MetaFilter posts tagged with random

National holidays are so boring.

Lutoslawski — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 13:27:51 -0800

Laboring on labor day? Some things to keep you busy. Ugly Mailboxes. Bizzare Statues. Hand Drawn Maps. French Manhole Covers. What's special about this number?.

Anything you want, for $2

divabat — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:45:04 -0800

Webcomic artist D.J. Coffman offers to draw anything you want for $2 apiece.

Stacks of Miscellany

Burhanistan — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 20:07:47 -0800

This stack of retitled paperbacks should feed your appetite for random weird pictures and found objects. Homepage

Postcrossing

Baud — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 08:00:45 -0800

you've got new postcrossed mail You have heard of geocaching. You have heard of Bookcrossing. Here comes Postcrossing. The main idea is that: if you send a postcard, you'll receive at least one back, from a random Postcrosser from somewhere in the world. The goal of postcrossing is to allow people to receive postcards from all over the world, for free. Well, for the price of the stamp you put on the postcards you need to send if you wish to get one from someone you never met. You can have up to 5 postcards traveling at any single time. Every time one of the postcards you sent is registered, you can request another address. I bought my first postcrossed postcard in Brussels' touristy district today and will mail it somewhere in Finland tomorrow.

15 bits of crypto should be enough for anybody

finite — Fri, 16 May 2008 22:01:42 -0800

On May 13, security advisories published by Debian and Ubuntu revealed that, for over a year, their OpenSSL libraries have had a major flaw in their CSPRNG, which is used by key generation functions in many widely-used applications, which caused the "random" numbers produced to be extremely predictable. [lolcat summary] How bad is it? It's pretty bad. Understand that these keys are used not only for encryption, but also for authentication. The keyspace has been reduced to a mere 32,768 possibilities, and you can already download them all, along with tools to use them. Worse still, in the days before the issue became publicly known, there was a noticeable spike in the number of brute-force attacks on SSH servers, indicating that there has already been significant exploitation of this vulnerability. Partial timeline of events: In May 2006, a bug led to a question which led to the fateful patch being applied to md_rand.c (in Debian's "unstable" development branch). In April 2007, Debian 4.0 "etch" and Ubuntu 7.04 were both released, which was the beginning of the inclusion of the buggy version of OpenSSL in officially-released distributions. The bug remained unfixed through the releases of Ubuntu 7.10 and 8.04. On May 7, 2008, the patch to fix the problem was committed to Debian's source repository, and on May 13 the issue was officially disclosed and updated packages were made available to users. (The patch's availability days before public disclosure of the bug appears to be a violation of Debian's policy.) Here are some responses from Debian blogs, and two from an OpenSSL developer.

Laverne Salmons, Adrian Turner, Stormy Spellman, Ruth Torres.....

dersins — Fri, 02 May 2008 17:20:20 -0800

Need to name a character? Use this random name generator. Hit refresh to, uh, refresh. Explanation here. [via]

Lost and Found Art goes from Random to Contrived?

skyper — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 10:52:53 -0800

Is it “found art” when it’s intentionally left out to be found? Enough findings at this street corner have been documented in a blog as long ago as April 2007, around the time anonymous artist(s) were planting small paintings at street signs in urban residential neighborhoods.
The resident who tracks the found art sightings, regularly updates with photos of her neighborhood’s location, a telephone pole with a makeshift shelf for passersby to anonymously place (and replace) found items.

Now she has become one of a posse of local artists is launching a movement in the spirit of this found art, calling itself Real Small Art.

Quantum Mechanics: Myths and Facts

XMLicious — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:21:29 -0800

Quantum Mechanics: Myths and Facts (pdf), a recently-updated paper on the Cornell arXiv peer-review site. By Hrvoje Nikolić of the Rudjer Bošković Institute in Croatia. Note: the presence of a paper on arXiv does not necessarily mean it has been reviewed and is not equivalent to having been published in a journal.

"Thrown Under the Bus" is Thrown Under the Bus. Ouch.

wendell — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 11:42:53 -0800

"This year, in a gesture of humanitarian relief, the (Lake Superior State University Banished Words) committee restores "truthiness," banned on last year's list, to formal use. This comes after comedians and late-night hosts were thrown under the bus and rendered speechless by a nationwide professional writers' strike. The silence is deafening."
Of course, "(thrown) under the bus"* is on this year's Banished List, along with "perfect storm", "webinar"*, "waterboarding", "post-9/11", "wordsmith", "back in the day", "surge", "x is the new y", "give back" and other seemingly "random" words and phrases.
*One of the requirements for a Banished Word or Phrase is that it has been used as a title for a Blogspot or Typepad blog. Yes, we've done this before. Consider it a tradition or a bad habit.

Random Haiku

pedantic — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 11:41:49 -0800

Intimate in bed
Adoptive iterative
Develop in bed!

[refresh]

Hello my marbles
You have no chance to marble
Make your undoing!