Geek News and Musings

Eighteen years ago today, CERN released the source code of WorldWideWeb — the first Web browser and editor — into the public domain. Tim Berners-Lee has some screen shots of the browser at his CERN page.

CERN’s intention in this is to further compatibility, common practices and standards in networking and computer supported collaboration.

WorldWideWeb (Wikipedia, via Imaginary Foundation)

iOS: Soundtracking combines the best aspects of a music tagging service, music discovery app, and music sharing all into one unique tool. The app allows you to tag a song that you’re listening to, compose a status update around it, and then post the song, what you’re doing, and even a sample of it for your friends to hear. More »

There are a lot of benefits to minimizing, but it can also save you money and teach you how to be frugal. The process forces you to examine what you own and why you have it, but having less junk makes the things you really need easier to find. More »

The recent storms that have torn across the Midwest and South were terrifying, and the cleanup in those areas will likely continue for years. When an electrical storm comes calling in your neck of the woods, how do you make sure your gear is okay so you can worry about your own safety? More »

The Brown Marmorated Stink Bug made headlines in North America last year, and is poised for a serious comeback this year. The little beetles get everywhere, and gleefully come into your home if you let them. Here’s how to fight back and keep your home stink-free. More »

Ever heard of Dropship? It’s an open-source project that “enables arbitrary, anonymous transfers of files between Dropbox accounts.” Dropbox hopes you haven’t; they tried to squelch it this week, and even accidentally reported that it was subject to a DMCA takedown notice, with predictably futile results. I’m mostly sympathetic: I’m a huge fan of their service, Dropship was a clear violation of their terms, and for obvious reasons they don’t want to turn into an anonymous peer-to-peer file-sharing service. Unfortunately, they accidentally built a system which enabled just that.

How about Sony’s PlayStation Network? Of course you have. It was so thoroughly hacked this week that Sony had to shut it down indefinitely. Did you also know that Sony’s PS3 firmware is effectively wide open, because they made a hilariously stupid security mistake? Did you know that that’s probably how PSN got hacked, and that it raised the spectre of the hacker(s) taking over every connected PlayStation 3 in the world and turning them into by far the biggest botnet in history? That probably wasn’t what Sony had in mind, but they accidentally built a system which enabled just that.

How about the new Google Docs Android app? Came out this week, and it’s pretty great. Among its many features is the ability to take a picture of an image with text and have that text automatically OCRed and turned into a document. Can’t wait ’til they integrate Google Translate into that, too, and recapitulate last year’s hot app World Lens. But I bet book publishers are pretty unhappy. Not long ago, if you wanted to scan a book you had to actually build a scanner, or buy a copy and turn every page. Now would-be book pirates can just crowdsource 10 people to go to bookstores and take 20 pictures each, et voila: 400 scanned pages in Google Docs. Easier book piracy probably isn’t what Google had in mind, but they accidentally built a system which enables just that.

This was also the week that people who keep remotely controllable Internet-enabled camera/microphone/GPSes on them at all times expressed outraged surprise when they learned their privacy is at risk. The panopticon probably isn’t what the mobile industry had in mind, but they accidentally built a system which enables just that.

What do these all have in common? The unexpected results of connecting client devices to the cloud. (Yeah, I don’t really like the term either, but it’s better than the alternatives.) People talk about “moving to the cloud,” as if we haven’t already. The heavy lifting may happen on the server farms (when they’re up) but every connected computer, phone, and game console already serves as a computing cloud’s eye, ear, and tentacle.

Emergent properties. Unintended consequences. Get used to ‘em. My favourite Douglas Adams books are the Dirk Gently novels, in which the protagonist makes use of “the fundamental interconnectedness of all things” to solve crimes in hilariously unexpected ways. Now we’re literally building that interconnectedness into (nearly) all things. So we shouldn’t be too surprised to find ourselves moving into a Dirk Gently future, in which off-kilter left-field ricochet consequences happen at an ever-increasing rate. You can bet that those cited above are just the beginning — and that there’s a lot of money to be made in seeing them before they happen.

Photo credit: Aspex Design, Flickr

Lucky for him they aren’t honey badgers. (Via Subtropic Bob)

This week’s favorites post comes from Chris Rhodes.

Gather ’round, ye Techdirt readers. Whether ye be Kool-Aid drinkers or anonymous trolls, freetards or industry shills, spam bots or Dark Helmet himself, gather ’round, and I shall impart to you the harrowing tale of the best of Techdirt. Looking back, if I were to assign a Word of the Week to this week’s stories, that word would have to be “irrelevance”, as it seems to be a key point of many of the choice posts, whether it was applied to IP maximalists, government organizations, or even your average blogger.

The Righthaven saga hit a little bit closer to home for me when Radley Balko, another blogger I read regularly, decided to preemptively take down a great post he had written after some of his friends pointed out that quoting and linking to the LVRJ was likely to get the Righthaven lawyers drooling into their briefcases. So it was with great delight that I read this Techdirt post: Another Judge Slams Righthaven For Chilling Effects That Do Nothing To Advance Copyright Act’s Purpose. Just as its title implies, it tells the tale of yet another judge who sees right through Righthaven’s transparent attempt to enrich themselves at the expense of the public, and delivers them the verbal pistol whipping that their evil shenanigans so rightly deserve. Will it stop them? Probably not. But how long is such a business model sustainable? As Radley says in his explanation, “The Las Vegas Review-Journal [...] is apparently hellbent on making itself completely irrelevant in the information age. Far be it from me to get in their way.” Indeed.

Next up, I would be completely remiss in my duties if I didn’t mention the disparity between the attitude of people like Nina Paley (as evidenced by her fantastic Yes Means Yes post), and the attitude of people like James Gannon (as evidenced by his comments here). Nina Paley wants you to copy, share and spread her work to wider audiences whenever and wherever possible, and believes that asking permission is a complete waste of time for all parties involved. Gannon, on the other hand, believes that people should rush to ask his permission before even linking to or quoting from the content he’s already posted to the world at large (perhaps he writes for the LVRJ?). Which attitude is likely to keep an artist relevant in the long run? It’s a rhetorical question. Keep in mind, however, that if you don’t let anyone talk to or about you, you just might end up talking to yourself.

And the week just wouldn’t be complete without more examples of security theater at the TSA, where fondling Miss USA and enforcing a “rules is rules” approach to security without a hint of rational thought behind it is somehow equated to passenger safety, but where making sure the passengers you choose to screen actually get screened is not. I imagine it requires quite a strong stomach anymore for people to rush to the comment sections of stories like these and proclaim that the TSA still deserves the benefit of the doubt. As more evidence of invasive searches, haphazard enforcement, and ludicrous policies surface, the populace is beginning to see how irrelevant the TSA really is on the issue of safety. As Lewis Black once said, perhaps they could skip all the standard procedures and just point a magic stick at us instead, chanting “OogaboogaOogabooga”. It would probably be just as effective in the long run, and would no doubt be a whole lot cheaper for all parties involved.

Happily, on the other side of the coin, we have a story about a theater owner who understands how to stay relevant in an era of big screen TVs and Blu-Ray players, and that his job is selling an experience, and not necessarily content. Any piratebay goer can torrent a film online, but very few can reproduce a good theater experience. If owners started to take their job of improving the theater experience as seriously as they seem to whine about every new technology that appears on the market, perhaps they wouldn’t be in such a bind these days. Kudos to Tim and Caitlin at the Alamo Drafthouse Theater in Austin for recognizing this.

And with that, I’ll wrap this post up. Stay relevant, kids!

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The Gillmor Gang — Kevin Marks, Danny Sullivan, JP Rangaswami, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — christened the new Gang studio with a surprise welcome to Kevin Marks. It turns out he’s joining salesforce.com on Monday, following JP (six months), JT (7 years), and me, who is celebrating my one year anniversary. Kevin has been a forceful champion of open standards at Apple, Technorati, Google, BT (Ribbit), the Gillmor Gang, and now salesforce.com. Before, and once the festivities were out of the way, we got back to Gang business, namely the continued aftermath of the phone location recording crisis.

With free lunch debunked, we tackled the Amazon outage and its impact on the Cloud. You can decide for yourselves, but the consensus is that such challenges will be remembered fondly as a validation of the moment, as with the Gmail outage of several years ago, when the Cloud passed from inflection point to basic services. The velocity of business in the iPad age, where CEOs can see deeply into their companies in realtime, demands a level of interactive services and an iterative feedback loop not possible with the previous generation of software. And that lead to a debate about iPhone video calls and what Danny is looking for in a flying car.

If you enjoyed markt022002’s Portal Easter Egg, you’ll love Supernewby’s “Make your own Portal Sentry Turret Egg Cup” Instructable:

Make your own Portal Sentry Turret Egg Cup

Portal 2 (Amazon)

(via Craft)

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