- Our Weirdness is Free (Gabriella Coleman) — Often lacking an overarching strategy, Anonymous operates tactically, along the lines proposed by the French Jesuit thinker Michel de Certeau. “Because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on time—it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized ‘on the wing,’” he writes in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980). “Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into ‘opportunities.’ The weak must continually turn to their own ends forces alien to them.” (via Jonas Kubilius)
- Information Rights and Copy Rights (YouTube) — Justice David Harvey’s keynote at Australian Digital Alliance forum, proposing balance of rights. (via Alastair Thompson)
- NewsBlur (GitHub) — one of the many trending repos in the wake of the announcement of Google Reader’s case of terminal lack of relevance to Google+. See also Tiny Tiny RSS, FastLadder, and a million repos empty but for “TODO” files listing the almighty RSS reading features yet to be added to the empty file. Also found: this obsessive guide to Reader’s history.
- The Pentester’s Guide to Akamai (PDF) — This paper summarizes the findings from NCC’s research into Akamai while providing advice to
companies wish to gain the maximum security when leveraging their solutions.
ENTRIES TAGGED "rss"
Four short links: 14 March 2013
On Anonymous, Information Rights, RSS Readers, and CDN Sec
Four short links: 12 September 2011
History Repeats, Fuller Feeds, Open Source Dev, and The Long Sunset of Business Models
- HP Emulates Next (BoingBoing) — In mid-1993, a few months after CEO Steve Jobs had shuttered the NeXT factory, and was in the process of switching to an all-software company—a path that led to its later acquisition by Apple—the lights were turned back on in its Fremont, Calif., factory. NeXTWorld’s rumor columnist, Lt. Sullivan, reported that the U.S. military and another undisclosed customer wanted more machines, and so NeXT was to fire up and spit 1,200 more devices out.
- FeedsAPI — service that turns a feed of partial posts into a full feed.
- Cinderella — a fully managed development environment for open source hacking on Mac OSX. It’s powered by homebrew and chef. You only need Xcode to get started. (via One Thing Well)
- The Greenwich Time Lady (Futility Closet) — the old and the new coexist. From 1836 to 1940, this one company sold the time to people; their pocketwatch was certified by Greenwich Observatory in the morning and for the rest of the day they charged to look at it. New technology, government standards, and plenty of competition didn’t end the business instantly. Compare to Clay Shirky’s That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.
Subscription vs catchment
As sources become less important, filters are the natural target for those who want to sway opinion.
When people are trawling so many content sources, it no longer pays to concentrate on sources at all. It makes much more sense to study how the trawlers work and become part of the filtering infrastructure.
Four short links: 20 July 2011
Meaningful Subsets, iPhone Reading, JSON Parser, The Epiphanator
- Random Khan Exercises — elegant hack to ensure repeatability for a user but difference across users. Note that they need these features of exercises so that they can perform meaningful statistical analyses on the results.
- Float, the Netflix of Reading (Wired) — an interesting Instapaper variant with a stab at an advertising business model. I would like to stab at the advertising business model, too. What I do like is that it’s trying to do something with the links that friends tweet, an unsolved problem for your humble correspondent. (via Steven Levy
- JSON Parser Online — nifty web app for showing JSON parses. (via Hilary Mason)
- Facebook and the Epiphanator (NY Magazine) — Paul Ford has a lovely frame through which to see the relationship between traditional and social media. So it would be easy to think that the Whole Earthers are winning and the Epiphinators are losing. But this isn’t a war as much as a trade dispute. Most people never chose a side; they just chose to participate. No one joined Facebook in the hope of destroying the publishing industry.
Four short links: 10 March 2011
MTurk Spam, Javascript Secrets, Better Comments, and Full RSS
- Everybody is Spamming Everybody Else on MTurk — one researcher found >40% of HITs are spammy, but this author posted a Mechanical Turk HIT to supply recommendations for visitors to a non-existent French city and got responses from people expecting that every response would be paid regardless of quality.
- Javascript Garden — a growing collection of documentation about the most quirky parts of the JavaScript programming language. It gives advice to avoid common mistakes, subtle bugs, as well as performance issues and bad practices that non-expert JavaScript programmers may encounter on their endeavours into the depths of the language.
- A 5 Minute Framework for Fostering Better Conversations in Comments Sections (Poytner) — Whether online or offline, people act out the most when they don’t see anyone in charge. Next time you see dreck being slung in the bowels of a news story comment thread, see if you can detect whether anyone from the news organization is jumping in and setting the tone. As West put it, news organizations typically create a disconnect between the people who provide content and the people who discuss that content. This inhibits quality conversation.
- Full Text RSS Feed — builds full-text feeds for sites that only offer extracts in their RSS feeds. (via Jason Ryan)
Four short links: 28 January 2011
RSS Dashboard, Hardware Filesharing, Making is Learning, and Revenue/Customer
- NiftyUrls — open source elegant wee RSS dashboard. I haven’t looked into the source yet, but I’m already thinking of applications.
- The PirateBox — small piece of hardware that creates a wifi network for local filesharing. Not connected to the Internet. (via BoingBoing)
- More Hammer, Less Yammer (Julian Bleecker) — If you’re not also making — you’re sort of, well..basically you’re not doing much at all. You’ve only done a rough sketch of an idea if you’ve only talked about it and didn’t do the iteration through making, then back to thinking and through again to talking and discussing and sharing all the degrees of material — idea, discussions, conversations, make some props, bring those to the discussion, repeat. Why O’Reilly prefers makers to fakers.
- Revenue per Unique Visitor (BusinessInsider) — Amazon makes $189/user, Google $24/user, Yahoo! $8/user, Facebook $4/user. (via Greg Linden)
Four short links: 3 January 2011
RSS, Copyright Terms, RFID Security, and Server-Side Javascript
- RSS is Dying and You Should Be Worried — If RSS dies, we lose the ability to read in private.
- What Could Have Been Entering The Public Domain on January 1, 2011? — a list of the works that won’t be entering the public domain in the US because the copyright term was extended in 1976. Think of the movies from 1954 that would have become available this year. You could have showed clips from them. You could have showed all of them. You could have spliced and remixed and made documentaries about them. (You could have been a contender!) Instead, here are a few of the movies that we won’t see in the public domain for another 39 years …. This list will be viewed two different ways by different groups, reinforcing instead of changing their views: copyright minimalists will say “what a tragedy” but copyright maximalists will say “look at these great works we protected, they’re still earning money for their creators therefore they’re still valuable and thus worth protecting”. (via Bill Bennett on Twitter)
- ProxClone — cloner for proximity cards, cost of parts around $30. (via Hacker News)
- 2011 Is The Year of Server-Side Javascript — explanation of why the author will be doing back-end coding in Javascript this year. Good to see an honest assessment that it’s still early days for server-side Javascript: Most of the libraries out there are young, buggy and incomplete. I got Node.js to segfault a few times. There’s no killer framework on the same caliber as Rails, nor anything that comes close to ActiveSupport and a decent standard runtime library (hmm … that gives me an idea). But then, it’s not much different than what Ruby was five years ago, or Java back in the late 90′s. We’ve all got to start somewhere.
Personal data stores and pub/sub networks
Social streams may eclipse RSS, but the blogosphere's roots run deeper.
Most people and organizations think of the calendar information they push as text for people to read. Few realize it's also data networks can syndicate. When that mindset changes, a river of data will be unleashed.
RSS never blocks you or goes down: why social networks need to be decentralized
Recurring outages on major networking sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn, along with incidents where Twitter members were
mysteriously dropped for days at a time, have led many people to challenge the centralized control exerted by
companies running social networks. We may have been willing to build our virtual houses on shaky foundations when they were temporary beach huts; but now we need to examine the ground on which many are proposing to build our virtual shopping malls and even our virtual federal offices. Instead of the constant churning among the commercial sites du jour (Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter), the next generation of social networking increasingly appears to require a decentralized, peer-to-peer infrastructure. This article looks at efforts in that space and suggests principles to guide development.
Four short links: 14 Apr 2009
Open data, lean startups, RSS-as-newspaper, and a design call to arms:
- OpenSecrets Goes Open Data — The following data sets, along with a user guide, resource tables and other documentation, are now available in CSV format (comma-separated values, for easy importing) through OpenSecrets.org’s Action Center [...] : CAMPAIGN FINANCE: 195 million records dating to the 1989-1990 election cycle, tracking campaign fundraising and spending by candidates for federal office, as well as political parties and political action committees; LOBBYING: 3.5 million records on federal lobbyists, their clients, their fees and the issues they reported working on, dating to 1998; PERSONAL FINANCES: Reports from members of Congress and the executive branch that detail their personal assets, liabilities and transactions in 2004 through 2007; 527 ORGANIZATIONS: Electronically filed financial records beginning in the 2004 election cycle for the shadowy issue-advocacy groups known as 527s.
- The Lean Startup Presentation at Web 2.0 — with audio. I’ve raved about Eric Ries blog before.
- Times — an RSS feedreader with a newspaper’s layout. News reading can be improved and newspapers are in the middle of dying, so it makes sense that someone would try a face transplant. I’m not convinced that the newspaper’s front page is the model for perfect news delivery, although I do love the ultimate in dense news layouts: Arts & Letters Daily. (via joshua’s delicious feed)
- Designing Through a Depression (NY Times blog) — exhortation to work on stuff that matters. This rethinking needs to come not just from designers but from the manufacturers, companies and other clients who decide what products and projects will be produced. There’s no excuse not to examine and re-examine what’s made, how it’s manufactured, what materials are used (and which are recyclable), what benefit it’s giving the consumer (or lack thereof) and what contribution, if any, it’s making to anything other than landfill. I believe recessions are when good things flourish.
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