Link of the day:
Cynical-C.com

A website listing “One star Amazon reviews of classic movies, music and literature.”

Catcher in the Rye:

I am very open minded when it comes to literature (I even read through Mein Kampf without any objection) but I just hated this book! If it wasn’t required reading, I would have stopped on the fourth page! I think Salinger could have done much better!

The old man and the sea:

I couldn’t have cared less what happened to the old man, the fish, the boat, or Ernest Hemmingway. It was a titanic struggle to get through the book–way harder than anything the old man had to face. James Joyce does stream of consciousness a whole lot better–and I hate Joyce’s writing too.

I leave you with this question. What if I had posted this under my pseudonym? Why should that have made a difference? I would have written the same words, but ironically, I could have added some more personal and perhaps persuasive arguments which I dare not make under this account. Because I was forced to post this under my real name, I had to weaken my arguments; I had to share less of myself. Have you ever met “Kee Hinckley”? Have you met me under my other name? Does it matter? There is nothing real on the Internet; all you know about me is my words. You can look me up on Google, and still all you will know is my words. One real person wrote this post. It could have been submitted under either name. But one of them is not allowed to. Does that really make sense?

Behind every pseudonym is a real person. Deny the pseudonym and you deny the person.
– Kee Hinckley, posted on Google+

(originally found here (Google+), reposted here, via Netzpolitik.org)

Two researchers from the University of California Davis, Hao Chen and Lian Cai, have successfully divined the keystrokes on an Android on-screen keyboard by measuring the wiggles, jiggles, and vibrations picked up by the device’s accelerometer. This is significant because the data from accelerometers is not thought of as a potential attack vector, and is thus freely available to any application on any smartphone or tablet.

via extremetech.com

Daniel Suarez, an American information technology consultant, followed up his first book “Daemon” (selfpublished 2006, published 2009 by Dutton; I wrote about it two weeks ago) with “FreedomTM”.

The first book is brilliant fiction in the sense that Suarez takes several things that exist in our world and puts them together in a way nobody else seems to have thought about before.
The second book “FreedomTM” continues with his ideas, but gains a new quality because Suarez’ ideas for a modern and truely democratic civilization are stated much more explicitly now.

Content
The Daemon, a computer program Matthew Sobol released when he died to take over the corporate world, has infested many companies. Whereas the fight between the Daemon and our world and the way the Daemon functions were portrayed in “Daemon”, now the US secret services decide to abuse the daemon for their own good, try to hack their way into it and manipulate it. One of the protagonists on this side is The Major:

“Bastards like me serve a purpose. People need order. They need to be told what to think, what to do, what to believe, or everything will fall apart. This miracle of modern civilization doesn’t just happen. It requires careful management by professionals willing to do whatever is necessary to keep things running smoothly …”

On the other side, we have farmers, hackers, our old friend Pete Sebeck and many others – members of the so-called “darknet”, a community that is hosted by the daemon. What was written between the lines in the first book is now written very explicitly in statements of characters. Suarez’ critique of the modern, globalised world starts before the book starts, with a quotation from Theodore Roosevelt (1906):

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befout the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statemanship of the day.”

The critique continues.
Read the rest of this entry »

Link of the day: Pirate Coelho

A) In the case that you download a book and like it, please buy the book, so we can tell to the industry that sharing contents is not life threatening to the book business.
B) You can do a relevant service to your community. Print and handle FOR FREE to a local library in a small town, to a hospital, to a prison. The intention of Pirate Coelho (as well as my free web books) is first and foremost share thoughts with people who cannot afford buying books.

Wonderful.

Ross Anderson, Cambridge University
vs.
Melanie Johnson, UK Cards Association

Background, as described on Ross Anderson’s blog, in the entry “merry Christmas to all bankers“:

“The bankers’ trade association has written to Cambridge University asking for the MPhil thesis of one of our research students, Omar Choudary, to be taken offline. They complain it contains too much detail of our No-PIN attack on Chip-and-PIN and thus ‘breaches the boundary of responsible disclosure’; they also complain about Omar’s post on the subject to this blog.
Needless to say, we’re not very impressed by this.”

And here are parts of the reply of Ross:

“You seem to think that we might censor a student’s thesis, which is lawful and already in the public domain, simply because a powerful interest finds it inconvenient. This shows a deep misconception of what universities are and how we work. Cambridge is the University of Erasmus, of Newton, and of Darwin; censoring writings that offend the powerful is offensive to our deepest values. Thus even though the decision to put the thesis online was Omar’s, we have no choice but to back him. That would hold even if we did not agree with the material! Accordingly I have authorised the thesis to be issued as a Computer Laboratory Technical Report. This will make it easier for people to find and to cite, and will ensure that its presence on our web site is permanent.”
[...]
“You complain that our work may undermine public confidence in the payments system. What will support public confidence in the payments system is evidence that the banks are frank and honest in
admitting its weaknesses when they are exposed, and diligent in effecting the necessary remedies. Your letter shows that, instead, your member banks do their lamentable best to deprecate the work of those outside their cosy club, and indeed to censor it.”

The entire letter can be found here.

Hilarious.

w00t!

w00t itself was first seen in 1994. The expression rose in popularity in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It has not reached general usage or understanding.

w00t is pronounced to rhyme with “boot” or “shoot”, and can also be written as “woot”, “w00+”, or “w007″. Some persistently argue that “w00t” is the only proper spelling.

The symbolic approximation of Latin letter forms makes w00t a prime example of leet. It may also sometimes be seen spelled as “wewt.”
This word was featured on the List of Merriam–Webster’s Words of the Year for 2007.

Read the rest of this entry »

• Go to Google.at
• Type in “Find Chuck Norris”
• Push the “Auf gut Glück” button.

(via Anja)

Douglas Adams, one of the most brilliant writers of the late 20th century, about modern technology, the internet, interactivity and humans as natural villagers:

“How to stop worrying and learn to love the internet”

A very recommendable article, and modern as well – an article that could have been very well written just yesterday.

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

RIP, Mr. Adams.
(Highgate Cemetery, London, July 2010)