MetaFilter posts tagged with Network

"It’s like the whole slow-foods thing. I still don’t know what the heck that’s about. Food’s either good or it’s bad."

peachfuzz — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 09:36:23 -0800

"...it’s not a title, it’s a job. It’s a position in a kitchen. It comes from an old German word that means 'boss' or 'head of the shop.' In which case I am the chef of my operation, but it’s a production company. It’s not a kitchen, even though we do have a kitchen. That’s the closest thing to chef I am. All the good chefs that I know say that they are cooks employed as chef. All the people that say, 'I’m a chef,' generally aren’t. The good ones will say, 'I’m a cook.' Once people start saying, 'I’m Chef Bob!'—yeah, whatever. I’m Captain Kangaroo. Have a nice day". The Onion AV Club interviews Alton Brown. The show's not for everyone, but the recipes sure are.

Canada Reigns In Facebook

shoesfullofdust — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 20:08:13 -0800

Facebook agrees to privacy changes [Flash video | article]. After an investigation by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, which found that Facebook gave "confusing or incomplete" privacy information to subscribers and gave developers "virtually unrestricted access to Facebook users’ personal information", Facebook has agreed to address the Privacy Commissioner’s concerns. “These changes mean that the privacy of 200 million Facebook users in Canada and around the world will be far better protected.” - Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart. "The notion that some teenager, working in a basement halfway around the globe, that could have access to all of this personal information was unsettling, to say the least." - Elizabeth Denholm, Deputy Privacy Commissioner.

The Adaptive Value of Human Institutions:* Building a Better (Secular) 'Religion'

kliuless — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 11:42:14 -0800

Keynes & Marx thought "that productivity would grow sufficiently to allow our needs to be met with very little labour," and that humankind's biggest preoccupation in the future would be leading lives of comfortable (or comparative) leisure. Obviously, that has not yet come to pass. But why?** Yochai Benkler (previously), for one, is working on it... *just saw jared diamond on the evolution of religion (and was inspired ;) **e.g., one could say the social utility of the enclosure movement has reached its limit (or a local logical maximum) and that the means of (re)production might now be (self-)organised not by the state and/or market per se, but (at long last!) by a conscious collective cultural aesthetic :P

Information doesn't want to be scale free

escabeche — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:48:33 -0800

"the scale-free network modeing paradigm is largely inconsistent with the engineered nature of the Internet..." For a decade it's been conventional wisdom that the Internet has a scale-free topology, in which the number of links emanating from a site obeys a power law. In other words, the Internet has a long tail; compared with a completely random network, its structure is dominated by a few very highly connected nodes, while the rest of the web consists of a gigantic list of sites attached to hardly anything. Among its other effects, this makes the web highly vulnerable to epidemics. The power law on the internet has inspired a vast array of research by computer scientists, mathematicians, and engineers. According to an article in this month's Notices of the American Math Society, it's all wrong. How could so many scientists make this kind of mistake? Statistician Cosma Shalizi explains how people see power laws when they aren't there: "Abusing linear regression makes the baby Gauss cry."

Your ISP: "Sunlight is the best disinfectant"

spock — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 07:10:26 -0800

Wanna test if your ISP (or company or university) is blocking or throttling BitTorrent traffic? Want some tools to diagnose network problems in your "last mile" connection? Google to the rescue: M-Lab! Predictably, with the recent announcement and publicity, the servers are now getting hammered. So post this? You can help: Host a Glasnost server (tests for BitTorrent). *Results so far. Coming soon are apps to "Determine whether an ISP is giving some traffic a lower priority than other traffic" and "Determine whether an ISP is degrading the performance of a certain subset of users, applications, or destinations". Power to the People, bay-bee!

Journey to the center of the brain

homunculus — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 19:50:28 -0800

Mapping the Structural Core of Human Cerebral Cortex. A new study of the connections in the brain has identified the brain's central hub.

Time in a bottleneck

Kronos_to_Earth — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 10:37:01 -0800

Snail mail isn't that slow, unless you use real snails.... As part of a "slow art" project, Vicki Isley and Paul Smith of Bournemouth University have attached radio frequency identification chips (RFID's) to three gastropods, Austin, Cecil and Muriel. The RFID's will pick up your mail as the carriers amble past an electronic reader and deliver it when (in just a few days! ...or weeks ...or months....) they slip past a second reader.... RealSnailMail! The system is up and running (When I tried it.). There's even a snailcam, which will be available August 11th - 15th, 2008. Also, from the website: DISCLAIMER: RealSnailMail is still under development. For testing purposes some messages may be forwarded sooner than expected. Sorry we can not guarantee unreliability of service at this time. We hope to have RealSnailMail working less predictably as soon as possible.

This complete breakfast: Feedback Loops

huckhound — Tue, 20 May 2008 23:02:35 -0800

You Tube on You Tube . . .

Pakistan vs. YouTube, BGP loses

gen — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 11:41:22 -0800

YouTube Hijacking: A RIPE NCC RIS case study is the definitive look at how actions of Pakistan Telecom caused the global outage of YouTube Sunday the 24th of Feb. 2008. This incident has exposed weaknesses of the Border Gateway Protocol as is outlined by Danny McPherson from Arbor Networks as well as on the Renesys blog.

All your berries in one basket?

jbickers — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 15:55:34 -0800

"It's amazing how we rely on them." BlackBerry email service went down this afternoon in "The Americas Network." That's bad. But is over-reliance on a network the worst of it? Or is it the thumb-ache? or the back-ache? or the work-life imbalance? or the shakes?

Once, sure. Twice, Maybe. Three? Four!?!

Dillonlikescookies — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 17:51:56 -0800

Much of the Middle East has been without reliable internet access recently due to the somewhat suspicious cutting of four seperate underwater cables, in seperate locations, within a few days of each other. The problem has been alleviated by re-routing of traffic until ships can reach the cables to repair them, a process which may take several weeks. The problem was initially believed to be caused by anchors of passing ships, but that has since been retracted and deals have already been signed by several companies for new cables. Without knowledge of the complex infrastructure we can’t really ascertain how unlikely four separate cables having near simultaneous problems is – but many are treating it as suspicious considering recent news. Personally, I think things may have been blown out of proportion by the limited information we have, although it was believed that Iran had been isolated by a single disabled router this is plain untrue and given the redundancies inherent in internet infrastructure it would be difficult if not impossible to fully cut off a country, but that is not to understate the consequences of these problems. On a related note, Iran has recently announced plans to move to trade oil with the Euro rather than the US dollar, which will cause further devaluing of the greenback. Saddam Hussein was in the process of doing the same before the US invasion, a decision reversed by the occupying force. Some are interpreting this as signs of an “info war” and while I don’t subscribe to the analysis, I find it interesting to consider the idea that in an age where increasingly large amounts of money can be attributed to companies based on estimated worth of intangible assets such as human networks and brand identities, the idea that you have to physically invade a country to do it economic damage is becoming outdated. There has been a documented shift towards “proxy war and if one agrees on the existence of this trend then more abstract forms of conflict between powers seem to be a likely follow up. If you do buy into the “information war” analysis there is ample fodder in the media, but more interestingly rumours of a theoretical invasion plan hint at a sophisticated attack not necessarily limited to military action. Indeed, Several large governments, such as the US, are spending increasing amounts of their military budget on more abstract forms of warfare (pdf) Again, although I don’t subscribe to this view, I find it interesting to consider as a growing trend a shift from conventional war to proxy war to purely economic warfare as engaging in open hostilities with any country becomes increasingly risky from a game theory point of view. See Also.

Howard Rheingold on cooperation, technology, and social dynamics

cortex — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 13:19:00 -0800

Technology of Cooperation (.gif map), from Howard Rheingold's Cooperation Commons project. Rheingold on Amish technology practices. More of Rheingold's writing on his homepage. An archive of (the hibernating? dead?) Cooperation Commons blog colletive. His Smart Mobs blog, apropos his book by the same name. Two more books, in full text: The Virtual Community, Tools For Thought. An excellent bullet-point distillation, The Art of Hosting Good Conversations Online. [via]

The Method is for wimps

fearfulsymmetry — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 09:12:50 -0800

The return of BIG acting. Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood Some past masters of the art from the article: Jack Nicholson in Batman and The Shining Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant Al Pacino in Scarface Peter Finch in Network and of course Day-Lewis himself in Gangs of New York (Several of those NSFW)

A Fingerprint-Protected Social Network for Girls

dbarefoot — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 09:47:39 -0800

Some fancy security for 6 to 14-year-old girls Anne's Diary is a Canadian social network for 6 to 14-year-old girls (I read about it on the CBC's Spark blog). It has two interesting security features to fend off child molesters and the like. To sign up for the service, kids need to get a non-parental adult professional as a 'sponsor' who validates their identity and age (much like applying for a passport). Secondly, you get a USB fingerprint scanner with your initial package, and I gather the kids use this to log in to the service. And yes, that's Anne with an 'e'. No Prince Edward Island gable was ever this secure. Actually, there's one other cool feature that I like: "each Christmas the child will be sent a physical copy of their Diary with all of their entries included in it." I also wonder what their exit strategy is for girls who turn 15. Do they get summarily booted off the service? Is there another network (besides, you know, Facebook) that they graduate too?

NoseRub

yoga — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 17:02:38 -0800

Decentralized social network: "...build your social network in one place and have other NoseRub clients connect to it instead of you having to build multiple networks on multiple social networks. The best part is NoseRub is released under the open source MIT license." via eHub. Previously related.

SPLed beans

Blazecock Pileon — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 18:52:13 -0800

"Finding JTAG on the iPhone": a ten-step hardware unlock of the iPhone, allowing it to function with other carriers

No web for you, Army Boy!

dejah420 — Mon, 14 May 2007 12:10:56 -0800

Soldiers may no longer use MySpace to communicate with family. The Defense Department will begin "worldwide" blocking access, as of today, to YouTube, Metacafe, IFilm, StupidVideos, FileCabi, MySpace, BlackPlanet, Hi5, Pandora, MTV, 1.fm, live365, and Photobucket on its computers and networks, according to a memo sent Friday by Gen. B.B. Bell, the U.S. Forces Korea commander. Note that most soldiers deployed in war zones don't have access to any network outside of the military network.

You are here.

loquacious — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 21:40:12 -0800

You may have seen this excellent map of the internet from xkcd. Still lost? You are here.

It's all in your head

logicpunk — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 07:56:24 -0800

Ramón y Cajal fathered a new science with his elegant sketches of neurons. Since then, the brain has been visualized in a variety of ways: from the microscopic to the functional, from the abstract to the beautiful. The connectome, intellectual heir to the human genome project and proteomics, aims to map the entire brain network as a means of understanding cognition and behavior. Pick your favorite brain metaphor here.

That's enough about me... now, let's talk about me

jokeefe — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 11:15:05 -0800

Dandelife. Q: "Why would I want to keep my biography on the Internet?" A: "Stories are best shared, don't you think?" [from the about page]
Dandelife.com describes itself as a "social biography network." It allows you to construct an annotated timeline of your life, add photographs (it works with Flickr, with which is shares design elements) and links. Example here; via anh-minh.com.

The Enron Explorer

tpl1212 — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 05:45:29 -0800

The Enron Explorer from Trampoline Systems "lets you investigate the actions and reactions of Enron's senior management team as the noose began to tighten" (through some 200,000 public domain corporate emails) using Trampoline's SONAR social network mapping platform. (via FutureFeeder)

The Croquet Project - Web 2.0

MetaMonkey — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 02:37:29 -0800

The Croquet Project is a staggeringly ambitious attempt to create 'an operating system for the post-browser Internet' - a multi-platform, open-source, extensible, decentralised, peer-to-peer, 3D virtual reality metaverse [2,3], designed for 'highly scalable deep collaboration', led by Alan Kay.

Dapper: an API for any website

MetaMonkey — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 20:59:03 -0800

Dapper: The Data Mapper
A recently launched service that allows users to extract data from any website into XML, and transform or build applications and mashups with that data. Described by it's creators as a way to, "easily build an API for any website... through a visual and intuitive process". Plagiarism Today, meanwhile, has cause for concern, "Dapper is a scraper. Nothing more... now the technologically impaired can scrape content from any site... the potential danger [is] very, very real".

Ad Supported Software

tboz — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 08:55:59 -0800

Ad Supported Software It started with email, and now it's everything from IM, maps and photo galleries. But, free network management software? Can this work?

I pooted

ijoshua — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 18:37:03 -0800

I pooted. Enigmatic billboard advertisements, apparently promoting a Cartoon Network show, Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends seen in several major cities.