Hey, check it out, walls have appeared!
What you are seeing is the skeleton of one of the two new restrooms, located in the back room above DNA Pizza.
Someone is wrong on the Internet.
I think the most annoying internet micro-trend this year has been graphic designers making "new" posters for old movies. "Oh look, I made a poster for a blockbuster scifi movie but I made it 'minimal' and/or look like it starred Steve McQueen! Aren't I precious?" No. You're a talentless hack. Make something new.Also, stop posting things with the comment, "Presented without comment". That is a comment, you smirking illiterate! It's just passive-voice and cowardly. Take a stand.
Tags: art, banned words, firstperson, movies
"TSA Oversight Part III: Effective Security or Security Theater?"
Bruce Schneier:
I was supposed to testify today about the TSA in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. I was informally invited a couple of weeks ago, and formally invited last Tuesday.
On Friday, at the request of the TSA, I was removed from the witness list. The excuse was that I am involved in a lawsuit against the TSA, trying to get them to suspend their full-body scanner program. But it's pretty clear that the TSA is afraid of public testimony on the topic, and especially of being challenged in front of Congress. They want to control the story, and it's easier for them to do that if I'm not sitting next to them pointing out all the holes in their position. Unfortunately, the committee went along with them.
Tags: big brother, computers, doomed, security
Phone numbers
Remember when you used to be able to google the number of an unknown caller and that worked? Yeah, that was nice. Those results have been utterly, 100% poisoned by spammers for years now.
It doesn't really matter, though, since though I understand that the new iPhones include real-time voice-chat, I never use it. There are only three numbers I ever accept voice calls from, and one of them's a robot, but sometimes I'm curious.
How is it that the cell companies still think it's a good idea for the protocol to not include the text of the subscriber name? Land-line CID had that, but cells never have. It's weird.
Tags: firstperson, phones, robots, spam, www
DNA Lounge: Wherein Blow Up leaves us, and we've got some Fridays to fill.
I'm sorry to report that Jeffrey and Ava have decided to stop doing Blow Up, at least for the foreseeable future. We've got three left, but the final Blow Up will be on Fri, Apr 13.
I'm really sorry to see them go, because Blow Up was by far my favorite of our regular parties. I understand that they're taking a break from club promotion for a while. There are a few reasons for this, among them that Jeffrey's got his hands full with his band Poolside, who have been doing well and doing a lot of touring lately.
In addition to losing a fun party, this means that now we've got a bunch of Fridays to fill, and on somewhat short notice. We've got a few leads, but if you have suggestions of parties or promoters that you think would be a good fit at DNA Lounge, please point them our way, because we're kind of in a mad scramble at this point to avoid being dark on any of our immanent Fridays! It would help us a lot if you could spread the word.
Metreon: Enemy of The Fucktopus.
I'm so glad that Metreon is going out of its way to make it harder for me to read webcomics in Yerba Buena Park.
Tags: a/b, art, big brother, boobs, comics, doomed, firstperson, perversions, security, sf, tentacles
By viewing this t-shirt you agree to the following terms and conditions
A couple of questions for the lawyers:
Is a "Kiss Me I'm Irish" t-shirt a defense against a sexual assault charge?
Is an "I'm With Stupid" t-shirt libel?
Followup: What if the person to the right is, in fact, stupid? Does it then hinge on the interpretation of "with"?
Tags: copyright, fashion, firstperson
Travel Posters for Lazy People
Caldwell Tanner: These are all fantastic.
"A reminder from the IT'S RAINING AND YOUR BAND SUCKS Travel Agency"!
Ad- and spyware-blocking
Here's what I use. What do you use?
- Privoxy
- I know everyone else in the world is probably using AdBlock or something, but I've been using Privoxy for ages and I'm used to it. (I almost wrote, "I like being able to type my own regexps" but no I don't, that's just the Stockholm Syndrome talking.)
On the plus side, since it's a system-wide proxy, it blocks ads not only in Safari but also in NetNewsWire and anything else that loads web pages.
On the minus side, it makes Little Snitch less useful (see below).
- Little Snitch
- Little Snitch is kind of amazing and I grudgingly admit that it is worth the $30 for its entertainment value alone. It lets you monitor and block network connections initiated by applications on a per-application, per-host and/or per-port basis, so you can tell what's trying to "phone home" on you, and stop it.
Unfortunately the combination of Privoxy and Little Snitch means that "port 80" is the root password that bypasses this. If some random application phones home by loading a URL via webkit, then by the time Little Snitch sees that connection, all it knows is that the "Privoxy" process connected to port 80, not that the connection is really coming from some app that ought not be making such connections at all. It can't tell the difference between some-random-app and you clicking links in a web browser. So that's a bummer.
If there was a way to tell MacOS that Safari and NetNewsWire should use the HTTP proxy but all other apps should connect directly, this would work better, but as far as I know there is not.
- Ghostery
- This seems to do a good job of blocking all manner of web-page spyware, and like Little Snitch, shows you what it's blocking. I had been using Incognito before this, but as far as I can tell, Ghostery does a superset of what Incognito does, but with better feedback over what's happening.
I suppose there's no way to get ad blocking on iOS without jailbreaking it or running a non-standard web browser app?
Incidentally, I was wondering whether Reeder on iOS is using SSL when it syncs my subscriptions with Google Reader, and I realized that I don't actually know how to snoop my wifi network in order to answer this question. Do you know the answer?
- Update: I think that Reeder on iOS is using SSL to connect to Google Reader and download the RSS contents of all of the feeds. It then connects to the sites directly to load images over http, as you'd expect. Oddly, though, it seems to keep connecting/caching long after its "busy" throbber has stopped, and mostly what it's loading is all of those stupid "apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png" URLs, so maybe this is some lower-level webkit nonsense instead of Reeder itself. Surprisingly, NetNewsWire on the desktop is connecting to Google over http instead of https.
Tags: computers, firstperson, lazyweb, mac, security, www
Current Music: EMA -- Marked ♬
