The Electronic Frontier Foundation is trying to get people into the holiday donation spirit with this ad, listing the things they fought for in 2008.
You can also find out more about each of these issues, many of which are obviously ongoing. Well, except for that happy dancing baby, who is pretty much okay for now. Whether you’re a programmer or a DJ or a remixer, there’s probably something of interest to you, even if you don’t agree with their positions.
Well, the headline says everything you need to know about what is about to happen, so I guess no further explanations are required. Warning: Do not attempt to do this at home, or in fact, anywhere, ever.
Created by Buzzin Monkey and die agentour GmbH, both German marketing agencies, the following MINI ad was created using a new advertisement technology named “augmented reality. The technology allows you to see a seemingly boring 2D ad in an all new light when exposed to the lens of a web cam. Check it out:
The new season of the HBO series Flight of the Conchords (based on my favorite geeky band, New Zealand’s fifth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo acapella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo) is kicking off on January 18. However, the first new episode has just been released at Funny or Die.
Unfortunately the video is only viewable in the United States, but HBO Canada will also be streaming it beginning December 23. For those of you elsewhere, I offer this, from the first season of the series:
Interestingly, Brett McKenzie was actually in Lord of the Rings (known by fans as Figwit–weird story, check out the fansite for that one).
If you haven’t checked out the band before, I highly recommend just doing a YouTube search for “Flight of the Conchords” since you can find nearly all of the music videos from the first season of the show, as well as live performances.
I have high hopes for the new season, though to be honest, I wasn’t completely crazy about this first episode. Probably because I didn’t particularly like any of the new songs… however, they did pull out “Angels,” which is an old favorite of mine.
Matt Cutts of Google posted yesterday about the ten things he doesn’t like about Chrome. Coming from a Google employee, this seems like brave transparency — but Matt’s list is pretty much a collection of nits. I use Google Chrome as my default browser, and in general I love it — especially its performance. But I have a few more serious things about Google Chrome that I dislike:
No RSS autodiscovery. I consume all of my regular sites through feeds, and I like the fact that Firefox (and Opera, and Safari, and even IE7) provide a consistent way to at least find the feed URL for any site that includes an RSS autodiscovery link. Firefox even lets you customize how to handle subscriptions — mine is set to feed it (pun intended) to FeedDemon — so subscribing to a feed I like is only one click away. In Google Chrome, there is no button to subscribe, and if I load a URL that contains an RSS feed, it just displays as HTML (ignoring all the RSS tags). I have to manually copy the URL and paste it into my feed reader.
I know Matt said not to mention it, but lack of cross-platform support is a major deficit. Eventually Google will get around to releasing versions for MacOS/X and Linux — but what about FreeBSD?
Keyboard shortcuts don’t seem to work all the time. I haven’t narrowed down exactly when, but sometimes Ctrl+T doesn’t open a new tab, and Ctrl+C sometimes doesn’t copy to the clipboard. In the same contexts, I can select “New Tab” from the wrench menu or “Copy” from the context menu, and they work as expected. This is a big one for a hater of Mus computerus like me.
Chrome seems to give up on links faster than Firefox (it does everything faster, even fail). I get a lot more page load failures that are remedied by F5. It also gives up on linked stylesheets, resulting in an unformatted page until I refresh. There should be some way to tweak the timeout. Maybe there is, but I haven’t found it yet.
None of these are show-stoppers for me yet, but if/when I change my main workstation to FreeBSD then #2 will be.
How about you? If you’ve used Chrome for any length of time, what bugs you about it?
This week I’m feeling a bit nostalgic, so I’m thinking back to my days as a geek-in-progress for this set of pictures. Remember the exciting world of the science fair? I’m pretty sure that I did more, but the two projects that I remember most clearly are: (1) when I was ten or so, I got a bunch of potted violets and watered them with different liquids (water, coke, milk, juice)–the one with coke died right away and the one with milk smelled really bad, and (2) when I was in high school, I spliced together a video with subliminal messages intending to make people want to eat a certain color of M&M (conclusion: subliminal messages–or mine, anyway–don’t work).
So take a moment to remember your school days, and let it warm your heart to see cute kids getting excited about science. As always, these pictures were all released under a Creative Commons license. Click the links for details!
Last week, the OLPC foundation released an Internet-only ad that starts by showing kids who are learning to use guns. The commercial then goes on with its message: “Children are fast learners. Let’s give them the right tools. Give a laptop. Get a laptop.”
What are your thoughts on this ad? Let us know in the comments.
According to Brian Krebs’ Security Fix blog, Microsoft is releasing an out of band patch to fix the critical flaw in all versions of Internet Explorer that we discussed on [GAS] last week. This is great news. While the number of home computers compromised by this attack is only about 1 in 500, security companies have noted sharp increases in the numbers of webservers that are being compromised to serve the malware to spread the infections.
Microsoft is signaling that it plans to ship an emergency software update on Wednesday to fix a dangerous security hole in its Internet Explorer Web browser that thousands of compromised Web sites have been using to install malicious software.
Microsoft says the critical flaw is present in all versions of IE, from IE5 all the way up through IE8 Beta 2. Microsoft estimated that about 0.2 percent of Windows users worldwide may have been exposed to Web sites containing exploits that try to attack this vulnerability.
While one in every 500 IE users may not sound like a large number, Microsoft said the frequency of attacks is increasing dramatically.
Signs that hackers were exploiting an unpatched flaw in all versions of IE showed up the day after this month’s Patch Tuesday. Attackers have begun using this day for exploitation as it gives them the longest lead time until Microsoft gets around to fixing it.
Microsoft has done an excellent job turning out this patch in an emergency. But the hackers will be back at it next week looking for new methods of exploit. And the patch dance goes onward.
According to a new study, one particular overactive gene could explain that dude you know who goes from Jekyll to Hyde when he gets a few drinks in him. The MAOA gene produces an enzyme that breaks down mood-related chemicals, and high levels of this enzyme mixed with alcohol creates a “dangerous cocktail,” triggering violent behavior.
It was already known that this gene is linked to violent behavior. In a profound and somewhat disturbing demonstration of the link, scientists found a family in the Netherlands with a particular mutation in the gene; every male family member with that mutation was an arsonist or rapist.
In the recent study, scientists found that in 174 Finnish male alcoholics with histories of violence, drinking increased the risk of impulsive violence among those with a highly active MAOA gene. The effects decrease with age, which could be part of the reason we don’t usually see the senior crowd getting into bar fights. According to one of the researchers:
Alcoholism, alcohol consumption and violence are clearly related. People react quite differently to acute alcohol exposure. Most individuals become relaxed and talkative, while some – particularly people who are introverted while sober – become expansively extroverted and aggressive. Perhaps we could increase the efficacy of addition rehabilitation by focusing resources particularly on younger heavy-drinking, high-activity MAOA individuals.
The hope is that that people could be screened for the gene. They could then be offered treatment or behavioural therapy… or better yet, decide to abstain from alcohol.
This research will appear in the March issue of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.
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