- MS Office Exploit In The Wild, Targeting Mac OS X — This is one of the few times that we have seen a malicious Office file used to deliver Malware on Mac OS X. (via Hacker News)
- Please Do Not Take Down The Sality BotNet — best responsible disclosure ever.
- 3Difficult — I’m an industrial designer at heart, and I’m saddened by what’s happened to my craft. We were once the kings of things, but for a variety of reasons I think we’re in danger of being left behind. […] Making became the talk of the town, and to some extent it still is. We’re in the first stumbling days of the Internet of Things, and are increasingly seeing the paper thin definition between digital and tangible falling away.
- Air Quotes Product (Matt Webb) — Recently I noted down some places in which traditional products have changed and he goes on to list some critical ways in which networked objects challenge our thinking. I love the little brain/big brain distinction–great to have words for these things at last!
"mac os x" entries
Four short links: 28 March 2012
Mac OS X Malware In the Wild, AntiBotnettery, Fabbing And Designers, Networked Products
Four short links: 6 December 2011
Dispel Your Illusions, Simple Mac OS X Apps, Assisted Translation, and AutoTagging
- How to Dispel Your Illusions (NY Review of Books) — Freeman Dyson writing about Daniel Kahneman’s latest book. Only by understanding our cognitive illusions can we hope to transcend them.
- Appify-UI (github) — Create the simplest possible Mac OS X apps. Uses HTML5 for the UI. Supports scripting with anything and everything. (via Hacker News)
- Translation Memory (Etsy) — using Lucene/SOLR to help automate the translation of their UI. (via Twitter)
- Automatically Tagging Entities with Descriptive Phrases (PDF) — Microsoft Research paper on automated tagging. Under the hood it uses Map/Reduce and the Microsoft Dryad framework. (via Ben Lorica)
Four short links: 4 April 2011
Library Game, Mac Security, Natural Programming, Selecting Metrics
- Find The Future — New York Public Library big game, by Jane McGonigal. (via Imran Ali)
- Enable Certificate Checking on Mac OS X — how to get your browser to catch attempts to trick you with revoked certificates (more of a worry since security problems at certificate authorities came to light). (via Peter Biddle)
- Clever Algorithms — Nature-Inspired Programming Recipes from AI, examples in Ruby. I hadn’t realized there were Artificial Immune Systems. Cool! (via Avi Bryant)
- Rethinking Evaluation Metrics in Light of Flickr Commons — conference paper from Museums and the Web. As you move from “we are publishing, you are reading” to a read-write web, you must change your metrics. Rather than import comments and tags directly into the Library’s catalog, we verify the information then use it to expand the records of photos that had little description when acquired by the Library. […] The symbolic 2,500th record, a photo from the Bain collection of Captain Charles Polack, is illustrative of the updates taking place based on community input. The new information in the record of this photo now includes his full name, death date, employer, and the occasion for taking the photo, the 100th Atlantic crossing as ocean liner captain. An additional note added to the record points the Library visitor to the Flickr conversation and more of the story with references to gold shipments during WWI. Qualitative measurements, like level of engagement, are a challenge to gauge and convey. While resources expended are sometimes viewed as a cost, in this case they indicate benefit. If you don’t measure the right thing, you’ll view success as a failure. (via Seb Chan)
Four short links: 6 December 2010
.bas Scripts, Net Neutrality, Open Harrassment, and iOS Blog
- Apple I Basic as Mac OS X Scripting Language — great hack. The “apple1basic” executable is a statically recompiled version of the original binary. All code is running natively. It plugs right into UNIX stdin and stdout. You can pass it the filename of a BASIC program to run. You can run BASIC programs like shell scripts. (via Hacker News)
- How to Discredit Net Neutrality — the Level3-Comcast dispute isn’t as straightforward as you might think (or as I implied). Increasingly, advocates of net neutrality have pegged their case to a larger and more powerful role for FCC regulation in the internet industry. And thus the net neutrality debate, instead of focusing on developing new institutional arrangements to preserve internet freedom on BOTH the demand and supply side, descends into a replay of the early 1980s, Reagan-era punch and judy show between democrats and republicans, with one arguing for “more government” and the other for “less government.” Neither talking much sense about what the government should actually do. There’s a missing discussion here about competition preventing carrier abuses, competition that the US lacks.
- The Dark Side of Open Source Conferences (Val Aurora) — A good first step is for conferences and communities to adopt and enforce explicit policies or codes of conduct that spell out what kind of behavior won’t be tolerated and what response it will get. Much in the way that people don’t stop speeding unless they get speeding tickets, or that murder is totally unacceptable to most people but laws against it still exist, harassment at conferences may seem obviously wrong, but stopping it will require written rules and enforceable penalties.
- iDev Blog-a-Day — love the layout and the content’s good too.
Snow Leopard Is Location-Aware
Shortly after installing Snow Leopard I saw the first evidence of the new location services built into the operating system. I got the new version of Clarke, a Fire Eagle updater. After the install a window appeared that asked me if I wanted to share my location with an application. Finally! So how is Apple doing it? The same they do on the iPhone.