Category: Interesting Reads

Damn leprechauns

I know many of you will read this poor gentleman’s sad tale of Irish tragedy and think “There but for the grace of God.”

I, however, read it and realize that some day that could be my picture in the paper. I can’t tell you how many times leprechauns have tricked me in to cars that weren’t mine.

A man was caught Tuesday morning inside a car with his pants down.

. . .

Investigators said Leblanc told them he had done drugs and believed that a leprechaun had let him into the car.

Oddly, the leprechauns only open car doors for me when I also am wandering through the streets without any pants on. (via boingboing)

[tags]Leprechauns, Always after me lucky charms, Pantless, There’s an explosion – IN MAH PANTS[/tags]

Staying on the down-low on P2P

All the cool kids are in to peer-to-peer filesharing these days. Estimates suggest anywhere from 30% to 90% of all internet traffic (depending on which source you believe) is P2P filesharing traffic, so this is clearly something that a lot of folks online are using. Naturally, the companies responsible for distributing physical media resources for distributing this information (here I’m thinkg of companies like the RIAA and MPAA since they are the most visibly affected) want to stop this online trading, and have taken steps to disrupt the data-streams.

Recently, University of California, Riverside researchers studied filesharing traffic, looking to see how much those sharing files are watched. Condensing that report to a highlights summary, PhysOrg has this brief article about the results of the filesharing observation work.

“We found that a naïve user has no chance of staying anonymous,” said Banerjee. “One hundred percent of the time, unprotected file-sharing was tracked by people there to look for copyright infringement.”

However, the research showed that “blocklist” software such as (PeerGuardian, Bluetack, and Trusty Files) are fairly effective at reducing the risks of being observed down to about 1 percent.

Read the linked PhysOrg story for a little more information, or download the full PDF paper, titled P2P: Is Big Brother Watching You? to see what the researchers found. This should help you understand how to protect yourself and minimize your exposure to the industry watchers who are looking for downloaders.

While I don’t propose folks start stealing songs, movies, TV shows, and so on from the content producers, I agree with one of the researchers who points out that this technology is not going away, and these industries would have a much better future if they worked to leverage the technology and offer reasonably priced options to users rather than trying to just shut down P2P.

[tags]P2P, Peer to peer, Filesharing, Is big brother watching you, Big Brother, MPAA, RIAA[/tags]

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Fox sports usability

While catching up on with the latest news about the worthless fuckers who shot a man in an attempted robbery at the university where my wife works, I saw the following three indecipherable links to sports stories. Can you tell WTF they are supposed to say? If you were in charge of the Fox Sports web site, would you have a talk with your site layout designers?

fox-sports-01 “Another early playoff exit, another off-season of questions, Ken Rosenthal says. The big one? Who’s seen their last days in N.Y.?”


fox-sports-02“Which star do you want on the mound in October – Schilling or Clemens? After Sunday, Mark Kriegel thinks the choice is clear.”


fox-sports-03“The Lions have looked like contenders at times and pretenders at others. Alex Marvez breaks down the inconsistency.”


And those images showed up the same in Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer. It seems that someone needs a little lesson in CSS or usability and user interface design.  Sure, with squinting and reaaalllllly focusing on the images, you can just make out the text.  Personally, I think better coloring on the background would work that problem out just fine.

[tags]Fox Sports, User interface design, Usability, WTF[/tags]

Image manipulation experts helping track down a child abuser

There are scumbags out there who think it’s cool to sexually abuse children. Some of the extra stupid of them post pictures on the internet of themselves with children they’ve abused. Thinking that simple photo manipulation will keep their identities secret, these idiots thankfully don’t realize that such editing can be undone. Recently, Interpol posted one such partially restored image and asked the public to help identify an abuser who has for years posted images of himself with many different children.

msn_interpol_hmed_630a.hmedium.jpg

Interpol sought public help Monday in identifying a suspected pedophile, revealing a technique to unscramble digitally altered images to show the face of a man seen in Internet photos sexually abusing young boys in Vietnam and Cambodia.

. . .

[Interpol child abuse database overseer] Persson said he personally had opposed making the photos public because it demonstrated to criminals that police can now unblur pictures. But that consideration and the risk that the man could face public humiliation or even violence now that he is recognizable were outweighed by the desire to protect other children from abuse.

Points for the good guys, and hopefully they’ll catch this bastard soon. Sadly, people like this, when caught, are often kept in solitary confinement to protect them from other prisoners. Even among criminals, child abusers are looked down upon. According to folks I’ve known in law-enforcement, child abusers tend to be especially abused in prison if not kept separate.

[tags]Sexual abuse, Interpol, Hunting child abusers, Image manipulation[/tags]

Off-duty sheriff’s deputy goes on shooting spree at a private home

This is just freaky news:

An off-duty sheriff’s deputy went on a shooting rampage early Sunday at a home where seven young people had gathered for pizza and movies, killing six and critically injuring the other before authorities fatally shot him, officials said.

. . .

The circumstances of the shooting were hazy Sunday and it wasn’t immediately clear what the gunman’s motive was, but the mother of a 14-year-old victim said the suspect may have been a jealous boyfriend. The shooting occurred in a white, two-story duplex about a block from downtown Crandon.

The shooter in question is 20 years old, and apparently touched in the head (and not in the good way).

[tags]WTF, Shooting spree, Touched in the head[/tags]

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Blogger fired for blogging about work

This would be easy to hear about initially and start griping about how wrong it is, but in the end it’s just a case of properly being punished for being stupid.  A young lady from Nintendo posted to her blog things about work.  She criticized cow-orkers, perhaps thinking that because she didn’t name them specifically she wouldn’t get in trouble.  Someone at Nintendo found out about her blogging and she was fired.

fired_blogger_clip On August 31, Jessica Zenner was driving her 3-year-old son to day care when her BlackBerry rang. It was the human resources director at Zenner’s work calling to tell her she was fired. The cause, Zenner says, was because her bosses at Nintendo discovered her personal blog, Inexcusable Behavior.

. . .

One post on Zenner’s blog—titled “The Daily Weed”—begins with her disputing her friends’ perception that she is a pothead. She digresses into a wry tirade against one of her bosses: “One plus about working with [a] hormonal, facial-hair-growing, frumpy [woman] is that I have found a new excuse to drink heavily,” Zenner writes. “My gut tells me that this woman hasn’t been fucked in years.”


Now really, I totally get griping about cow-orkers.  I tell others allllll the time about the stupidity I see and suffer through at work.  But I’ve been careful to not gripe too specifically on the Blahg about work, and decided to remove the one really bad post I made after I put it up last year.  Blogging and anything about one’s job just don’t go together for non-work blogs.  It’s not wise, and anyone who thinks about it can see why companies are not keen on having their employees blog about work – even anonymously (although claiming the post anonymously and posting a picture of yourself on your blog aren’t really compatible thoughts).

I feel for her, because she’s young and made a mistake that an older worker probably would have realized could be trouble.  But I’ve seen others call out first amendment protections or claim that since she wasn’t blogging AT work, she can’t be fired for it.  I don’t think those are applicable here since she’s not at all anonymous nor can one freely criticize others and not face consequences just because one doesn’t use specific names.  If it’s easy to figure out who she’s talking about, she’s going to cause trouble for her employee.

On the plus side, she has since found a new job, and I’m pretty sure her new employer knows about this and has most likely already specifically condoned further personal blogs (although I bet they have advised her on things not to blog so she doesn’t get into this kind of trouble again).  (via Joystiq)

[tags]Stupid, Blogger fired for personal blog, Protected speech[/tags]

Men – hide your stash of pr0n better than this guy

Pr0n! One of the driving factors in the growth of the intarpipes, I am certain. Fantasy get-away for many men. For one man, however, it was only a sure-fire method to peeve the old-lady and suffer a serious hurting.

A Chicago woman who became enraged after discovering her longtime boyfriend’s stash of pornography shot and killed him in their South Side home over the weekend, prosecutors said.

. . .

Strowder and Martin had lived together in the 5300 block of South Shields Avenue for the last two years, prosecutors said at a hearing Tuesday at which Strowder was ordered held in lieu of $600,000 bail. On Sunday night, Strowder found CDs inside the home containing images of nude women and lost control, authorities said.

Ding-dang-diggity! That’s some freaky scary stuff, right men?

[tags]Pr0n for disaster[/tags]

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Denied! – Bush executive order to stop release of Presidential papers as the public documents they are

In 2001, President Bush signed an executive order which would allow a President to disallow the publication of Presidential papers as long as he/she wished, even extending that write to descendants.  Since these documents are public records except in the case of classified information, this has never been done before.  Formerly, all Presidential documents (again, excluding classified materials) were released as the public records they are after a set time past the end of a President’s administration.  With the Bush executive order, researchers had to prove a need for the records before they would be released if any relative wished to hold them as non-public records.  And that’s pretty hard to prove, when you don’t know what the records hold.

Recently, a judge upheld the public’s right to access to these records and blocked the portion of the executive order which would stop the release of papers.

A federal judge on Monday tossed out part of a 2001 order by President George W. Bush that lets former presidents keep some of their presidential papers secret indefinitely.

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled that the U.S. Archivist’s reliance on the executive order to delay release of the papers of former presidents is “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion and not in accordance with law.”

You might remember Kollar-Kotelly for her work on the Microsoft case.  While some of her work in the past has been criticized, I like her for the fact that she has ordered Bush administration officials to speak on the illegal domestic surveillance in the post-9/11 era.

[tags]President Bush, Executive order, Presidential papers, Public documents, Kollar-Kotelly[/tags]

Freaky news of the day – surrogate births her own twin grandchildren

So when the woman who carried you 9 months in the womb and birthed you is also your grandmother, would you call her Mom or Grandma? That’s the question these Brazilian twins will have to figure out when they are old enough to talk.

Rosinete Palmeira Serrao, a government health worker, gave birth to twin boys by Caesarean section on Thursday at the Santa Joana Hospital in the city of Recife, the hospital said in a statement on its Web site.

. . .

Serrao decided to serve as a surrogate mother after four years of failed attempts at pregnancy by her 27-year-old daughter, Claudia Michelle de Brito.

Kudos for going above and beyond normal parental responsibilities in helping your child have children of her own, but man if those kids were American, I could foresee them needing counseling as teens. I’m sure it shouldn’t seem weird, but yet I think it is weird. It’s no Ray Stevens’ tune, but it’s pretty close.

[tags]Mom is my grandma, Grandma is my mom, Brazilian woman gives birth to own grandchildren[/tags]

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Applying game theory to anti-terrorism

In what I would say is a smart play to making things more difficult for terrorists, Los Angeles airport security officials are using randomized security checkpoints to make pre-attack scouting work more risky.

…Anxious to thwart future terror attacks in the early stages while plotters are casing the airport, LAX security patrols have begun using a new software program called ARMOR, NEWSWEEK has learned, to make the placement of security checkpoints completely unpredictable. Now all airport security officials have to do is press a button labeled “Randomize,” and they can throw a sort of digital cloak of invisibility over where they place the cops’ antiterror checkpoints on any given day.

. . .

The ARMOR software is the real-world product of an idea that began as an academic question in game theory. USC doctoral student Praveen Paruchuri sought to find a way for one “agent” (or robot or company) to react to an adversary who has perfect information about the agent’s decisions. Using artificial intelligence and game theory, Paruchuri wrote a new, fast set of algorithms to randomize the actions of the first agent. But when he took the paper to prestigious AI conferences, nobody would publish the work. The basic reaction: great math, but so what? “They said, ‘We don’t see a practical use for it’,” says Milind Tambe, the USC engineering professor who led the ARMOR team. “It was very disappointing.”

I had a math professor in college who preferred to live in the world of theoretical math – it was cleaner, and not constrained by looking to make something out of the ideas studied. It sounds like Purachuri ran in to mostly theoretical mathematicians who didn’t like real-world products messing up their precious Gedankenexperiment work. Fortunately, LAX officials didn’t view the work the same as the academics at the conferences did. They wanted to talk more to the ARMOR product creators. Now, the project has been put to work for the airport.

It’s a smart premise, and if used more frequently than once a day, I could see this helping. Have the bog-standard set security screening points that we all know and love, add in sets of relocated daily mobile screening points, and throw randomly mobilized light-duty screening officers on top of it. It can be a hassle for the security officials, but should lead to less overall intrusion for standard travellers and more security visibility to potential terrorists or attackers. It sounds like it will make for better security, and as my regular (and exceptionally brillaint) readers know, I am all for security that leads to less intrusiveness for regular travellers, which ARMOR sounds like it will do. (via /.)

[tags]ARMOR software security tool, Randomized security checkpoints, Game theory, Mobile random screening[/tags]

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The Blahg – breaking 1 million!

Now some folks might see that and think I am announcing a million hits to the site, or some other improbable event. While looking around at all the new things I could discover on the web today, I found a cool web site grading tool and decided to see how the Blahg ranked for SEO.

From that site, I thought I’d manually verify the rankings and statistics the reporting tool gave me. That’s how I found that the Blahg is ranked 810,958 in the world for web traffic. So I’ve broken the top million. I figure if I can knock out another 801,000 sites, I can be proud of my results. Of course, the question is do I knock them off the net, or just try to exceed their traffic levels?

[tags]The Blahg, Blahg tops a million, Alexa, Traffic stats, Web site grader[/tags]

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Waalbot – signs of the impending robotocalypse

I am so sorry for once leading you, my brilliant and far above-average reader, to believe that the coming zombie uprising was one of the greatest fears we had to face. Apparently, the robots have been amassing numbers and improving their designs for long enough to be the real threat to humanity. I don’t know how soon the robots will take over, but I believe the wall-climbing Waalbot is further proof of the superiority of robots. We humans have Spiderman, and, if you are to believe The Simpsons Movie, Spiderpig. I present to you now early images of the robotic army of the future – the Waalbot:

waalbot4.jpgApproach: The tri-leg Waalbot will use dry adhesion to stick to walls and ceilings as it climbs. The tri-leg design uses simple rotary actuators for a singly degree of freedom motion, but includes passive joints and elastic flexures to allow this motion to provide the preload and peeling forces necessary to climb using dry adhesion. A PIC microcontroller is used to control the motion of the robot and onboard power makes the system fully autonomous.

. . .

Other Wall Climbing Robots: Geckobot, Compliant Geckobot, Tank


You may look at the image and claim me a fool for phearing such a miniscule droid, but just like with little rat dogs – sometimes the smallest ones have the most fight in them. And when the robots are swarming you, and your enemy-bot sensor indicates hundreds of them are in front of you and behind you – remember they are in the ceiling, and you should check the vent shafts, too.

The site also has a few cool videos, including a sped-up movie of the bot climbing an acrylic wall done last year. I imagine more work will allow the designers to increase the weight or carrying capacity of the waalbot and we’ll end up with a more useful critter in the future. (via Spatial Robots)

[tags]Robots, The coming robotocalypse, Robots will take over, Gecko, Dry adhesion, Wall climbing robots[/tags]