanks Adobe!

Ajax Security, Chapter 8, pages 218 - 226 pages ;-)

You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again | Epicenter | Wired.com

(Picture taken by author, 2/10/2004, Sapporo, Japan

For this field of Snowman/frozen Wii Miis, Japan gets a win! Current score is now 2-2.

Previous scores:

1-2 : "Sexy Firefox" means something (horribly) different (lose)
1-1 : Foxken (win) Maid Cafe (lose)

Japan: 2 and 2!

I don't know what I like more:

1- That there is a Snowman in Unicode

2-That visiting the Wikipedia URL for the Snowman character redirects to "Snowman."

3-That Firefox displays the Snowman glyph in the URL bar:

This absolutely made my night... and I even grilled myself a steak tonight!

I would use "☃" a lot more if Memestreams stopped escaping my & into &!!!

Snowmen, snowmen everywhere!

Charlie: This is complete BS. You can diff a jailbroken kernel with a standard iPhone kernel and there are very few places that are changed. In particular, it doesn't mess with anything that has to do with the communication with the carrier. Even if it did do something crazy, which it doesn't, I would hope that the towers are robust enough to handle it. Just as the software in the iPhone should be able to handle any type of input it receives, the cell towers should too. I hope the carriers adequately test their equipment. If not, they can always give me a call, I'd be happy to help. In other words, if all it takes for a terrorist to take down cellular communication in this country is have a jailbroken iPhone, we’re in trouble.

I like Charlie a lot. He (like Gary McGraw) is way smarter than I while being very understated (which is most refreshing in this space).

However I hope Charlie does not seriously believe that one part of the cell network is flawed (as Zane and Luis showed) and while another part is not.

If someone held a gun to my head and said "Do the towers have input validation issues?" I would say with conviction "hell yes."

It only logical. The cell network has been a closed system for years. Equipment built and controlled by a small number of companies talking with other equipment built and controlled by a small number of companies. These systems are engineered to withstand random, not deliberate, error. New widget FOO has a bug that causes it to send bad messages that crashes BAR? Well then obviously there is a bug in FOO. Call Ed over at FOO! Apparently their engineers need to read the BAR spec again! Never mind that BAR utterly crapped itself the fault clearly lies with FOO. Throw in a few decades of legacy technology and I have no doubts there are problems.

please please please be joking.

Sometimes you find that your lifestyle, or (in some cases) your job, means that you parent somewhat differently than may be the norm. This rare moment of self-reflection came when I was standing in my daughter's room, watching her sleep through a pair of night-vision goggles. This way, I can make sure she actually is sleeping without turning on a light and perhaps waking her, or alerting her to my presence as I bear witness to whatever level of shenanigans she's getting up to.

I wonder, idly, if there is enough ambient light to see the outline of my head. I then wonder if this is how alien abduction memories begin.

Really? Cause I was wondering if you are a sick bastard.

Very creepy Ars

Peter: Now what are you thoughts on a Wedding Singer?
Jillian: Oh I thought maybe I'd just DJ the wedding myself. I already made a playlist on this! [pulls out white box]
Peter: ... A box of Junior Mints?
Jillian: This isn't an iPod?
Peter: Your Junior Mints play MP3s?
Jillian: My iPod is chocolate?
Peter: ... Well be that as it may

Family Guy: We Love You, Conrad