"The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb." -- Marshall McLuhan, 1969
Angry lawyers scuffled with police as protests erupted across Pakistan Wednesday over the removal of nation's top judge, intensifying a crisis that threatens President Gen. Pervez Musharraf's grip on power.
Lawyers, in suits, in the street, with rocks, "scuffling" with police. Seriously. They should have had a section about that in the book of revelations.
This is not a special effect, people. Nor is this a Photoshop job. It's what happens when an Australian tinkerer decides to put an electricity-spewing Tesla coil on top of his automobile. Let's just say he won't be worried about carjackings any time soon.
At BuzzLogic, our mission is to apply the science of influence to the world of social media. This requires keen insight into dynamic conversational networks, a methodology premised on the idea that influence is in and of itself dynamic, and an ability to identify which participants in conversations are gaining or losing influence over time.
This is very different than “blogger A-lists” or other imprecise measures that can identify only who is popular, but not who is influential. And it is very different from the brand monitoring and analysis services that can describe what a small sample of bloggers was thinking a few weeks ago, not what is happening right now.
Only BuzzLogic brings both clarity and confidence to action in social media. BuzzLogic’s service enables brand and product marketing managers, corporate communications professionals, market researchers and customer service managers to actively monitor conversations that are taking place around their company, brand, products or competitors. They can quickly identify who the most influential participants of a conversation are. And they can engage with them to offer an alternative point of view, amplify key points or set the record straight. Once they are participants themselves in a conversation, they can then follow, track and understand the impact of their actions.
They won't divulge their real names, they call their project a "whiny, attention-seeking ploy," and they appear to take their fashion cues from Beastie Boys music videos.
"The purpose of the exercise is not so much to expose MySpace as a hive of spam and villainy (since everyone knows that already), but to highlight the monoculture-style danger of extremely popular websites," wrote Mondo Armando in an e-mail interview.
"We could have just as easily gone after Google or Yahoo or MSN or IDG or whatever. MySpace is just more fun, and is becoming notoriously [obnoxious] about responding to security issues," he said.
The MySpace hackers launched their project late Thursday expressing simultaneous enthusiasm and disdain for the task ahead. "If it ends up being just as lame as the Month of Apple Bugs, then we haven't really missed the mark. If it's funnier, then great," they wrote on their project's blog. "If it kills this Month of Whatever fad, then hurray for everyone, it's over."
They intend to primarily publish cross site scripting bugs, which can allow an attacker to execute malicious script within a victim's browser, but they may also publish bugs that affect browsers or technologies like Flash or QuickTime.
"Documental sobre los hackers" (documentary about hackers)
From DefCon 2006. 24 minutes long. Pretty watchable even for English-speakers, as most of the interviews are in English with Spanish subtitles.
Elonka points out this Argentinian documentary on Defcon. This is one of the best segments I've ever seen covering a hacking convention.
I don't know the names of everybody that got interviewed, but overall it's a good piece. Covers all the main Def Con elements, from Capture the Flag, to the Wall of Sheep, to the Lockpicking Contest, clips of people from Adam Laurie to Johnny Long to Jeff Moss, and much of the partying in between. ;) Billy Goto can be seen showing off his black badge (permanent free admission, from winning Hacker Jeopardy in a previous year), and my own fleeting seconds of Argentinian fame are around 16:25 (wearing my IGDA T-shirt) and a somewhat inebriated interview clip at 18:05. ;) I love my title description: "Ilanka, diseñadora de juegos, hacker" ("Elonka: Game designer, hacker.") Only it sounds c00ler in Spanish. ;)
Life is short for a meme, it seems, and unpredictable, to boot.
Unlike baby mammals, a meme cannot expect to go from conception to birth in a standard, more or less fixed period of time. Some memes are born immediately, whereas others may linger in gestation for years on end. Because prenatal care is so poor in the meme world, miscarriage, stillbirth, and infant mortality rates are quite high. Even worse, abortion and infanticide of new memes are commonplace in some quarters.
However, also unlike mammals -- and in fact most higher organisms -- a meme reaches reproductive age only moments after its birth. If it only manages to find its way to a target-rich environment, growth opportunities abound.
Yet even the most successful families of memes can go from pauperdom to dynasty to death to dust, all in the span of a few days.
Fortunately, here at MemeStreams, they don't bury or incinerate our beloved memes of yore. Instead, the crack team of scientists at the Industrial Memetics Institute has developed a highly advanced cryopreservation service. Unlike similar services for humans and other mammals, the service provided by MemeStreams is active today. It allows you -- in fact, anyone -- to reanimate a suspended meme of your choosing, and then to deposit it in the memetic meat market that is your blog.
Sadly, I have found that most MemeStreams users only rarely -- if ever -- avail themselves of the benefits of these remarkable cryorestoration services. As an independent profit center with no annual allocation from the IMI budget, the cryo unit is perpetually at risk of closure. For months now, the unit has been unable to hire staff to replace three of its senior technicians lost to headhunters in Q4FY06.
As part of the upcoming "Reanimemer" promotional campaign aimed at a Q3FY07 turn-around for the ailing cryo unit, I have scoured their voluminous records to provide you with a small sampling of what is presently on offer. I encourage you to plan your own visit soon.
Several people have been having problems with posts that contain unicode characters. It turns out that I broke unicode support in the UI update. Forms were passing bad data back to the system when submitted. In our HTML code, this:
I didn't catch the typo when proof reading the diffs. The problems should go away now. If they don't, let me know...
On the bright side, in the process of debugging the problem we added in better logging capabilities for tracking situations where the code errors out.
There still appear to be problems with some posts when forwarding to multiple users. Those problems have been around for awhile.. They are going to be worked out in a forthcoming update to the posting interface.
Boing Boing: Kidnapped Nun Bun Resurfaces in Seattle
Topic: Miscellaneous
7:39 pm EDT, Mar 16, 2007
Here's an article about the "world-famous" Nun Bun which was stolen/kidnapped about two years ago. The Nun Bun is a cinnamon roll that has a strong resemblence to Mother Teresa.
The NunBun has resurfaced in Seattle. Hopefully, the authorities are hot on the trail. Although somehow, I doubt it.
In this post, Jackson clarifies some of the Nub Bun history as well..
If you've ever been to a concert, you've seen something like it. A lone spotlight hits the baby grand as the star sits for a final solo; in the audience, a sea of tiny lights flicker. But those aren't lighters, and this isn't a rock star. His name is Koji Kondo, and he's playing his own composition, one of the most famous tunes in the world -- the theme song to the video game Super Mario Bros.
And those lights in the audience? They're Nintendo DS game systems, opened up with their backlit screens pointed towards the stage.
"I wanted to create something that had never been heard before," he says, "something not like game music at all." Some of the tunes came easy, like the lilting, soothing music that trills when Mario is swimming underwater, or the staccato bass line that accompanies his travels underground.
But that signature theme, the first one in the game, took the longest to compose. Kondo would write one version, and then he and the team would put it into the game. If it didn't accentuate the action perfectly, didn't time up right with Mario's running and jumping, didn't harmonize with the different sound effects, he'd scrap it and start over.
Tito is in his early twenties. Born in Cuba, he speaks fluent Russian, lives in one room in a NoLita warehouse, and does delicate jobs involving information transfer.
Hollis Henry is an investigative journalist, on assignment from a magazine called Node. Node doesn't exist yet, which is fine; she's used to that. But it seems to be actively blocking the kind of buzz that magazines normally cultivate before they start up. Really actively blocking it. It's odd, even a little scary, if Hollis lets herself think about it much. Which she doesn't; she can't afford to.
Milgrim is a junkie. A high-end junkie, hooked on prescription antianxiety drugs. Milgrim figures he wouldn't survive twenty-four hours if Brown, the mystery man who saved him from a misunderstanding with his dealer, ever stopped supplying those little bubble packs. What exactly Brown is up to Milgrim can't say, but it seems to be military in nature. At least, Milgrim's very nuanced Russian would seem to be a big part of it, as would breaking into locked rooms.
Bobby Chombo is a "producer," and an enigma. In his day job, Bobby is a troubleshooter for manufacturers of military navigation equipment. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice. He meets no one. Hollis Henry has been told to find him.
Spook Country. Great title. I know already I'm going to love this book.
August 7th is the tentative release date. Start counting the days..
