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"social software" entries
GAFE MOOCs, Recommendations Considered Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, Glitch Art Given, and Cool Visual Hack
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Google Educator MOOCs — online courses for teachers who use Google in their classrooms.
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Algorithms and Accountability — Thus, the appearance of an autocompletion suggestion during the search process might make people decide to search for this suggestion although they didn’t have the intention to. A recent paper by Baker and Potts (2013) consequently questions “the extent to which such algorithms inadvertently help to perpetuate negative stereotypes”. (via New Aesthetic Tumblr)
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Glitch Content Enters Public Domain — amazing contribution of content, not just “open sourcing” but using CC0 to give the public the maximum possible rights for reuse.
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Sprite Lamp — a tool to help game developers combine 2D art, such as digital painting or pixel art, with dynamic lighting. This is pretty darn cool. (via Greg Borenstein)
Web Collaboration, Science Perversion, Decompiling Tamagotchi, and Science Fabrication
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Together.js — Mozilla-produced library for in-page collaboration.
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This Complex and Tragic Event Supports My Own View (Vaughan Bell) — pretty much every tactic he describes, you will see deployed daily.
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Natalie Silvanovich — a security engineer who has extracted and decompiled the code (running on a 6502!) in the heart of a Tamagotchi, and documenting it. Formidable!
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Science Fiction to Science Fabrication — MIT course: This class ties science fiction with speculative/critical design as a means to encourage the ethical and thoughtful design of new technologies. (via Beta Knowledge)
Malware Samples, Groupware w/out Groupthink, Seppuku Theory, and QS Keylogging
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List of Malware pcaps and Samples — Currently, most of the samples described have the corresponding samples and pcaps available for download.
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InterTwinkles — open source platform built from the ground up to help small democratic groups to do process online. It provides structure to improve the efficiency of specific communication tasks like brainstorming and proposals. (via Willow Bl00)
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Lavabit, Privacy, Seppuku, and Game Theory (Vikram Kumar) — Mega’s CEO’s private blog, musing about rational responses to malstates.
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Telepath Keylogger (Github) — A happy Mac keylogger for Quantified Self purposes. (via Nick Winter)
UK Gov 2.0, Remote Work, Git + App Engine, and Amazon Sells 3D Printer Goodies
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How Geeks Opened up the UK Government (Guardian) — excellent video introduction to how the UK is transforming its civil service to digital delivery. Most powerful moment for me was scrolling through various depts’ web sites and seeing consistent visual design.
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Tools for Working Remotely — Braid’s set of tools (Trello, Hackpad, Slingshot, etc.) for remote software teams.
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Git Push to Deploy on Google App Engine — Enabling this feature will create a remote Git repository for your application’s source code. Pushing your application’s source code to this repository will simultaneously archive the latest the version of the code and deploy it to the App Engine platform.
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Amazon’s 3D Printer Store — printers and supplies. Deeply underwhelming moment of it arriving on the mainstream.
Hacking HTTP Host Headers, Collaborative Coding, Glitch is the Overloaded Essence, and Crazy Culture
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Practical HTTP Host Header Attacks — lots of cleverness like So, to persuade a cache to serve our poisoned response to someone else we need to create a disconnect between the host header the cache sees, and the host header the application sees. In the case of the popular caching solution Varnish, this can be achieved using duplicate Host headers. Varnish uses the first host header it sees to identify the request, but Apache concatenates all host headers present and Nginx uses the last host header.
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Madeye — collaborative code editing inside a Google Hangout. (via Andy Baio)
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Too Momentous for the Medium — Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them. (Brian Eno’s words)
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Where the Happy Talk about Corporate Culture is All Wrong (NY Times) — I think there are two types of happiness in a work culture: Human Resources Happy and High Performance Happy. Fast-growth success has everything to do with the latter and nothing to do with the former. Lazy false opposition, and he describes an asshole-rich workplace that would only please a proctologist. (via Sara Winge)
Electric Monks, Moore's Law's Death Spiral, Trafficking Technology, and Product Management
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Automated Essay Grading To Come to EdX (NY Times) — shortly after we get software that writes stories for us, we get software to read them for us.
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AMD Calls End of Moore’s Law in Ten Years (ComputerWorld) — story based on this video, where Michio Kaku lays out the timeline for Moore’s Law’s wind-down and the spin-up of new technology.
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Addressing Human Trafficking Through Technology (danah boyd) — technologists love to make tech and then assert it’ll help people. Danah’s work on teens and now trafficking steers us to do what works, rather than what is showy or easiest.
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Product Management (Rowan Simpson) — hand this to anyone who asks what product management actually is. Excellent explanation.
Obfuscation, Logging, Copyright, and Control
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The Obfuscation of Culture — Tumblr and LJ users sep ar ate w ords thr ou gh o dd spacin g in o rde r to fo ol sea rc h en g i nes. Chinese users hide political messages in image attachments to seemingly benign posts on Weibo. General Pretraeus communicated solely through draft mode. 4chan scares away the faint of heart with porn. More technically astute groups communicate through obscure messaging systems. (via Beta Knowledge)
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log2viz — an open-source demonstration of the logs-as-data concept for Heroku apps. Log in and select one of your apps to see a live-updating dashboard of its web activity.
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Doctorow at LoC (YouTube) — video of Cory Doctorow’s talk on ebooks, libraries, and copyright at the Library of Congress.
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When TED Lost Control of its Crowd (HBR) — golden case study. You can’t “manage” a crowd—or a community—through transactional exchanges or economic incentives. You need something stronger: shared purpose
Ransom Money, High School CS, Wikipedia Links, and Social Teens
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Adventures in the Ransom Trade — between insurance, protection, and ransoms, Sean Gourley describes it as “one of the more interesting grey markets.” (via Sean Gourley)
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About High School Computer Science Teachers (Selena Deckelmann) — Selena gets an education in the state of high school computer science education.
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Learning From Big Data (Google Research) — the Wikilinks Corpus: 40 million total disambiguated mentions within over 10 million web pages […] The mentions are found by looking for links to Wikipedia pages where the anchor text of the link closely matches the title of the target Wikipedia page. If we think of each page on Wikipedia as an entity (an idea we’ve discussed before), then the anchor text can be thought of as a mention of the corresponding entity.
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Teens Have Always Gone Where Identity Isn’t — if you look back at one of the first dominant social platforms, AOL Instant Messenger, it looks a lot like the pseudonymous Tumblr and Snapchat of today in many respects. You used an avatar that was not your face. Your screenname was not indexed and not personally identifiable (mine was Goober1310).
Chrome's Speed Tricks, Military's IRC, HTTP's REPL, and Inductive Mice
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High Performance Networking in Google Chrome — far more than you ever wanted to know about how Chrome is so damn fast.
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Tactical Chat — how the military uses IRC to wage war.
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http-console — a REPL loop for HTTP.
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Inductive Charger for Magic Mouse — my biggest bugbear with Bluetooth devices is the incessant appetite for batteries. Huzzah!
Top Chinese Memes, Raising Quality, Retro Browsing, and The Clicks of the Dead
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Top 10 Chinese Internet Memes of 2012 — most are political, unlike Overly Attached Girlfriend.
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Evaporative Cooling — thoughtful piece about the tendency of event quality to trend down unless checked by invisible walls. (via Hacker News)
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What Was It Like to Browse the Web in the 90s? (Quora) — it was awesome, because the alternative was television. Couple of whiny “you won’t believe how hard we had it” posts, from people who obviously believe that everyone in history has been miserable because they don’t have it as good as we do now. And, thus, by extension, we are miserable because we don’t have it as good as future generations of silver-robot-bearing flying-car-driving humans.
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Why Are Dead People Liking Stuff on Facebook? (ReadWrite Web) — a good question.