firehose

in the future everyone will be tumblr famous for 15 minutes

cervesaebraciator writes "The Guardian reports that the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit has arrested two men from Birmingham and have seized 'suspected counterfeit DVD box sets worth around £40,000, including titles such as Game of Thrones, CSI and Vampire Diaries.' The claim is that the men were buying foreign counterfeit copies and selling them online as genuine. London police commissioner Adriad Leppard offers commentary indicative of the thinking behind these efforts, saying, 'Intellectual property crime is already costing our economy hundreds of millions of pounds a year and placing thousands of jobs under threat, and left unchecked and free to feed on new technology could destroy some of our most creative and productive industries.' The article offers £51 billion as an estimate for the cost of illegal downloading to the music, film, and software industry, a figure they say will triple by 2015." Meanwhile, Netflix is paying attention to piracy via torrent sites as well. The difference is that they're using that data to decide what shows they should buy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

pyropi:

no sorry i can’t go out with you tonight i have a hot date

Looks like some of mine. :)

the-fury-of-a-time-lord:

losingmycool-bcsupernatural:

jtotheizzoe:

An important reminder that the universe has three spatial dimensions and is best appreciated with all three engaged*.

*engage fourth as needed for EXTREME MODE

god dammit people tag your porn

FUCK THIS IS SEXY

if u dont hear from me

it was facebook

by Eugene

_{Silhouettes of Alfred Hitchcock and Cary Grant on the set of Notorious, 1946.}

Hatris (Video System - arcade - 1990)

vgjunk:

Flyer for Hatris, which as the name suggests is Tetris but with hats.

Government and industry have betrayed the Internet, and us.

By subverting the Internet at every level to make it a vast, multi-layered and robust surveillance platform, the NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. The companies that build and manage our Internet infrastructure, the companies that create and sell us our hardware and software, or the companies that host our data: we can no longer trust them to be ethical Internet stewards.

This is not the Internet the world needs, or the Internet its creators envisioned. We need to take it back.

And by we, I mean the engineering community.

Yes, this is primarily a political problem, a policy matter that requires political intervention.

But this is also an engineering problem, and there are several things engineers can -- and should -- do.

One, we should expose. If you do not have a security clearance, and if you have not received a National Security Letter, you are not bound by a federal confidentially requirements or a gag order. If you have been contacted by the NSA to subvert a product or protocol, you need to come forward with your story. Your employer obligations don't cover illegal or unethical activity. If you work with classified data and are truly brave, expose what you know. We need whistleblowers.

We need to know how exactly how the NSA and other agencies are subverting routers, switches, the Internet backbone, encryption technologies and cloud systems. I already have five stories from people like you, and I've just started collecting. I want 50. There's safety in numbers, and this form of civil disobedience is the moral thing to do.

Two, we can design. We need to figure out how to re-engineer the Internet to prevent this kind of wholesale spying. We need new techniques to prevent communications intermediaries from leaking private information.

We can make surveillance expensive again. In particular, we need open protocols, open implementations, open systems -- these will be harder for the NSA to subvert.

The Internet Engineering Task Force, the group that defines the standards that make the internet run, has a meeting planned for early November in Vancouver. This group needs to dedicate its next meeting to this task. This is an emergency, and demands an emergency response.

Three, we can influence governance. I have resisted saying this up to now, and I am saddened to say it, but the US has proved to be an unethical steward of the Internet. The UK is no better. The NSA's actions are legitimizing the internet abuses by China, Russia, Iran and others. We need to figure out new means of internet governance, ones that makes it harder for powerful tech countries to monitor everything. For example, we need to demand transparency, oversight, and accountability from our governments and corporations.

Unfortunately, this is going play directly into the hands of totalitarian governments that want to control their country's Internet for even more extreme forms of surveillance. We need to figure out how to prevent that, too. We need to avoid the mistakes of the International Telecommunications Union, which has become a forum to legitimize bad government behavior, and create truly international governance that can't be dominated or abused by any one country.

Generations from now, when people look back on these early decades of the Internet, I hope they will not be disappointed in us. We can ensure that they don't only if each of us makes this a priority, and engages in the debate. We have a moral duty to do this, and we have no time to lose.

Dismantling the surveillance state won't be easy. Has any country that engaged in mass surveillance of its own citizens voluntarily given up that capability? Has any mass surveillance country avoided becoming totalitarian? Whatever happens, we're going to be breaking new ground.

Again, the politics of this is a bigger task than the engineering, but the engineering is critical. We need to demand that real technologists be involved in any key government decision making on these issues. We've had enough of lawyers and politicians not fully understanding technology; we need technologists at the table when we build tech policy.

To the engineers, I say this: we built the Internet, and some of us have helped to subvert it. Now, those of us who love liberty have to fix it.

This essay previously appeared in the Guardian.

EDITED TO ADD: Slashdot thread. An opposing view to my call to action. And I agree with this, even though the author presents this as an opposing view to mine.

vigilanted:

is no one going to talk about this or

An anonymous reader writes "Writer and activist Cory Doctorow says competition keeps Google behaving ethically because it believes there are benefits to be had. However, as it moves into sectors where it faces fewer rivals this may not always be the case. 'It actually seems to be a quality metric. They believe they can attract customers, independent software vendors, resellers and an ecosystem around them by not being evil,' he says. 'Where they operate in narrower, less competitive markets — like where they’ve become an Internet service provider, for example — they abandon those commitments.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

invader - Kabuki Quantum Fighter (Human - NES - 1991)

Escalator etiquette

hodad

#soundstudies buzzfeed

Original Source

OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

hmmm

Gary Carr on Downton Abbey via. Mail.co.uk

Downton Abbey boss Julian Fellowes has slammed the depiction of black actors in TV. The writer said the first black face in the ITV period drama will instead be very much a positive role model.

Jazz singer Jack Ross, played by Gary Carr, makes his debut in the fourth series which hits our screens next month.

And Julian, 64, said: “I was very keen he should be a positive character. I feel this quite strongly. So many black characters in TV drama are victims and things are not going well for them. Even when they’re positive, even when they’re sympathetic, everything’s terrible. I feel for black young men and women. It’s very important that you see people on the screen who are not victims. This guy is not a victim. He is a very successful entertainer, a very positive guy, very attractive, and there’s no negative side, and that was important to me.”

– “Downton Abbey Creator Julian Fellows Slams Depiction of Black Actors on TV,” The Mirror UK, September 6, 2013

Original Source

MojoKid writes "Yep, a USB condom. That term is mostly a dose of marketing brilliance, which is to say that grabs your attention while also serving as an apt description of the product. A little company called int3.cc has developed a product—a USB condom—that blocks the data pins in your USB device while leaving the power pins free. Thus, any time you need to plug a device such as a smartphones into a USB port to charge it—let's say at a public charging kiosk or a coworker's computer--you don't have to worry about compromising any data or contracting some nasty malware. It's one of those simple solutions that seems so obvious once someone came up with it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

popular shared this story from Marginal Revolution.

---

CBS News uncovers a frightening new trend, unregulated dinner parties:

As you sit down to dinner, this story illustrates eating out like you have never experienced before. We are talking about super-secret, illegal dining experiences hosted in homes.

CBS 2 investigative reporter Tamara Leitner went undercover to see firsthand how this underground world works.

It may look like a dinner party, but it’s really an underground supper club.

The diners are a mix of New Yorkers and tourists. CBS 2’s undercover cameras captured one experience — eight people who didn’t know each other eating a meal in a stranger’s home.

Horrifying. CBS, however, missed an even bigger story. It’s one thing when adults subject themselves to danger but surely even libertarians with their heads stuck in the 19th century must recognize that it is something else again when the least powerful among us are subject to these same dangers without their consent. Intrepid economistArt Cardenhas the story of abuse and shame that has remained hidden for too long:

…children–children, mind you–are being fed food that’s prepared in unregulated, uninspected, and possibly less-than-sanitary conditions.

The bunny has been watching the dog herding; now bunny thinks he can herd too

Even though we officially "eliminated" measles in the US 13 years ago, the Center for Disease Control has put us on track for the worst year for the disease in nearly two decades. Is the spread of this "dead" disease tied to the religious right's fears of vaccination?

At a recent stop in Illinois on the much-discussed Oddball Comedy and Curiosity Festival, Chappelle told this story about the time Kanye performed on Chappelle’s Show just as he was starting to blow up, and it is just perfect.

1. Your Coworker

It’s happened to me over and over: I’ll spend hours trying to track down a problem. In frustration, I’ll ask a coworker to look at the code and frequently they will point out the problem in seconds. It’s called situational blindness and it means that you will often overlook the bug right in front of your eyes because you’ve looked at it so much, your mind has started to ignore it.

Your coworker has another valuable trait: they are different than you. They think differently and have a different set of knowledge. A hard bug for you to find might be easy for them. Next time you’re frustrated, call over a coworker and see what happens.

2. Your Creative Side

It’s happened to me over and over: I’ll build something with a flaw that doesn’t quite work right. I’ll go to sleep frustrated and wake up the next morning knowing exactly what the problem is.

It’s well known that we think in two different manners: creatively and logically. When focused on details (such as debugging a problem), we’re 100% logical as we jump from thought A to B to C. But it’s your creative side that can jump from thought A to thought Z via intuition. Like your coworker, your creative brain thinks differently from your logical brain. By going to sleep, you’re calling over that “creative coworker” and asking for help.

3. Your Mental Model of the System

If you don’t know the software tools and APIs you are using to solve problems really well, you’ll find yourself endlessly debugging. When learning a system like Ruby on Rails for the first few years, debugging is often really just learning how the system works. Software is insanely complex and every level of the stack is insanely complex. Abstractions hide much of the complexity and understanding those abstractions well allows you to fit it all within your head.

Malcom Gladwell’s maxim that expertise comes with 10,000 hours of practice holds here too. After 5 years of full-time experience (40hrs/wk * 50 wk/yr * 5), you’ll have a very strong understanding of your system of choice. That knowledge is very valuable.

Pro tip: read the documentation for a library that you are going to use, implement your first attempt at using that library, and then read the documentation again. The first time will give you an overview and things to look for but frequently you won’t comprehend certain aspects due to your inexperience with the library. You almost certainly will comprehend more when you read it the second time.

Conclusion

All of these things have one thing in common: thought. Debugging is thinking through the execution of code in your head. By improving your knowledge and looking at the problem from different angles, you can much more effectively debug those hard problems that can be so frustrating.

cachaemic:

Frozach Submitted