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Category Archives: blurb
Meek FM: typographic synthesizer
Rule for How to be an Evil Hacker #73
If you’re going to write a program to steal people’s logins and passwords, don’t hard-code your own login and password into that same program. Otherwise awesome, benevolent hackers like Dustin Brooks will bollox things up for you real good, and then Jeff Atwood will publicly embarrass you.
Move over, Roswell
This creepy story of the unexplained deaths of nine expert skiiers in the USSR in 1959 makes the Roswell tale, The X-Files, and The Thing sound dull by comparison:
Baffled investigators said the group died as a result of “a compelling unknown force” — and then abruptly closed the case and filed it as top secret.
Gimme an H!
Gimme an O! Gimme an A! Gimme an X! What does that spell? Hoax! Sure, Microsoft’s all about embrace & extend, and they are the masters of the terrible name, but UNG? Please.
Word of the day: etag
etag, N. the electronic-mail version of telephone-tag.
Plastic Pacific
The Independent has another article about the massive floating trash “soup” in the Pacific.
It is truly staggering not only that such a large amount of trash is floating in the ocean, but that it has escaped discovery until now. It has to have been accumulating for decades.
“Yes we can”
Maybe he’s just a politician, and maybe he’s not that different from Hillary Clinton. But all rationalizations aside, Barack Obama is an inspiration to a lot of people. As an anonymous former Clinton administration official was quoted in the New Yorker:
When I’m with her, I feel she wants to impress me. When I’m with him, I feel he wants to know what I have to offer him.
Sounds an awful lot like another inspiring president.
Underwater data cable maps
Coverage of Thursday’s internet outage in the Middle East and South Asia, caused by a ship that dragged its anchor off the coast of Egypt, has included some nifty maps. ForeignPolicy has this close-up of the Mediterranean cable network:
And The Guardian UK included this large map of the global cable network.
The source for both maps, TeleGeography, has some pretty impressive maps of the global data network for sale; unfortunately their prices are just as impressive.
Map of European pipelines
Energy independence for Europe is going to be increasingly important geopolitically. The Russian South Stream pipeline was just approved in Bulgaria, which means the European Nabucco pipeline is economically unfeasible.
Russia has already used its control over the oil flowing into Europe as a political tool in Ukraine and Belarus, and there’s no reason to think that they won’t continue to do so in the future.