We pushed a bug fix to production late last night which should address a problem with Recommend. If you've noticed people have %22 in their posts instead of a ", or have had the URL for hyperlinks, images, or videos in a post you were creating suddenly disappear, that shouldn't happen anymore. Let Decius or me know if there are any problems.

Thanks!

Site Update - Bug Fixes to Recommend

Never Forget | 1-31-07

Bomb units scrambled across Boston and Somerville today to investigate several suspicious devices.

The reports forced the temporary shutdowns of Interstate 93 out of the city, a key inbound roadway, a bridge between Boston and Cambridge, and a portion of the Charles River but were quickly determined not to be explosive.

"It's a hoax -- and it's not funny," Gov. Deval Patrick said.

Officials at Mayor Menino's office say the devices appear to resemble a cartoon character. It could be related to characters from the cartoon, "Aqua Teen Hunger Force."

This is right up there with the smiley face bomber.

Heh.. It was a marketing campaign. Adult Swim paralyzed Boston. I don't care what anyone says, this is funny as hell. I mean, everyone know that having LEDs in the shape of a cartoon character is the perfect way to disguise an IED...

cbs4boston.com - Hoax Devices Creating Gridlock In Boston

From Acidus:

For those unfamiliar, GNUCITIZEN is quite possibly the best site on the internet for web security research that is not affiliated with a vendor. pdp has covered topics such as backdooring Quicktime files, building XSS attack libraries, improving existing protscanners and history stealers, and even a JavaScript web crawler (which is currently receiving a massive improvement...). Much of his work ends up appearing in live attacks a few months after the info is released.

Needless to say I was really happy when pdp asked me to write a blog entry for his site. I wrote up a meaty overview of the different methods JavaScript can use to send HTTP requests, as well as the pros and cons of each.

GNUCITIZEN - JavaScript Remoting Dangers

I’ve often heard that Washington’s ‘Farewell Address’ — the speech he sent out (in written form) to a bunch of papers at the end of his second term — is important. Apparently he lays down a lot of good ideas for America. But the common style of writing and vocabulary has changed since then. Maybe people have gotten dumber, too. Either way, the result is that it’s kind of a pain to read sometimes. Particularly tricky are the odd compound sentence structures, where it’s hard to keep track of what the subject is.

Having never read the whole thing, I thought it would be interesting to go through and try to transcribe it into some sort of casual modern speech. I wouldn’t try to recreate the prose and would probably miss out on subtleties and shades of meaning (and no doubt occasionally miss the point completely), but at least I’d get the idea of what he was talking about.

This is great! I'm only about a third into it, and I've already compelled to meme this. Here are some snips:

Government’s important, and it’s not always easy to stay together. You’ve figured this out, and that’s why you ditched the last idea and came up with this Constitution. We went over it all carefully, big and small, and it’s definitely something we can trust (we can even amend it if necessary!). Give it some credit, and if you disagree, change it — don’t just disobey. Otherwise it just screws things up.

Getting in the way of the law for the sake of power plays similarly screws things up. Playing that game creates groups just looking out for themselves, turning crazy splinter groups into a powerful force. Let this get too bad and you’ll probably have the country tossed back and forth wildly as the various parties with their pet issues fight for power, rather than nice, consensual, unified government.

Parties are probably gonna look like they’re helping with one popular issue or another, so you’re gonna want support them, but I bet the guys in charge of them will just turn out to be power-hungry assholes who want to run everything.

...

I just said that parties are no good, particularly regional ones. But lemme go a step further and say ALL parties are a bad idea.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty much human nature to gather into little factions like this. It’s worst in the freeest countries, and they suffer because of it.

Control goes back and forth between one party and another, and they just get more and more pissed, and we’ve seen that get really bad in the past. But it also leads to terrible, controlling government and general suckage. This gets the people more angry, they get behind one party leader or another, and that guy just takes that support and does whatever he wants, screwing up the country.

...

I like you all. We’re friends. I’m not gonna hope that you’ll actually remember all this for long, but I can hope that every now and then people will look back on what I said and use it to calm down a crazy political party, remind us not to get tied up with other countries, or to try to expose phoney patriots. That’s the only payment I need — the hope that in return for my looking after you, you’ll look after yourselves.

xkcd » Blog Archive » Washington’s Farewell Address Translated into Everyday Speech

The Hubble Space Telescope is flying partially blind across the heavens because of a short circuit in its most popular instrument, the advanced camera for surveys.

NASA engineers reported today that most of that camera’s capabilities — including the ability to take the sort of deep cosmic postcards that have inspired the public and to track the mysterious dark energy splitting the universe to the ends of time — have probably been lost for good.

In a telephone news conference from NASA headquarters, Hubble engineers and scientists said the telescope itself was in fine shape and would continue operating with its remaining instruments, which include another camera, the wide-field planetary camera 2, or wfpc2, and an infrared camera and spectrograph named Nicmos. The advanced camera for surveys stopped working Saturday morning.

He and his colleagues said that it was unlikely they would be able to repair the camera during the next Hubble servicing mission, which is scheduled for September 2008. On that mission, astronauts will replace the existing wide field camera with a powerful new version, wfpc3, which will extend Hubble’s vision to ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths and restore the lost capabilities. They will also install a new ultraviolet spectrograph, among many pressing repairs.

The Advanced Camera for Surveys was installed on the telescope in March 2002, and it has been Hubble’s workhorse ever since. Among its other feats, in 2003 camera took the deepest photograph of the cosmos ever taken, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, showing young galaxy fragments only one billion to two billion years after the Big Bang. In the most recent round of proposals from astronomers to use the Hubble, about two-thirds of them required the advance camera.

Hubble Telescope Loses Its Survey Camera - New York Times

A Georgia senator worried about the safety of young teenagers who log on to Internet social networking sites such as MySpace.com and FaceBook.com has proposed a bill that would force such companies to tighten up their access to minors.

The measure would make it illegal for the owner or operator of a social networking Web site to allow minors to create or maintain a Web page without parental permission. Senate Bill 59 also would force MySpace.com and FaceBook.com to allow parents or guardians to have access to their children’s Web pages at all times.

Here we go again...

If owners or operators of a company failed to comply with the proposed law, they would be guilty of a misdemeanor on the first offense. A second offense would be a felony and could lead to imprisonment for between one and five years and a fine up to $50,000 or both.

Staton said the bill does not tell the companies exactly how to ensure that minors don’t log on without parental permission. The companies can figure that out on their own, he said.

“They can find a way to do this,” Staton said. “That’s my challenge to them.”

Ok, so let me get this straight. We would be breaking the law, until which point some method was devised to guarantee the age of our users. Currently, all we can do is ask users their age, and we do that.

This is no different from COPPA, only the age is higher, and there is no way to not wind up committing a felony.

What kind of challenge is this? Another challenge to see if we can get a badly thought out bill killed?

Senator wants restrictions on social networking sites | Capitol Updates

National Association of Radio-Distress Signalling and Infocommunications
Havaria Emergency and Disaster Information Services
Budapest Hungary

Well, here is one for your bookmark list. A website in Hungary that keeps an up to date map of the biggest disasters currently occuring everywhere on the planet. Its a death and destruction information console!

RSOE HAVARIA Emergency and Disaster Information Service

Fyodor has started NoDaddy.com in response to last week's shutdown of seclists.org...

I created this site to document instances of customer abuse at GoDaddy. The goal is for GoDaddy to either improve their policies and customer service, or suffer continued loss of market share to their customer-focused competition.

While I gave this site its bare skeleton, I'm hoping it becomes more of a community effort. If you have been frustrated by GoDaddy's behavior, please see our call for volunteers and join in.

But it turns out GoDaddy has defenders! I found this article linked off of Google News!

Screw Seclists.com, you should higher an internet security employee from MySpace to make sure you don't post our personal, highly secure information on your website. Obviously you aren't capable or maybe you just don't understand internet law.

Talk about Comedy Gold! The layers of irony in that passage are so thick its like a work of art!

NoDaddy.Com - Exposing the Many Reasons Not to Trust GoDaddy with Your Domain Names

The true purpose for the BellSouth building revealed!!

Space Monster: Destroy Nashville