firehose

An anonymous reader writes "Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer has contributed a Firefox patch that will block third-party cookies by default. It's now on track to land in version 22. Kudos to Mozilla for protecting their users and being so open to community submissions. The initial response from the online advertising industry is unsurprisingly hostile and blustering, calling the move 'a nuclear first strike.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

haitian-sensation:

hermanifesto:

whatiremembered:

Louis C.K. explains white privilege to America on Jay Leno, without actually saying “white privilege”.

this. this. ALL OF THIS. 

DAMMIT THIS MAN’S A GENIUS. A GOTDAMNED GENIUS

Dragon Quest x Animal Crossing

It’s Saturday afternoon, so you know what that means: shots of fun stuff you can do in Animal Crossing: New Leaf!

Here we have a player dream walking through a Dragon Quest-themed town someone’s created. This village has it all — monsters, shops, inns, Slimes, and even Torneko!

You can see more shots of the Dragon Quest town here.

PREORDER Animal Crossing: New Leaf (June 9), upcoming games

Side note: Some Redditors have come to a conclusion that this is one of the most reposted cat GIFs on the site.

Submitted by: Unknown (via Reddit)

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at-the-barricades-of-freedom:

Let’s take a look at a few of my favs so far;

Sassy Waterstones worker, I love you,

And well this is true:

Sometimes I do worry about their psyche though:

They make up cool new words;

They’re a sassy little shit.

And best of all, the Holden debacle;

And one more for good luck:

A NASCAR race at the Daytona International Speedway today was interrupted by a harrowing crash that sent debris flying into the stands and left some fans injured. As CNN reports, shredded debris flew into the racetrack barrier, with some reaching the second level of the track's stands. At least one fan who witnessed the event caught it on camera and promptly uploaded it to YouTube — but the video was blocked by NASCAR on copyright grounds just minutes after it went live.

It's not clear yet why NASCAR decided to block the fan-made video — it's not as if the fan ripped a television broadcast — but in typical fashion it's already been mirrored and re-uploaded. NASCAR does own all rights to film and broadcast anything that happens at its events, but taking down a video of a dangerous crash that injured spectators has sparked a backlash from observers who see it as an improper use of the DMCA.

We've asked NASCAR to comment on the copyright takedown and will update you if we receive more information. In the meantime, you can watch the video that it tried to block below.

• Via Brian Stelter
• Related Items nascar wreck youtube copyright dmca takedown

Popular Android Twitter client Falcon is the latest to run afoul of Twitter's app restrictions. Earlier today, Falcon's developers tweeted that it had hit the ceiling of 100,000 user tokens that Twitter's API allows for many third-party clients. That means that while people can still buy the app, new users won't be able to log in. To make things worse, running out of tokens doesn't necessarily mean 100,000 people paid for Falcon. It's listed on the Play Store as having between 10,000 and 50,000 installs, but extra tokens can be used up by things like piracy.

Tokens also only go back into the pool when users explicitly revoke them, which means people who use the app once and then uninstall it still count towards the limit. Twitter has emphasized that the limit only applies to apps that replicate the "core experience" of Twitter, a term that covers clients like Falcon or Tweetbot. It's caused consternation among developers: Tweetbot was forced to pull back on public testing for fear that unpaid users would use up tokens, and Tweetro said it was "completely crippled" by the change. Falcon is petitioning Twitter for more tokens, but the developers may end up looking for a workaround like Tweetro's "reboot."

• Source Falcon for Android (Twitter)Falcon (Play Store)
• Related Items twitter android app falcon twitter api falcon for android twitter token

From Stuart Kidd in the May 2003 Word Ways:

CANON is a synonym for ORDINANCE, and CANNON is a synonym for ORDNANCE.

We at [HAD] love any hack that combines children’s toys with science-fiction technology, so seeing a Tickle-Me-Elmo “frozen” in [Carbonite] is a definite win in our book. It’s also a great argument for joining your local Hackerspace, or just getting together with some like-minded friends. This idea came out of an impromptu brain-storming, or “talking about crazy ideas session” at the [Baltimore Node] hackerspace.

Fortunately [Todd] had access to all the tools necessary to make this “crazy idea” a reality. A [Shopbot] was used to cut out the box, and the side panels were 3D printed with help from these files on Thingiverse. For processing, an [ATtiny85] programmed using an Arduino was used to power this project.

There’s no mention of whether [Todd] would be willing to part with his creation, however, we would guess that there would be no bargaining with him. He’s not going to give up his favorite decoration easily.

Filed under: toy hacks

walterbyrd writes with news that Nikon is the latest company to agree to pay Microsoft for the privilege of using Android on its devices — as you might expect from Nikon, the devices in this case are cameras. (Microsoft's press release.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For the meantime

Raymond Pettibon

But mainly because people don’t want us to think that christpoher columbus was so douche like hitler was. Which he kind of was in a way. 

Khrushchev giving advice to the King and Queen of Denmark, 1964.

Boston Globe

Cambridge police investigating fake MIT threat NECN (NECN: Julie Loncich, Cambridge, Mass.) - "We treat all threats as credible until deemed otherwise," Cambridge Police Lt. Dan Boyle told reporters Saturday. Armed SWAT teams stormed the campus of MIT Saturday morning, and Cambridge Police, campus ... MIT campus briefly on lockdown after reports of man with 'long rifle'The Guardian Officials certain there was no gunman at MIT, feds investigatingMy Fox Boston all 108 news articles »

Thirty-six questions. Six answers. One random number generator. Welcome to Robot Roulette, where creators roll the virtual dice and answer our questions about their lives, careers, interests and more.

Trying his luck today is comic writer, guest lecturer and sometimes keynote speaker Mark Waid. He’s the man behind Thrillbent.com and the writer of such comics as Indestructible Hulk, Daredevil, Insufferable, Steed and Mrs. Peel, Rocketeer: Cargo of Doom, Kingdom Come, The Flash, Captain America, Legion of Superheroes, Amazing Spider-Man, Irredeemable, Fantastic Four and many more.

Now let’s get to it …

1. At what particular point in your career — a specific comic, job offer, convention, etc. — did you realized you’d gone from wanting to be a comic creator to knowing you’re a comic creator?

Easy. When I turned in my second issue of Flash, #63. I’d been convinced I was a fraud and someone was gonna figure that out and stop me from this career, and I was stumbling around, but then I suddenly GOT it mid-page. I remembered an important lesson I’d gotten from Marty Pasko, one of my all-time favorite writers, about how you really have to step inside the characters to make it all work, really think about (as he put it on a page of Action Comics #500, a page I proudly own) “the feeling of the wind in your face, in a way no one else in the world can feel it, or the sound bullets make when they bounce off living flesh.” I was writing about Wally West’s first run, the moment of unbridled joy in him when he realized he could run at super-speed, and–thinking of Pasko’s lesson–I somehow stumbled into this line of narration: “And the only sounds in the world were the roar of the wind and the thunder of my own two feet,” which to this day is probably the best sentence I ever wrote. I understood Wally in that split-second, and I didn’t feel like a fraud any longer.

12. What comic was your “gateway drug” and made you a comic fan?

Dude, I’ve told this story so many times now that alien civilizations can probably repeat it, but for you, a brief recap: Batman #180, the first issue my dad saw at a newsstand after the Adam West TV show debuted, of which I was immediately a huge fan. He brought it home for me and I haven’t stopped reading comics since.

13. Where did you grow up? Tell us something about where you grew up that we may not know.

I grew up all around and in the Birmingham, Alabama area, with lots of time spent in Tupelo, Mississippi, as well. Because my dad was middle-management with Gulf Oil, we moved around a lot as he trouble-shot different refineries–and once my folks got divorced, I lived with my mom for a bit and we moved, like, every week. I skipped two grades, but I still went to 12 different schools in 10 years. So while I was born in Hueytown and while, of all the places I’ve been, I still consider Tupelo “home,” I think the true answer to “where did you grow up?” is probably “Gotham City.”

23. What’s on the desk around your work area (feel free to send a picture if you’d like)?

Left to right: Thrillbent.com business cards, a Diet Coke, a small notebook, a box of graham crackers and that’s it. I need a sleek work space because I have the attention span of toaster.

28. Based on where you live right now, what’s the farthest you’ve ever been from home, and why did you go there?

New Zealand. For two back-to-back conventions. And I would go back in a cocaine heartbeat.

30. What hobbies or interests do you have outside of comics?

I don’t understand the question.

Psychology Today 2012
(image courtesy of)

Amazon to open market in second-hand MP3s and e-books - New Scientist:

A new market for second-hand digital downloads could let us hold virtual yard sales of our ever-growing piles of intangible possessions

WHY buy second-hand? For physical goods, the appeal is in the price – you don’t mind the creases in a book or rust spots on a car if it’s a bargain. Although digital objects never lose their good-as-new lustre, their very nature means there is still uncertainty about whether we actually own them in the first place, making it tricky to set up a second-hand market. Now an Amazon patent for a system to support reselling digital purchases could change that.

Amazon’s move comes after last year’s European Union ruling that software vendors cannot stop customers from reselling their products. But without technical support, the ruling has had no impact. In Amazon’s system, customers will keep their digital purchases – such as e-books or music – in a personal data store in the cloud that only they can access, allowing them to stream or download the content.

This part is like any cloud-based digital locker except that the customer can resell previous purchases by passing the access rights to another person. Once the transaction is complete, the seller will lose access to the content. Any system for reselling an e-book, for example, would have to ensure that it is not duplicated in the transaction. That means deleting any copies the seller may have lying around on hard drives, e-book readers, and other cloud services, since that would violate copyright.

Amazon may be the biggest company to consider a second-hand market, but it is not the first. ReDigi, based in Boston, has been running a resale market for digital goods since 2011. After downloading an app, users can buy a song on ReDigi for as little as 49 cents that would costs 99 cents new on iTunes.

That Was a Totally Appropriate Reaction to this Situation

Explodingdog at the Daily Dot

For her Let’s Move! (anti-obesity in kids) campaign, First lady Michelle Obama went on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon and danced with Fallon in the “Evolution of Mom Dancing.” FLOTUS ftw!

I’ll see you tonight @jimmyfallon. Bring your game face! -mo

— FLOTUS (@FLOTUS) February 22, 2013

.@flotus Here’s my game face. What’s yours? twitter.com/jimmyfallon/st…

— jimmy fallon (@jimmyfallon) February 22, 2013

.@jimmyfallon Game on, Jimmy. See you soon! -mo twitter.com/FLOTUS/status/…

— FLOTUS (@FLOTUS) February 22, 2013

Thousands of votes have led to today, a very special day: The final round of Eater's Third Annual Hottest Chef in America competition. Presenting the four contenders: Western Division winner Pascal Sauton (Milwaukie Kitchen & Wine, Portland, OR); Central Division winner Joanna Powell (Cafe Aion, Denver); Southern Division winner Frank McMahon (Hank's Seafood Restaurant, Charleston); and Northeast Division winner Karen Akunowicz (Myers+Chang, Boston).

The winner gets all the glory and joins SF's David Bazirgan (2011 Hottest Chef in America) and Texas' Kurt Ramborger (2012 Hottest Chef in America) in the pantheon of notable chef hotness. To the vote:

Update 2/20 2PM EST: Voting is now closed, votes are being tabulated and analyzed, and the winner will be announced soon.

Update 2/20 3PM EST: Eater's Hottest Chef in America 2013 Is Pascal Sauton

Update 2/20 2PM EST: Voting is now closed, votes are being tabulated and analyzed, and the winner will be announced soon.

Update 2/20 3PM EST: Eater's Hottest Chef in America 2013 Is Pascal Sauton

· All Hottest Chef Coverage on Eater [-E-]

rtfa-troll writes "There has been a worldwide (all locations) total outage of storage in Microsoft's Azure cloud. Apparently, 'Microsoft unwittingly let an online security certificate expire Friday, triggering a worldwide outage in an online service that stores data for a wide range of business customers,' according to the San Francisco Chronicle (also Yahoo and the Register). Perhaps too much time has been spent sucking up to storage vendors and not enough looking after the customers? This comes directly after a week-long outage of one of Microsoft's SQL server components in Azure. This is not the first time that we have discussed major outages on Azure and probably won't be the last. It's certainly also not the first time we have discussed Microsoft cloud systems making users' data unavailable."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Guardian

Egypt 'spent £1.7m on teargas' amid economic crisis The Guardian Egypt spent the equivalent of £1.7m on 140,000 US-sourced teargas canisters last month, despite the Egyptian government nearing bankruptcy – and amid a wave of police brutality that 21 human rights groups this week labelled a return to Mubarak-era state ... and more »

Telegraph.co.uk

Weak yen adds to woes confronting South Korea's Park Reuters By David Chance. SEOUL | Sun Feb 24, 2013 4:00pm EST. SEOUL Feb 25 (Reuters) - South Korea's new president faces a hostile North Korea that seeks nuclear weapons, a moribund domestic economy and now new pressure on its exporters and growth ... Park takes helmThe Korea Herald S. Korea's new leader warns powerful conglomeratesThe Star Online all 259 news articles »

At last year's RSA security conference, we ran into the Pwnie Plug. The company has just come out with a new take on the same basic idea of pen-testing devices based on commodity hardware. Reader puddingebola writes with an excerpt from Wired: "The folks at security tools company Pwnie Express have built a tablet that can bash the heck out of corporate networks. Called the Pwn Pad, it's a full-fledged hacking toolkit built atop Google's Android operating system. Some important hacking tools have already been ported to Android, but Pwnie Express says that they've added some new ones. Most importantly, this is the first time that they've been able to get popular wireless hacking tools like Aircrack-ng and Kismet to work on an Android device." Pwnie Express will be back at RSA and so will Slashdot, so there's a good chance we'll get a close-up look at the new device, which runs about $800.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

By Jim Rossignol on February 22nd, 2013 at 8:00 pm.

This is the problem: there’s too much other stuff. I run a PC games site, and even I missed this one arriving late last year. And I shouldn’t have. A top-down, claustrophobic horror-shooter with procedural levels. It’s brilliant, horrifying, commanding, excruciating. We’ve posted about Teleglitch before, of course, but last night the boy Quinns told me that we hadn’t written enough about it, and that it was “a phenomenon”, like a top-down System Shock, he said. Coming back to it today, I realised I’d played a few minutes of it and become distracted, thinking to return later. Short-term memory was over-written. Forgotten. The old beta is still here, installed and abandoned on my gaming desktop. I had no idea. I grabbed the latest version and went back for the afternoon.

Well. Quinns wasn’t wrong.

Look, there’s a demo. You don’t have to bother reading my wittering.

Here are the important bits, though:

LIGHT

And dark, obviously. It’s top down, but you can only see what’s in line of sight. So there could be things lurking around that corner. There could be death. There is death. It creates a flowing world, a constant dynamic blindness to what is out there. Or what isn’t out there. You glimpse cracks of light where you can break through into secrets. Scenes open up. It’s more about negative space than what you can actually see on screen. That void and the constant play of distortion effects sell a convincing atmosphere of altered reality. It’s sketchy in the sense that it is impressionistic and pixellated, and it’s sketchy in the sense that the place as a tenuous grasp on its reality.

And it’s packed with details. These fragments of text are sometimes beautifully written. Each death message made me smile.

FEAR

We’ve been here before I think, and you are probably familiar with a similar timbre of lo-fi threat. The game is tough, and the things that come for you are fast and vicious. It batters you like Hotline Miami’s masked fuckers. And you have limited resources. It’s not just the hit-points that are going to run out, it’s everything else. Overwhelming. Overwhelmed. Quitting out, exhausted.

Then there’s something else here, the sort of dread hum of it. Games do this so well: the sort of sci-fi that works best by not explaining anything, and not really showing anything, but just doing enough to make clear that THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG WITH EVERYTHING. That super-natural aspect of sci-fi fictions which deal with inhumanity and underlying complexities that are of a magnitude beyond our intelligence: stuff, like the alien of Alien, that is both impossibly sophisticated and bestial, or something that is both incomprehensible and liable to tear us apart in a way that we can’t even understand, like black holes. Crushed by maths: threat, the horror of unknowable, implacable forces.

PROCEDURALITY

The levels are the same and yet different. Procedural randomisation of world elements means you might learn the beat and components of a level, but you can’t learn the layout. You can’t know.

CONTROL

People will say this is like Alien Breed, of course they will, but this manages to be the game those games wish they were, whilst being even more lo-fi. It has a fraction of the fidelity of a 16-bit era Alien Breed game and yet it contains multitudes more. This game is their failed intention. The tight control of slowing and aiming with right click, firing with left, and then just turning and releasing the button and fleeing is something perfect in this kind of top-down shooter design. It feels convincing.

You also have an inventory in which you can combine found items. This is critical to how the game works: you will need some of the things you can make, and others might be a waste. I made a gun that I didn’t have ammo for. A brilliant gun, but my old gun was gone, of course. I died. Next time, I had ammo, and that gun took me to the next level. Bombs and guns and rockets: there are a lot of mad, noisey toys here. It’s loud and extremely violent. You will kill yourself with explosives. Smashed into fiery scraps.

There’s another layer of physicality there too, that is almost pointless, and is certainly unnecessary: you can push items around in world. You have weight. The world is not a static, untouchable set piece. There’s not much use for this. But it’s there. Boxes move. And it adds life.

If there’s a major downside it’s that the shapeless pixel world makes it tough to read, and it becomes hard to see what anything might be. It’s also brutal. Brutal. You will die in a corner because you ran out of ammo. You will realise you could have used X or Y to escape that situation. But you didn’t. It’s too late now.

You will plummet backwards and silently screaming down the open elevator shaft of progress through the game, because it defeated you. Procedurality lends itself to having good runs and bad runs due to circumstance, and never more so than here.

It’s going to kick my ass. There is almost no chance of my finishing it. And not just because there’s too much other stuff.

By Adam Smith on February 22nd, 2013 at 6:00 pm.

The King of the Wood is a free, short-form riff on Bladerunner and Deus Ex, with an android-hunting protagonist plucked from the former and the infiltration-infused frisson of freedom of the latter in its single mission. Unless you become confused and keep shooting at a window, as I did, you’ll probably finish it in fifteen minutes or so and may well agree that you spent your time well. It’s a first-person detective adventure with some thinking, some shooting and a fair bit of mostly optional reading. You can play in your browser (provided you have Unity Web Player) or download. Very brief thoughts below.

As with many of my favourite free games of recent times, this feels like a sample chapter of something larger, in direct contrast to Thirty Flights of Loving, a game to which this could be the less aesthetically extravagant cousin. I’d like to tie together the pictures, book extracts and film clip – I suspect there’s a larger story than I’ve recognised – but I found the final action majestically forlorn.

Via Indiegames.com.