Ramblings & ephemera
From Daniel Eran Dilger’s “The Unavoidable Malware Myth: Why Apple Won’t Inherit Microsoft’s Malware Crown” (AppleInsider: 1 April 2008):
Thanks to its extensive use of battle-hardened Unix and open source software, Mac OS X also has always had security precautions in place that Windows lacked. It has also not shared the architectural weaknesses of Windows that [...]
Posted on March 26th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Prince McLean’s “Pwn2Own contest winner: Macs are safer than Windows” (AppleInsider: 26 March 2009):
Once it did arrive, Vista introduced sophisticated new measures to make it more difficult for malicious crackers to inject code.
One is support for the CPU’s NX bit, which allows a process to mark certain areas of memory as “Non-eXecutable” so the [...]
Posted on March 26th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Catey Hill’s “Massive ATM heist! $9M stolen in only 30 minutes” (New York Daily News: 12 February 2009)
With information stolen from only 100 ATM cards, thieves made off with $9 million in cash, according to published reports. It only took 30 minutes.
“We’ve seen similar attempts to defraud a bank through ATM machines but not, [...]
Posted on March 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From William Yardley and Richard Pérez-Peña’s “Seattle Paper Shifts Entirely to the Web” (The New York Times: 16 March 2009):
The P-I, as it is called, will resemble a local Huffington Post more than a traditional newspaper, with a news staff of about 20 people rather than the 165 it had, and a site with mostly [...]
Posted on March 17th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Natalie Angier’s “In One Ear and Out the Other” (The New York Times: 16 March 2009):
In understanding human memory and its tics, Scott A. Small, a neurologist and memory researcher at Columbia, suggests the familiar analogy with computer memory.
We have our version of a buffer, he said, a short-term working memory of limited scope [...]
Posted on March 17th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From danah boyd’s “Social Media is Here to Stay… Now What?” at the Microsoft Research Tech Fest, Redmond, Washington (danah: 26 February 2009):
Certain properties are core to social media in a combination that alters how people engage with one another. I want to discuss five properties of social media and three dynamics. These are the [...]
Posted on March 17th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From danah boyd’s “Social Media is Here to Stay… Now What?” at the Microsoft Research Tech Fest, Redmond, Washington (danah: 26 February 2009):
For American teenagers, social network sites became a social hangout space, not unlike the malls in which I grew up or the dance halls of yesteryears. This was a place to gather with [...]
Posted on March 17th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From danah boyd’s “Social Media is Here to Stay… Now What?” at the Microsoft Research Tech Fest, Redmond, Washington (danah: 26 February 2009):
Many who build technology think that a technology’s feature set is the key to its adoption and popularity. With social media, this is often not the case. There are triggers that drive early [...]
Posted on March 17th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From danah boyd’s “Social Media is Here to Stay… Now What?” at the Microsoft Research Tech Fest, Redmond, Washington (danah: 26 February 2009):
At this stage, over 35% of American adults have a profile on a social network site.
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The importance of network effects to social software
Socioeconomic analysis of MySpace & [...]
Posted on March 17th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, social software, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
From danah boyd’s “Social Media is Here to Stay… Now What?” at the Microsoft Research Tech Fest, Redmond, Washington (danah: 26 February 2009):
Facebook had launched as a Harvard-only site before expanding to other elite institutions before expanding to other 4-year-colleges before expanding to 2-year colleges. It captured the mindshare of college students everywhere. It wasn’t [...]
Posted on March 17th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, politics, social software, tech in changing society | No Comments »
From danah boyd’s “Social Media is Here to Stay… Now What?” at the Microsoft Research Tech Fest, Redmond, Washington (danah: 26 February 2009):
Social media is the latest buzzword in a long line of buzzwords. It is often used to describe the collection of software that enables individuals and communities to gather, communicate, share, and in [...]
Posted on March 17th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From John Siracusa’s “The once and future e-book: on reading in the digital age” (Ars Technica: 1 February 2009):
Nuances aside, the big picture remains the same: DRM for digital media distribution to consumers is a mathematically, technologically, and intellectually bankrupt exercise. It fails utterly to deliver its intended benefit: the prevention of piracy. Its disadvantages, [...]
Posted on March 17th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Paul Graham’s “Why TV Lost” (Paul Graham: March 2009):
The somewhat more surprising force was one specific type of innovation: social applications. The average teenage kid has a pretty much infinite capacity for talking to their friends. But they can’t physically be with them all the time. When I was in high school the solution [...]
Posted on March 17th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Paul Graham’s “Why TV Lost” (Paul Graham: March 2009):
About twenty years ago people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they’d produce when they converged. We now know the answer: computers. It’s clear now that even by using the word “convergence” we were giving TV too [...]
Posted on March 17th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From The Economist’s “Primates on Facebook” (26 February 2009):
Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist who now works at Oxford University, concluded that the cognitive power of the brain limits the size of the social network that an individual of any given species can develop. Extrapolating from the brain sizes and social networks of apes, Dr Dunbar suggested [...]
Posted on March 10th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: science, social software, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
From Robert Graham’s “PHPBB Password Analysis” (Dark Reading: 6 February 2009):
A popular Website, phpbb.com, was recently hacked. The hacker published approximately 20,000 user passwords from the site. …
This incident is similar to one two years ago when MySpace was hacked, revealing about 30,000 passwords. …
The striking different between the two incidents is that the phpbb [...]
Posted on March 10th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Mark Gibbs’ “New Zealand gets insane copyright law” (Network World: 20 February 2009):
A law was recently passed in New Zealand that has created what many consider to be the world’s harshest copyright enforcement law. This insanity, found in Sections 92A and C of New Zealand’s Copyright Amendment Act 2008 establishes – and I am [...]
Posted on March 10th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Allen Abel And Madeleine Czigler’s “Submarines, bananas and taxis” (National Post: 24 June 2008):
Depicted in frescoes and canvases from the early Middle Ages onward in the robes of the betrayer of the Christ, “Judas yellow” devolved into an imprint of depravity, treason and exclusion.
…
By the 12th century, European Jews were compelled to wear yellow [...]
Posted on March 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Allen Abel And Madeleine Czigler’s “Tangerine trees and marmalade skies” (National Post: 24 June 2008):
… it was [marketing sage & Chicago scientist Louis Cheskin] who turned Marlboro cigarettes from a woman’s brand — originally red-tipped to hide lipstick smears — into the cowboy-themed cancer sticks of universal renown.
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What in our brains invest memories [...]
Posted on March 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Allen Abel and Madeleine Czigler’s “Scandal, communism, blood” (National Post: 27 June 2008):
The blood-red allure of lipstick is a gift of a parasitic insect that infests cactus plants, principally in Mexico and Peru. It has been known since Aztec and Mayan times that, when boiled, the body of the cochineal insect dissolves into a [...]
Posted on March 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, religion, science | No Comments »
