Jed: : well it’s not really a sloppy one liner in the sense that it’s on line
Jed: : it’s more sloppy in that
Jed: : I’m just excluding specific cases
Jed: : which may change in the future
Jed: : if [[ something_specific ]] then; continue; fi
Jed: : ah dilemma… I suppose I should just spend a little more time on it
Liryon:: its always best if you can avoid cases, but sometimes there are cases
Liryon:: hows that for generic statement of the day.
Jed: : you should blog about it
Jed: : :-P
Archive for the ‘From the Internet’ Category
Generic Statement of the Day
Monday, December 10th, 2007Facebook Beacon
Friday, November 30th, 2007So, I’ve been hearing a lot recently about Facebook’s new Beacon advertisement deal. By deal of course I mean you get nothing and they get money, sounds like a deal. So apparently the deal is, if you were to do or buy something at a non facebook site, facebook would somehow be notified of it and it would appear in your news feed. This can do all kinds of great things, like give away secrets and make you look foolish and it is hard to opt out. See the above link for more info. Now there has been all kinds of uproar, but I’m yet to see any of this occur in person. I’m also curious as to how in the world facebook knows that you just bought something or whatever from some other site. So I did some testing.
So the first hard thing about testing this was finding a participating site! With all of the outrage in the bolgosphere, I still had to search a bit to find out that Yelp.com, an restaurant review site is participating. Ok so I signed up for a fresh new yelp account with my them, and reviewed a bad Indian place near me that refuses to serve me spicy food, low and behold the little box shows up from facebook, and I opt out, cause well I don’t need to spam my news feed even for testing purposes. Ok, so how did they know, facebook doesn’t have that email, but I did tell yelp my real name, lets change that to a fake one, as per usual, but something random, not just liryon like I usually do. Humm, after reviewing Chipotle, facebook still knows. Ok, lets get a new account with a brand new email, no ties to me at all, oops still knows, this must be using cookies. Well i could have assumed that but I really wanted to know if they were trying to look things up on other information. Clear the cookies and active web sessions and bam, after another test review facebook does not know about it.
So the lesson here is that nothing interesting is going on at all, other than that facebook now counts as malware that you must protect yourself against. I was really hoping that they were doing something interesting to determine that you are you, but cookies aren’t interest. Anyways, you can protect yourself by doing this or just by logging out of facebook before you go do other things. It turns out that the little remember me check box, with its oh so helpfully annoying tool tip explaining what it does is a whole lot more sinister than it seems.
Well, it seems that the remember me button is even more sinister:
If a user has ever checked the option for Facebook to “remember me” — which saves the user from having to log on to the site upon every return to it — Facebook can tie his activities on third-party Beacon sites directly to him, even if he’s logged off and has opted out of the broadcast. If he has never chosen this option, the information still flows back to Facebook, although without it being tied to his Facebook ID, according to Berteau.
This according to a PC world writer with more time to research than myself. Now, hes a bit misleading on the ever part: if you clear your cookies, and browser sessions, the methods by which remember me works, then it resets the “have ever checked” part. Of course, it is trivial to say on the internet that information is transmitted, as the simple loading of a URL transmits the information to the host of that resource that you have requested to load it. And any given site, say this one, linking too an off site resource such as this image:
is a perfectly begin way in which it appears that you have requested an image of bunny when in fact you only meant to request this blog post, and you didn’t know it contained a bunny. Facebook is taking just taking this same sort of thing a lot too far, by sending requests that identify you and what you are doing, this is just blatantly over the line.
As Paul points out, the is a simple solution, just don’t use facebook. He has espoused this position for some time for a variety of increasingly convincing reasons.
You can now completely opt out of the program with one click in your facebook settings.
Of Mashups, Podcasts, and Cat Macros
Thursday, October 4th, 2007Check out this great Google maps mashup I found: Zip code mashup. I found it because a packaged arrived yesterday and the delivery confirmation claimed it was sent to my address in zip code 02143, which I thought wrong. So I wanted to check and make sure that I’m actually in 02144 and not 02143, because I could easily have memorized the wrong zip code. Turns out 02144 is correct, like I thought, but I was surprised to learn that Somerville has 3 whole zip codes to itself. That seems like a lot to me, but then, it is the northeast. Oh, apparently, we’re calling these things special google maps overlays “mashups” now. A “mashup” really is just the result of open access to information; people put together information from different sources. Thats just an awful name for something so common. Its also kind of misleading like the term Podcast.
A podcast, is just an audio file (often in MP3 format). It is nothing else. Podcasts are often delivered via RSS, which is nothing more than an attempt to turn the “user pulls the content” nature of the world wide web on its head. That would be, into a “users have content pushed to them” medium, such as television. RSS does this by wasting a ton of resources polling for updates. Any well seasoned programmer will tell you the polling is an awful idea unless you have no other way, and if you have to do it, maybe you should rethink why you need to do it in the first place. I tend to think that making the internet more like TV is also an awful idea, so that even this friggen blog automatically offers an RSS feed irks me. Right, so a podcast is an audio file that is pushed to the user, its simple, the only software you need is an audio playing program and a web browser. The web browser will display the XML that implements the RSS feed, and you can easily find the link to the audio file, download it and play it. But the name podcast makes people think that there is something special about this audio file, and that they need to have special software like iTunes which combines and audio player and an RSS reader, when in fact, neither are needed. I know it sounds cool, but nomenclature should make things as simple as they are, not more complex.
On the subject of names for things I don’t like: “lolcats” for pictures of cats with words on them. Well I don’t like pictures of cats with words on them much in general because most of them aren’t very creative and the shorthand English doesn’t make them funnier. Now, really creative ones I’ve got nothing against, but I would prefer to call them Cat Macros, which is an accepted alternative term. The worst part about lolcats is that I’ve heard (not heard of) people use the term when talking about images in the same style but without actual cats in them. If you add a humorous caption to an image of a turtle it should be a Turtle Macro, not an lolcat.
Conversation with OSU Paul at 2007 – 08 – 22 14:30:56
Thursday, August 23rd, 2007The aim names have been changed where necessary to protect the innocent.
OSU Paul: weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Liryon: Spinning around in the office chair are we?
OSU Paul: oo, thats a good idea
Liryon: Remember to remove all wired headphone devices before attempting.
OSU Paul: Do you speak from experience?
Liryon: No, only theoretical research. There will be a simulation in the next six months, and, if all goes well, a test in fall 2008
OSU Paul: Do u have a grant to conduct said research?
Liryon: No, I found that the grant would have required me to take the research in a direction which I found to be unproductive. I am generously contributing to the physics community this research out of my own pocket.
OSU Paul: How generous, will you be publishing your results in any trade journals?
Liryon: I will be presenting the results of the simulation at PhysicsCon in hamburg, Germany next spring.
OSU Paul:excellent
Liryon: I expect the research to draw a considerable crowd at that event which should aid in furthering the study and getting published upon its completion.
OSU Paul: Let me know if you need any research subjects, I may know a few.
OSU Paul: Although, you may want to do most of your initial experimentation on cats.
Liryon: I am already in contact with a volunteer for the final test who has agreed to take on the risks.
OSU Paul: Excellent.
Liryon: I was unable to find appropriate headgear that fit non human subjects.
OSU Paul: That’s a shame
Liryon: Besides, I don’t want PETA getting all worked up about this, or OSHA, which is why I am first conducting simulations.
OSU Paul:true
Liryon: This research is too important to be marred with any setbacks.
OSU Paul: Pivotal stuff that.
Liryon: Well, that’s what we’re trying to determine, here ;-)
OSU Paul: My best wishes sir, I hope you have a major breakthrough
Liryon: Thank you for the interview, good day to you.
OSU Paul: Gooday
MMMMPI
Thursday, May 24th, 2007So a guy who lives on my street’s car (direct image link here) made the front page of digg.com today. I had been saving up my pics of it, which are still on my phone for a little write up on geeky cars I’ve seen and had time to snap a picture of while driving around Boston, but looks like someone beat me to it. As is often said, Picture or it didn’t happen, so here are some pictures from my craptastic phone as per usual. Note that these are taken in winter, I’ll post some more from today when I get home. Someone on digg suggested I buy my neighbor a beer, I’d be happy to, neighbor.
The Most Amazing Thing to Ever Happen on the Internet
Tuesday, May 1st, 2007- What: Censorship of a number which is approximatly 1.32562789×10^37.
- Why: The number in question is a processing key for most existing HD-DVD movies, and is helpful in breaking the DRM contained on the discs.
- When: May 1st 2007.
- Where: Digg.com.
- Who: The digg.com staff and well, the AACS Consortium.
- How: Banning users and burrying stories, the usual suspects in censorship.
The Amazing Part:
In a Revolt against the censorship of our poor unsuspecting number friend, diggnation (as they like to be called), used the site’s democratic system to flood the front page with stories containing the censored number. For many hours every front page story was about the number or the controversy (see the image below). In a matter of hours Digg was forced to stop the censorship of its users and stand up for the right of free people to talk about a number (a big win for Mathematicians everywhere).
From my original post:
This is how viral an idea, a numerical constant, can be, there are even You Tube Songs about it. According to cwo655321, on Digg, “all you have to do is point the number towards any hd dvd and it will automatically play.”… Here is an image (censored to protect you) of Digg.com’s front page for posterity:
Ok, so really, its just a number, you can’t copyright a number. Numbers have exactly infinite meanings, no more, no less, well save maybe zero. The number in question is an IPv6 address by virtue that it is exactly 128 bits long (all 128 bit numbers are IPv6 addresses). What else is the number? I wonder how many of my files have this number in them by random chance. I’ll set to work on that.
Update: I was unable to find any files on my system that randomly contained the 128 bits in question in order, I did not complete the search but instead gave up for now because I needed my cpu cycles for more important things like video compression.