On the importance of flame wars
Are online flame wars nothing but purile wastes of time, best left to people lacking in social skills (and possibly certain physical attributes)?
Charles Munat would beg to differ. In a posting to the World Wide Web Consortiums Web Accessibility Initiative mailing list, Munat argues there are actualy some benefits to flame wars:
Flaming can be a very effective method for getting minority viewpoints heard. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Just as in the "real" world, sometimes people have to yell to be heard.
Rules against *all* flaming favor politicians and passive aggressives. These people are experts at sticking the knife in subtly. When the victim yells out in pain, the politician/passive aggressive feigns innocence and claims he/she is the victim and the true victim is the aggressor. Since you rarely find a list without at least a few politicians and passive aggressives, rules against all flames tend to force everyone into the politician/passive aggressive mode for protection (unless you're one of the Gandhi-like few who can rise above it all).
Via MetaFilter.
Bill Gates sees dead people?
Only the dead know Microsoft? Oh, you could go on forever with the bad jokes about the revelation that a Microsoft "grassroots" letter-writing campaign to various state attorneys general included at least two letters from dead people.
You're gettin' old when...
You go to a site like 8-track Heaven and sigh wistfully.
08/23/01
A markup language for grunts and groans
This just in from the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards:
OASIS, the XML interoperability consortium, today announced its members have formed the OASIS Human Markup Technical Committee (TC) to develop and promote a specification for conveying human characteristics through XML. The Human Markup Language (HumanML) will embed contextual human characteristics (cultural, social, kinesic, psychological and intentional features) within information.
<surprise-with-slight-wry-smile>Isn't that what smileys are for?</surprise-with-slight-wry-smile>
In any case, read more here and subscribe to the newsletter at lists.oasis-open.org/ob/adm.pl (type humanmarkup in the entry box).
Is Microsoft leaking those Ballmer dance videos?
Proving, perhaps, that some people have way more time than others, Alex Burns provides detailed analysis of Ballmer's performance in the Dance Monkey Boy video. And he wonders if Microsoft didn't release the clips itself to take the heat off the increasingly controversial Ballmer:
What better way to divert attention and take the heat off than by deliberately 'leaking' the Ballmer clip? Consider the crucial timing in which the clip emerged: Microsoft had just lost a court appeal about bundling Windows and Internet Explorer, and counter-filed a petition against U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson. Coincidence?
Via MetaFilter.
08/22/01
Good Samaritan not so good?
Was it only a couple days ago I was comparing some guy under indictment in Oklahoma to Dmitry Sklyarov, the Russian arrested for violating copyright? Um, yes, it was.
A posting on Politech casts some doubt on the innocence story, pointing to documents on the guy's own site (including an FBI search-warrant request) indicating the government is charging him with figuring out how to get to the command line of a newspaper server and access its password and user lists.
Needless to say, the newspaper site was running on IIS (are any of you Unix admins surprised?). If the allegations are true, then, yes, it's a lot closer to breaking and entering than Good Samaritaning. But the case also raises the question of what steps a site should be taking to protect itself - what does it say about the site if it's really true the guy not only got into the command line, but was able to read the password file?
Steve Ballmer works up a sweat
First there was the Steve Ballmer Dancy Monkey Boy Planet of the Apes imitation. Now the boyos at NTK have dredged up another Ballmer clip, this one showing him yelling "developer! developer! developer!" while dripping in sweat.
We shudder to think what's next. Steve Ballmer naked? Ewwwwww.
08/21/01
Open-source wireless cracking
So first some researchers discover it's not all that hard to crack the encryption at the heart of 802.11 wireless networks.
Now we have 802.11 encryption cracking as an open-source project. See Airsnort (oh, those hackers are so clever sometimes) on SourceForge:
AirSnort is a wireless LAN (WLAN) tool which recovers encryption keys. AirSnort operates by passively monitoring transmissions, computing the encryption key when enough packets have been gathered. ... AirSnort requires approximately 100M-1GB of data to be gathered. Once enough packets have been gathered, AirSnort can guess the encryption password in under a second.
Works under Linux, natch.
Via Kuro5hin.
When technology goes too far
A bar in New York lets you interact with other patrons without risking any germ spreading. Remote Lounge is equipped with numerous Webcams and monitors.Patrons at Remote Lounge train cameras on each other for viewing on Cocktail Consoles and monitor banks, send flirtatious text messages, and chat across the bar through big grip handsets.
This is just so wrong.
Via Aberrant News.
08/20/01
Another dumb computer arrest?
First came Dmitry Sklyarov, the Russian programmer arrested on copyright charges in Las Vegas. Is Brian West next?
West is a salesman for an Oklahoma ISP. He claims he discovered that the Web site of the Poteau Daily News and Sun was completely insecure when he brought up a page in Internet Explorer and clicked on Edit (he says he wanted to see how an ad for his ISP would look on the site) and that he promptly called the paper's publisher to warn him of the problem.
The newspaper and the FBI allege that West was a hacker trying to crack into the system (among the allegations: that West, horror of horrors, attempted to access Perl scripts on the site to see how they worked!). So he was arrested.
Now, all of this allegedly happened more than a year ago. That it's only now getting any attention outside southeast Oklahoma is due, of course, to the Weblog/Slashdot meme effect. Still, there's some interesting reading in the court documents and articles on West's own site (as well as here). Don't bother trying to find anything about the case on the newspaper site: It's slow and its search function is one of the more poorly designed Perl scripts out there (well, OK, I waited it out and found this article - just don't try to deduce anything at all about how the search script works by looking at the URL or source code).
Is Cisco Communist?
Socialist Art in IT Marketing is an interesting loook at how a number of tech companies have appropriated icons from the worker's-hero, hammer-wielding Socialist school of art of the '30s and '40s.Notice the heroic poses of the characters adorning the cisco web site. It's difficult to miss the similarities to this Russian propaganda poster. Throughout the cisco site, the heroic poses of The defenders of Sebastapol are echoed.
Via Kuro5hin, which also has a discussion on the article.
Note: Some links may no longer work.
RELATED LINKS
Compendium archive: Week of 01/21/02 Week of 01/14/02 Week of 01/07/02 Week of 01/02/02 Week of 12/03/01 Week of 11/26/01 Week of 11/19/01 Week of 11/12/01 Week of 11/05/01 Week of 10/29/01 Week of 10/22/01 Week of 10/15/01 Week of 10/08/01 Week of 10/01/01 Week of 9/24/01 Weeks of 9/10/01 - 9/17/01 Week of 9/3/01 Week of 8/27/01 Week of 8/20/01 Week of 8/13/01 Week of 8/6/01 Note: Compendium's entire staff took the week of 7/30 off. Week of 7/23/01 Week of 7/16/01 Week of 7/9/01 Week of 7/2/01 Week of 6/25/01 Week of 6/18/01 Week of 6/11/01 Week of 6/4/01
Tracking down a stolen Mac; Dead C Scrolls; Googlewhacking; How bad is it in the Valley?; Storage lessons from the Wayback Machine; The pub-seeking handheld; Internet gang wars; Outlook XP breaks MIME.
Why should iMac owners have all the eye candy?; Luxo Redux; So you think your job is bad; Google as a DNS replacement? Not so fast; Nokia exec cites stock plunge in speeding-fine appeal; The tragedy of the .coms; The Google parlor game; Some people *like* Steve the Dell Guy; Ban all Microsoft attachments?
Dot-com to bare all; iMac Dance; Wendy's remembers Dave; Search engine bites the dust; Wendy's Web site ignores Dave's death; Geek comic strip; Youngest security expert ever; Spam poetry; Confessions of a hacker; Breathless Apple; Dave Barry does Windows XP.
Dropping everything to vote; The best Apple rumors, ever; Guess Steve Case isn't getting into Harvard; Make your own O'Reilly cover; Boosting your wireless juice; Telnet lives!
This space intentionally left blank (vacation).
The most useless software ever; Is Microsoft getting ready to squash PC vendors?; Excite@Home: The Watergate of the New Economy?; No more 3Com Park. Is CMGI Field next?; Are you an e-bore?; This site'll have you coming and going; Entertainment Weekly's loss of innocence; Ensign Crusher as Entertainer of the Year; Oh, for the old days.
The Museum of Broken Packets; Just in time for Thanksgiving; Tourist Guy found; Why virtual offices suck; A domain ruling that sucks; Hacking the iPod.
Why you shouldn't ship computers via UPS; When .Net requires Java; High-tech grafitti artists; Spam from beyond the grave; New group tries to oversee the whole Internet; Paging Dick Tracy; Students use PDAs to cheat; Windaz for Aussies, Newfies; Another alternative to Passport; A virtual honeynet
Bill Gates: Father of open source; Verizon exec: Monopoly is good; Weird molecule names; E-mail: too much of a good thing?; A cluster of one; More woes for dot-bombers; Spam as weapon in the war on crime; Just when you think the Web can't get any better; Just when you think the Web can't get any worse; More proof I shouldn't be a wiseass; Using your Web logs to ID hacker attacks; Help save the FAQs; Who do you trust, baby?; Powerpuff Girls powerless against virus; Big IP pipe between US, Europe.
The profit of turning thugs into programmers; Work Name Generator; A programmer's lament; The world's best ATM; Are anti-spammers killing people?; Web services and storage; Get your Aerons here; Perl for the XXI-imum century; Microsoft's blocking of non-IE browsers.
Government info taken off the Web since 9/11; Beware hackers who talk too much; A contest you can enter sitting down; Now don't try this in the office; Bob Patterson must die; Finally, a useful 404 page; Tech calls from hell; Teletubbies XP; More XP fun; Anthrax and e-mail; Larry's ID card; World's longest gum-wrapper chain.
Let's drop PDAs on Afghanistan; Voice control? Try grunt control; Spam gets back to business; A content-management portal; Share your system tray with the world; Would you let the recording industry onto your network?; Al Queda's low-tech high tech; 9/11 archive; Shoe company gets open source after all; Pod people, coming soon to a cube near you.
Larry and Scott's dueling ID cards; Cringely: Broadband is dead; The dangers of Photoshop; The dangers of copy protection; Microsoft mining whois for telephone solicitations?; How to REALLY throw a LAN party; Good fences don't make good 'Net neighbors; How Google adapted to 9/11 news; Web services as over-hyped hooey; Why shoe guys shouldn't do open source; Online air hockey.
AT&T waives 9/11 wireless charges for some; Shifting gears; Craig Burton on the Novell/Microsoft suit; In search of the post-PC interface; Vibrating PDAs and wearable phones; Gary Condit's Web site; No, that isn't a real photo of a WTC tourist; How to throw a LAN party; How sucky is your intranet?
For grizzled 'Net veterans; UK ISP forced to pull deceptive ads; Pretty Good encryption controversy; Are you as smart as Miss America?; Really securing your computer; Still lots of insecure IIS servers; Kids, don't try this at home; Anthrax Kills; Larry's national database; Nimda hysteria?
Attack and post-attack items.
999,999,999 bottles of beer on the wall; Finally, a wind-up cell phone; Enough with the ringing!; The VoIP calculator; 802.11b insecurity; Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf explains IOS DHCP; Is ENUM the mark of the devil?; AOL gives user permanent demerit; The Ballmer music video; Cleveland news flash: Y2K was last year.
Re-routing around censorship; Us vs. them in scripting; The boss button; Fighting off the hackers for fun; Peer computing as a weapon of war; Unix poetry; The Windows Fatal Exception Decoder; New Fusion widget: Getting rid of spyware; The sound of 200 cell phones going off at once; Taleban Web site hacked; Hey, sysadmin, remember Sircam?
On the importance of flame wars; Bill Gates sees dead people?; A markup language for grunts and groans; Is Microsoft leaking those Ballmer dance videos?; Good Samaritan not so good?; Steve Ballmer works up a sweat; Open-source wireless cracking; When technology goes too far; Another dumb computer arrest?; Is Cisco Communist?
Moron marketers threaten 'Net users; Finding free wireless access; Complete wastes of time; OS holy war flares in North Carolina; Are programmers weird?; Somebody actually buys an X10 camera; We're number, uh, two!; Those after-hours computer discussions; An entire city running on Linux; Distributed spam fighter under development; Could a Warhol virus infect the entire 'Net in 15 minutes?; Tell AOL what to do with its CDs.
Fusion shatters a myth; Bridging .Net and Java?; AT&T Broadband cuts off non-IIS servers to fight Code Red; Bluetoothless; Tennessee town bites into Apple; And you thought TI-99/4A fans were over the edge; Biometrics coming to your local supermarket; Steve Ballmer a-hootin' and a-hollerin'; Speaking of Web images; Just how far PC prices have fallen; Does Starbucks' CEO get his own wireless strategy?
Crackers getting more sophisticated; Sex and Microsoft Office; The wonders of science, part MXXII; Finally, a useful virus; A shocking game controller; Big Ball of Mud school of programming; Two vitally important new resources; Adobe: Ooops; Eudora Welty, dead at 92; Centralizing Unix administration in Perl; Spellchecking the entire Web.
Worm turns on Microsoft Web servers; The day the ISP died; Cell-phone users have no shame; Even Internet consultants can screw up the 'Net; Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers; The ultimate cup of coffee; The solar-powered ISP; Everhost; Internet VCer: Oops; The Lego Palm and the pink fuzzy laptop; The Microsoft-English dictionary; Putting a loved one in the home.
Saving those all important VoIP calls; This site is a bright idea; Could wireless end messy divorces?; How much will that software really cost you?; Ghosts of failed dot-coms; The spy's guide to securing your Cisco routers; Oprah for Internet czarina?; What's Microsoft doing at an open-source conference?; Like a big pizza pi; Cyber-bullies; Better check your phone bill; Have some birthday pi.
How HP wastes energy to save energy; New toy for the bored and lonely; Weird programming languages; When sponsors are speakers; The case of the disturbing backwards monitor; Congress to ICANN: Drop dead; Yet another video game made into a movie; Smile, you're on Candid (Police) Camera; High-speed hotels; Network Solutions blocking name transfers?
One of the fathers of Usenet dead at 45; Are you ready for insta-spam?; Diary of a site collapse; Skirting the issue; Assimiliating the Web; Trolling for help; Software wars; Rating the rater; True tales from the help desk; How about spam embedded in your mail?
Unix diapers; A beautiful waste of time; A P2P taxonomy; This page is too stupid; Homeless dot-commer bogus?; Whee, Linux is fun!; Blue Screens everywhere; Forget viruses: This fungus eats CDs; Microsoft revises Smart Tags a bit; Homeless dot-commers.
Slashdot crashes the NSA; They may be Smart Tags, but they're not Original Tags; What open source and California wines have in common; Jakob Nielsen no tyro; How to make Windows 2000 really, really secure; Where the Internet begins; A useful computer bug; The clothes make the geek; The end of the Internet; Why PDF bites; Novel use of a wireless phone; Hidden info; When Web sites tell too much.
DSL modems are so '90s; Bye-bye Netscape; Get ready to upgrade those mail servers; The anti-.Net; The real reason to buy a Palm; Anatomy of a DDoS attack; Pain is good.
