August 28, 2013
Cookieless Monster
Cookieless Monster: Exploring the Ecosystem of Web-based Device Fingerprinting [pdf]. From the 2013 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, this article examines "how web-based device fingerprinting currently works on the Internet. By analyzing the code of three popular browser-fingerprinting code providers, we reveal the techniques that allow websites to track users without the need of client-side identifiers [i.e. cookies]." [more inside]
Try a Little Tenderness
Try a Little Tenderness, a classic of R&B, and Otis Redding, in this 1967 version, recorded the day before he died, nailed it... in 1969, this old Italian guy, Jimmy Durante found that same soul feeling....
Try a Little Tenderness
And, if you enjoyed that... here's more of the Schnoz:
Make Someone Happy
I'll Be Seeing You
Young At Heart
As Time Goes By
Inka Dinka Doo
And, of course... Good Night Mrs. Calabash, Wherever You Are
Into The Great Unknown
In 1869 John Wesley Powell lead an expedition down the Green and Colorado rivers including the first documented passage through the Grand Canyon. Now, geologist, teacher and blogger Gary Hayes writes a post a day about each day he spent on his own journey Into The Great Unknown, a rafting trip 226 miles down the Canyon that he just completed. Start here. Come for the fabulous pictures, stay for the geology, wild life both past and present. And when you're done stick around and checkout many of the other great past series on this blog (scroll down).
Would this be the Nintendo 4DS?
LET'S-A GO! Super Mario Parkour (slyt) : Exactly what you think it is, plus cool augmented-reality effects.
My mind to your mind; my thoughts to your thoughts.
At the University of Washington, researchers have performed what they believe is the first noninvasive human-to-human brain interface. [more inside]
The Decline of the Serial Killer
Ben Popper writes about the increased faith in strangers and falling crime rates that are enabling services like Lyft, AirBNB, TaskRabbit, and others in the new "sharing economy". [more inside]
The difficult choices facing families seeking welfare assistance
'Damned if you do, doomed if you don't' - When it comes to violating welfare rules, recipients sometimes do so after suggestions from caseworkers. Published by Al Jazeera America (previously), which opened for business just this month. Consider it a sequel piece to Planet Money's controversial report on dissability fraud (previously).
"The Hero who Created a Thousand Heroes."
"The reason I picked the over-used cliché “behind the lines” for this series is probably going to be pretty obvious. Each month I’m going to take a look at Jack Kirby original pencils and examples of Kirby original art — images that reveal information not in the final newsprint publications. I may also take a look at some scans of Jack’s pencils from the 70s and compare those to the printed books. Mainly I want to focus on Jack’s famous margin notes from his 1960s work so we can get a glimpse into the Jack Kirby/Stan Lee collaboration." -- On what should've been Jack Kirby's 96th birthday, Robert Steibel starts a new column at tcj.com looking at the King's artwork. [more inside]
Creative Breakthroughs
Perhaps the Most Important Gig Ever
On Jun 4, 1976, between 40 and 100 people gathered to see the Sex Pistols perform at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester, a gig that has been called "the greatest gig of all time." It was attended by members of Joy Division, New Order, the Fall, the Smiths, A Certain Ratio, Ludus, Simply Red, Buzzcocks, Magazine, the producer Martin Hannett, and voted one of the most important concerts of all time, alongside Woodstock and Live Aid. A documentary about that night is called "I Swear I Was There." (SLYT)
Go With the Flow
"Have you ever dropped a stick in a river and wondered where it might go if it floated all the way downstream? Now you can trace its journey using Streamer." In addition to displaying the distance traveled, difference in elevation, and number of states, counties and cities the stick will pass through before reaching its outlet point, Streamer can do an upstream trace to show you which rivers and smaller streams fed into the spot where the stick was dropped. [more inside]
Monopoly's iron token is dead - long live the cat
Hasbro took a vote, and the internet has spoken. Not content to simply remove the losing token from the game, Hasbro will send the offending piece directly—and permanently—to jail. The ballots have been counted, and the people have said F the iron—the new Monopoly token will be a cat. [more inside]
Superposition
Covariance is a particle detector-inspired art installation in the London Canal Museum's ice wells. It is part of the Superposition: physicists and artists in conversation project.
░n░i░c░e░ ░&░ ░w░a░r░m░ ░i░n░ ░h░e░r░e░
The Problems of the 1st and 3rd Worlds have been well covered. And in 2011 we found out about 5th World Problems and 6th World Problems. But there are new worlds and new problems (and new ways to express them). Let's explore some shall we? [more inside]
Intellectuals vs Academics
Academics are farmers and intellectuals are hunters - and the hunters may be the future of the liberal arts, writes Jack Miles.
From Protest to Politics
From Protest to Politics by Bayard Rustin, the civil rights leader almost erased from history. "From Protest to Politics" talks about the difficulty of moving beyond symbolic victories into lasting justice for the Civil Rights Movement.
A first look at Man of Steel 2, through the eyes of a fan
As soon as it was announced that Ben Affleck would play Batman in the sequel to the Superman reboot, twitter-ers were a-flutter with jokes and bemoaning the choice, and YouTube user started putting together a Man of Steel 2 Comic Con Teaser Trailer, in the style of the original Comic Con MOS audience recording. YouTube user soylentbrak1, aka "Steve," recently released a slightly longer, cleaner version of his fan-made trailer, pulling from 20 different video sources, including features of the rumored role of Bryan Cranston as Lex Luthor . If you like that sort of thing, soylentbrak1 also made a Mad Max: Fury Road trailer and over 100 other short clips in tribute to films, franchises, and dreams of what could be.
Twitter circa 1990
wwwtxt.org: "In 1995, commercialization, a swelling population, and the multimedia revolution began to shape Web 1.0 and the modern Internet. 1988–94 represent the final years of a much smaller, non-commercial, and text-dominated Internet. / The users of this era were not only programmers, physicists, and university residents—they were also tinkerers, early-adopters, whiz kids, and nerds. Their conversations and documents—valiantly preserved by digital archivists—are fractured across numerous services, increasingly offline-only, and incredibly voluminous (100GB+). / wwwtxt digs deep and resurrects the voices of these digital pioneers as unedited, compelling, and insightful 140-character excerpts." [more inside]
"The charmingly naive American student is in fact a cash cow"
"The coming of “academic capitalism” has been anticipated and praised for years; today it is here." (Thomas Frank for The Baffler)
The Gangster In The Huddle
Paul Solotaroff of Rolling Stone investigates the life of former New England Patriots player Aaron Hernandez and the path he took from NFL player to murder suspect.
1DS, 2DS, 3DS, 4...
Nintendo, already no stranger to customer confusion over its consoles' names, "will be launching a new portable gaming system in October. It's called the Nintendo 2DS. It's a 3DS without the 3D, and it's shaped like a thin piece of cake." [more inside]
New, from the Soylent Corporation...
Since completing a successful fund-raising campaign, Rob Rhinehart has set up a company to make a food substitute, somewhat controversially called "Soylent", designed to be a complete food substitute -- drinking only Soylent shakes, people can stop eating "traditional food" completely. The he company's ambitions appear to be concerned with freeing up a few minutes from a busy, chewing-averse person's day, but extend as far as providing cheap food aid to the starving. [more inside]
"...attitudes and budgets were much more in favor of science..."
The eye of Michele Bachmann will be hitting Florida in a few hours
Climate Name Change "Since 1954, the World Meteorological Organization has been naming extreme storms after people. As scientific evidence shows that climate change is creating increasingly frequent and devastating storms, and with climate scientists declaring these extreme weather events as the new normal, we propose a new naming system. A system that names extreme storms caused by climate change, after the policy makers who deny climate change and obstruct climate policy."
Classic N64 Soundtracks
Did you enjoy Nintendo 64 classics from the 90's? How about their soundtracks? Well, I have some good news for you (MLYT).
London to Brighton in four minutes across sixty years.
London to Brighton, side by side. "In 1953 the BBC made a point-of-view film from a London to Brighton train. 30 years later it did the same again. And after another 30 years it did so once more." [more inside]
Force Fed
On Monday, August 19 - day 43 of the strike a federal judge approved a request by state and federal prison authorities to engage the controversial practice of force-feed striking prisoners.[more inside]
Her buns are the best!
Buffalo Buffaloes Buffalo Bouncy Thing
On Marrying a Survivor of Childhood Sexual Abuse
As his wife, how do I respond? That he survived? That he’s brave? That he’s a hero for letting me talk about it? That I will stand beside him with a personal mission and public vow that nobody will ever hurt him, physically or emotionally, again, the way they did during his 30 months as a choirboy from 1988 to 1990?
The battle for the Web’s drug corner is on
Meet the Dread Pirate Roberts - the man behind booming black market drug website Silk Road
The Price of Institutional Racism
Why has there been only one non-white Worldcon chair? Because science fiction fandom is not welcoming to non-white people, because con-running has not done enough to address its own lack of diversity, because people would rather believe that fandom is inclusive than force it to become inclusive.Jonathan McCalmont writes on institutional racism in the science fiction fandom.
I made it for myself, and the way I work
I made a thing! It’s a simple music creation tool, called Bosca Ceoil (pronouced “bus-ka kyo-al”, Irish for “Music Box/Accordion”). [Mac+Windows/Adobe AIR/Flash App] [more inside]
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