Ramblings & ephemera
From Bloomberg’s “Francis Ford Coppola Sees Cinema World Falling Apart: Interview” (12 October 2009):
“The cinema as we know it is falling apart,” says Francis Ford Coppola.
“It’s a period of incredible change,” says the director of “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now.” “We used to think of six, seven big film companies. Every one of them is [...]
Posted on October 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, social software, tech in changing society | No Comments »
From “List of confidence tricks” (Wikipedia: 3 July 2009):
Get-rich-quick schemes
Get-rich-quick schemes are extremely varied. For example, fake franchises, real estate “sure things”, get-rich-quick books, wealth-building seminars, self-help gurus, sure-fire inventions, useless products, chain letters, fortune tellers, quack doctors, miracle pharmaceuticals, Nigerian money scams, charms and talismans are all used to separate the mark from his [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, law, science, security | No Comments »
From David Foster Wallace’s “David Lynch Keeps His Head” (Premier: September 1996):
AN ACADEMIC DEFINITION of Lynchian might be that the term “refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.” But like postmodern or [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, language & literature, weird | 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
Filed under: language & literature, security | No Comments »
From Bruce Sterling’s “2009 Will Be a Year of Panic” (Seed: 29 January 2009):
Let’s consider seven other massive reservoirs of potential popular dread. Any one of these could erupt, shattering the fragile social compact we maintain with one another in order to believe things contrary to fact.
…
2. Intellectual property. More specifically, the fiat declaration that [...]
Posted on February 12th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, history, law, politics, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
From John Harlow’s “Amateur crimefighters are surging in the US” (The Times: 28 December 2008):
There are, according to the recently launched World Superhero Registry, more than 200 men and a few women who are willing to dress up as comic book heroes and patrol the urban streets in search of, if not super-villains, then pickpockets [...]
Posted on January 4th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: weird | No Comments »
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 consulting [...]
Posted on December 17th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security | No Comments »
From Tom Junod’s “Steve Jobs and the Portal to the Invisible” (Esquire: 29 September 2008):
… Jobs has changed three industries forever — personal computing with the Apple II, music with the iPod and iTunes, and movies with Pixar — and is on the verge of changing a fourth with the iPhone …
Related posts
Scarcities and the [...]
Posted on November 23rd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, technology | No Comments »
From Chapter 2: Botnets Overview of Craig A. Schiller’s Botnets: The Killer Web App (Syngress: 2007):
Figure 2.11 illustrates the use of botnets for selling stolen intellectual property, in this case Movies, TV shows, or video. The diagram is based on information from the Pyramid of Internet Piracy created by Motion Picture Arts Association (MPAA) and [...]
Posted on November 22nd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, law, security, tech in changing society | No Comments »
From Bruce Schneier’s “Anonymity and the Netflix Dataset” (Crypto-Gram: 15 January 2008):
The point of the research was to demonstrate how little information is required to de-anonymize information in the Netflix dataset.
…
What the University of Texas researchers demonstrate is that this process isn’t hard, and doesn’t require a lot of data. It turns out that [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security, tech in changing society | No Comments »
From Jonathan Handel’s “Is Content Worthless?” (The Huffington Post: 11 April 2008):
Everyone focuses on piracy, but there are actually six related reasons for the devaluation of content. The first is supply and demand. Demand — the number of consumers and their available leisure time – is relatively constant, but supply — online content — has [...]
Posted on October 12th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, history, law, technology | No Comments »
In Clay Shirky’s response to R.U. Sirius’ “Is The Net Good For Writers?” (10 Zen Monkeys: 5 October 2007), he takes on the persona of someone talking about what new changes are coming with the Gutenberg movable type press. At one point, he says, “Such a change would also create enormous economic hardship for anyone [...]
Posted on April 19th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, on writing | No Comments »
From Roger Ebert:
“Because the movie all takes place during one day and Roxy is being chased by a truant officer, it compares itself to “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” It might as reasonably compare itself to “The Third Man” because they wade through sewers.”
Related posts
Best entertainment news headline ever
Why so many Google projects & betas?
The strictest [...]
Posted on November 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, language & literature | Comments Off
From Entertainment News, 21 March 2004:
“Zombies Push Jesus from Top of North American Box Office”
(About Dawn of the Dead and The Passion of the Christ)
Related posts
Transcendence, described by the East & West
The strictest of teachers
The Irish Church lies in creative – and evil – ways
She’s a poet and don’t know it
Robin-ism #6
Posted on November 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, overheard | Comments Off
We went to see Troy last week. At the end of the movie, the Trojans drag the Trojan Horse into the city. They party, celebrating what they think is the abandonment of the war by the Greeks, and everyone collapses into a drunken stupor. Cut to the waiting Greek ships, hidden a few miles away, [...]
Posted on November 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: overheard | Comments Off
From Farhad Manjoo’s “iPod: I love you, you’re perfect, now change” (Salon: 23 October 2006):
Levy writes that when this happens, the music becomes a “soundtrack” for the scenery, which is a good way to put it. The iPod turns ordinary life — riding the bus, waiting in line at the post office, staring at a [...]
Posted on October 23rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
From Claudia Roth Pierpont’s “Tough Guy: The mystery of Dashiell Hammett” (The New Yorker [11 February 2002]: 70):
In March, 1928, [Hammett] had written to his publisher, Blanche Knopf, about his plans to adapt the “stream-of-consciousness method” to a new detective novel. He was going to enter the detective’s mind, he told her, reveal his impressions [...]
Posted on October 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, history, language & literature | Comments Off
From Bruce Schneier’s “Hollywood Sign Security” (Crypto-Gram: 15 January 2005):
In Los Angeles, the “HOLLYWOOD” sign is protected by a fence and a locked gate. Because several different agencies need access to the sign for various purposes, the chain locking the gate is formed by several locks linked together. Each of the agencies has the key [...]
Posted on August 2nd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security | Comments Off
From Nate Anderson’s “Hacking Digital Rights Management” (Ars Technica: 18 July 2006):
AACS relies on the well-established AES (with 128-bit keys) to safeguard the disc data. Just like DVD players, HD DVD and Blu-ray drives will come with a set of Device Keys handed out to the manufacturers by AACS LA. Unlike the CSS encryption used [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
From Nate Anderson’s “Hacking Digital Rights Management” (Ars Technica: 18 July 2006):
DVD players are factory-built with a set of keys. When a DVD is inserted, the player runs through every key it knows until one unlocks the disc. Once this disc key is known, the player uses it to retrieve a title key from the [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
