Image by rsgranne via Flickr Image by rsgranne via Flickr Image by rsgranne via Flickr From Dave Alan’s “Interview with Alex Christopher” (Leading Edge Research Group: 1 June 1996): Legend: DA [Dave Alan, Host] AC: [Alex Christopher] C: [Caller] … (Note: according to former British Intelligence agent Dr. John Coleman, the London-based Wicca Mason lodges [...]
Posted on December 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From danah boyd’s “Friends, Friendsters, and MySpace Top 8: Writing Community Into Being on Social Network Sites” (First Monday: December 2006) John’s reference to “gateway Friends” concerns a specific technological affordance unique to Friendster. Because the company felt it would make the site more intimate, Friendster limits users from surfing to Profiles beyond four degrees [...]
Posted on December 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Nicholas Carr’s “Further musings on the network effect and the cloud” (Rough Type: 27 October 2008): I think O’Reilly did a nice job of identifying the different layers of the cloud computing business – infrastructure, development platform, applications – and I think he’s right that they’ll have different economic and competitive characteristics. One thing [...]
Posted on December 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Jeffrey Goldberg’s “The Things He Carried” (The Atlantic: November 2008): Because the TSA’s security regimen seems to be mainly thing-based—most of its 44,500 airport officers are assigned to truffle through carry-on bags for things like guns, bombs, three-ounce tubes of anthrax, Crest toothpaste, nail clippers, Snapple, and so on—I focused my efforts on bringing [...]
Posted on December 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Brian D’s “The benefits of a monthly recurring revenue model in tough economic times” (37 Signals: 18 December 2008): At 37signals we sell our web-based products using the monthly subscription model. We also give people a 30-day free trial up front before we bill them for their first month. We think this model works [...]
Posted on December 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Stephen J. Dubner’s interview with Bruce Schneier in “Bruce Schneier Blazes Through Your Questions” (The New York Times: 4 December 2007): There’s a huge difference between nosy neighbors and cameras. Cameras are everywhere. Cameras are always on. Cameras have perfect memory. It’s not the surveillance we’ve been used to; it’s wholesale surveillance. I wrote [...]
Posted on December 17th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Stephen J. Dubner’s interview with Bruce Schneier in “Bruce Schneier Blazes Through Your Questions” (The New York Times: 4 December 2007): This is true in many aspects of our society. Here’s what I said in my book, Secrets and Lies (page 389): “As technology becomes more complicated, society’s experts become more specialized. And in [...]
Posted on December 17th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Stephen J. Dubner’s interview with Bruce Schneier in “Bruce Schneier Blazes Through Your Questions” (The New York Times: 4 December 2007): Basically, you’re asking if crime pays. Most of the time, it doesn’t, and the problem is the different risk characteristics. If I make a computer security mistake — in a book, for a [...]
Posted on December 17th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Stephen J. Dubner’s interview with Bruce Schneier in “Bruce Schneier Blazes Through Your Questions” (The New York Times: 4 December 2007): Identity theft is a problem for two reasons. One, personal identifying information is incredibly easy to get; and two, personal identifying information is incredibly easy to use. Most of our security measures have [...]
Posted on December 17th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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My blog was at http://www.granneman.com/blog, but I then moved it, after several years of living at its old address, to http://blog.granneman.com. I wanted to preserve all my links, however, so that someone going to http://www.granneman.com/blog/2008/04/20/after-a-stroke-he-can-write-but-cant-read/ would instead end up at http://blog.granneman.com/2008/04/20/after-a-stroke-he-can-write-but-cant-read/. To do this, I edited the .htaccess file in http://www.granneman.com/blog to read as follows [...]
Posted on December 11th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Anna Gosline’s “Death special: How does it feel to die?” (New Scientist: 13 October 2007): Death comes in many guises, but one way or another it is usually a lack of oxygen to the brain that delivers the coup de grâce. Whether as a result of a heart attack, drowning or suffocation, for example, [...]
Posted on December 8th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Lisa Vaas’ “Storm Worm Botnet Lobotomizing Anti-Virus Programs” (eWeek: 24 October 2007): According to an Oct. 22 posting by Sophos analyst Richard Cohen, the Storm botnet – Sophos calls it Dorf, and its also known as Ecard malware – is dropping files that call a routine that gets Windows to tell it every time [...]
Posted on December 7th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Vaughan Bell’s “Ghost Stories: Visits from the Deceased” (Scientific American: 2 December 2008): The dead stay with us, that much is clear. They remain in our hearts and minds, of course, but for many people they also linger in our senses—as sights, sounds, smells, touches or presences. Grief hallucinations are a normal reaction to [...]
Posted on December 7th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From James Bennett’s “Let’s talk about Python 3.0” (The B-List: 5 December 2008): There’s an old joke, so old that I don’t even know for certain where it originated, that’s often used to explain why big corporations do things the way they do. It involves some monkeys, a cage, a banana and a fire hose. [...]
Posted on December 7th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Jonah Lehrer’s “Hell is a Perfect Memory” (The Frontal Cortex: 2 December 2008): This isn’t the first case report of a person with perfect memory. In the masterful The Mind of A Mnemonist, the Soviet neurologist A.R. Luria documented the story of a Russian newspaper reporter, D.C. Shereshevskii, who was incapable of forgetting. For [...]
Posted on December 4th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Samiha Shafy’s “An Infinite Loop in the Brain” (Der Spiegel: 21 November 2008): Price can rattle off, without hesitation, what she saw and heard on almost any given date. She remembers many early childhood experiences and most of the days between the ages of 9 and 15. After that, there are virtually no gaps [...]
Posted on December 4th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Richard Ben Cramer’s “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?” (Esquire: June 1986): Few men try for best ever, and Ted Williams is one of those. There’s a story about him I think of now. This is not about baseball but fishing. He meant to be the best there, too. One day he [...]
Posted on December 1st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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Posted on November 30th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Christopher M. Fairman’s “Fuck” (bepress Legal Series: 7 March 2006): The PTC [Parents Television Council] is a perfect example of the way word taboo is perpetuated. The group’s own irrational word fetish – which they try to then impose on others – fuels unhealthy attitudes toward sex that then furthers the taboo status of [...]
Posted on November 30th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, language & literature, law, politics, tech in changing society | No Comments »
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Posted on November 30th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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