Category: linkblog

Free lightweight BitTorrent client for MacOSX.

Obama seizes the attack, sharpens his criticism of McCain’s economic policies: “The ‘old boys network’? In the McCain campaign, that’s called a staff meeting.”

David Weinberger summarizes McCain’s interview in which he apparently confuses the Prime Minister of Spain with a leftist Latin American official, then stands by the position when he’s corrected.

Did SEC rules exemptions lead directly to the collapse of Lehman, Bear Stearns, et al?

Incisive thoughts about the ethics of blogging vs. the ethics of journalism, boiling down to closed vs. open means of production for the written word.

Clear, calm articulation of the Obama plan for the economy. Spread the news.

Interesting list of WordPress plugins that speak Twitter.

Interesting perspective: “I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.”

…and here’s how they could have done it. Not every hack requires the knowledge of exploiting buffer overflows and SQL injections… sometimes there’s just plain bad design at work.

From the same twisted impulse (though probably not the same people) who brought you “HillaryIsMomJeans.com”.

There is, of course, a web application security spin to this story, but I would guess that social engineering is involved in the hack. The real question is, how much light does it shine on Palin’s governing style and on the whole shady practice of using personal email for government business?

Nice summary of aglianicos on the market. I’m with Eric–I’ll happily drink any aglianico I find on a wine list, which isn’t many.

Be careful on BusinessWeek.com.

Interesting discussion of how to get children to eat healthy: keep them in the kitchen, don’t diet in front of them, avoid “forbidden fruit.”

Just out of curiosity, how DOES an ACC team like Virginia get beaten like an old carpet by Connecticut?

New Obama ad using press coverage of McCain’s dishonest campaign against him.

Hmm, a ratings system for web applications! What a great idea!! Seriously, with a market like Facebook’s, a reputation system is a really critical thing to get in place.

As usual, trenchant observation from Gruber: “Perhaps this will refocus presidential campaign coverage on the economy rather than bullshit.”

Oh crap.

Man, the Japanese cellphone market is weird.

A surprisingly concise and cogent peom by Bob Dylan in th!s week’s New Yorker.

Katie Couric starts to get some respect, and got a killer quote from Mike Dukakis, of all people: “Look, I owe the American people an apology. If I had beaten the old man, you would never have heard of the kid and then we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“Epic fail,” indeed.

The first official release of the Common Weakness Enumeration, a standard way of classifying and describing software flaws that may lead to security vulnerabilities.

Proving that there are characters still in Boston: a man has eaten oysters at the Union Oyster House every Wednesday night without a break for 15 years, and shows no signs of slowing down. Nice.

Dave Weinberger does a great job of disemboweling a set of standing anti-Obama arguments.

Okay, I take it back. She makes a pretty good Cheney on a small scale.

Unsettling evaluation of the current state of the race–even if Palin does make an unlikely Cheney figure.

PES makes BoingBoing, and spaghetti.

A sobering portrait of Obama's reception in rural America. It ain't the race (though there may be coded racism just like there's coded sexism, sure), it's the class, the suspicion about intellectualism. And what the hell is Joe Biden doing? How can a story like this one talk about how Obama, McCain, and Palin play in rural America but not mention coal-country Biden?

This is, of course, why I have such a hard time getting rid of books. Of course, even I have to admit sometimes that enough is enough.

Like it says. I've gotten wary of tinyurls and the like that come from other people, so this is really useful.

Interesting digital camera tips. It's all about the lighting and the postprocessing.

"The media are getting mad." Well, it's about time.

"Alex Koppelman immediately caught the biggest gaffe of the interview: Palin's deer-in-the-headlights ignorance about the 'Bush doctrine' that claims for the U.S. the right to unilateral, 'preventive' war against nations perceived as fomenting threats against us. Her answer committing us to defend Georgia or the Ukraine against Russia was almost as bad…"

Newsjunk's roundup of links from 9/11/2008 shows the segue in discourse from remembrance to horror at Palin's interview performance. Really good demonstration for the effectiveness of the technology.

The press, at least, was not impressed by Sarah Palin's softball interview with Charlie Gibson last night. What will swing voters think?

Having made quite a few recipes from Marcella’s classic cookbook, I’m not surprised that she’s murder to get along with. Some are dead easy and some will wreck you. And of course they all taste fabulous.

Nice collection of digital revivals of early 20th century fonts. Apparently made for Call of Cthulu games, so if you are dragged into tentacled horror and madness you'll know why.

The physics major in me thinks this is really cool. The webcomics geek in me groans at the discovery of another good webcomic to catch up with.

Another name for SQL Injection. Arguably obfuscated SQL Injection attacks don't deserve their own subclass, but some of the information about attacks being canonicalized at the DB layer is interesting.

This answered a couple of important questions I had after reading the other coverage, like: are the newspapers going to be as PO'd about this as the book publishers were? (A: Maybe, but it's set up to give them a cut of the AdWords revenue, so maybe not.)

Bad vuln? Yes. See WordPress 2.6.1.

“What struck me about Palin was her cowardice. Before letting us know anything about her intelligence or knowledge, or the quality of her ideas, she was sarcastically trashing a man we’ve gotten to know and respect over the last X months, a man who had to keep his cool as the press went after his church, community and family, and kept his grace even humor at every step. Palin, in contrast, not only hasn’t been even slightly vetted, has absolutely no basis for her arrogance, no foundation. … She needs to slow down and sober up, she’s asking for a big job. It’s serious. If she were a man I’d say she was a dickhead.” One of Dave’s finer pieces in recent memory.

Heh. Behind McCain’s acceptance speech: a big ol’ picture of Walter Reed. Not the hospital, a middle school. Someone gonna get a whippin’.

It’s a good thing http://www.google.com/search?q=uva dorms kellogg global warming is fictional, cause otherwise with all the ice sheets breaking up I’d be worried.

“One of the most enduring taboos in American politics, the airing of graphic images from the September 11 attacks in a partisan context … was pronounced dead at approximately 7:40 CST, when a video aired before delegates at the Republican National Convention included slow-motion footage of a plane striking the World Trade Center, the towers’ subsequent collapse, and smoke emerging from the Pentagon.”

Interesting coverage of two interviews: Obama and O’Reilly and Katie Couric and Mrs. McCain, who didn’t seem to know which way John McCain was going on Roe vs. Wade.

An all in one iTunes assistant: lyrics and artwork download, Last.fm scrobbling, and remote. Now if GimmeSomeTunes did lyrics for songs *that weren’t currently playing we’d be in luck. Replaying all 25,000 songs in my library just to get lyrics isn’t an option.

Detailed fact check of Palin’s speech.

I bet the GOP would feel pretty foolish about slamming Obama’s faith-based community service if they thought anyone cared about the substance of what they said. Do they? Do we?

Paints a picture of Chrome as a natural extension of Google’s existing offerings.

Fascinating rundown of how political and social mobility (the creation of the middle class) influenced artistic performance (the modern conception of the classical music concert). For better or for worse?

Of course, now I want the same capability for ACC football too. I can’t believe there’s no comparable client for other sports.

Does a speech http://www.google.com/search?q=uva dorms kellogg whips up the base torpedo your chances with independents? It might, if enough of them identify “the base” with the problems that they are experiencing right now.

An interesting runthrough of some of the default Ubiquity commands.

Oooh. Histogram!

I just heard the first reason to take a look at IE8. I wonder how effective/ hackproof this anti-XSS filter really is?

Are you kidding me? Has anyone ever heard of freedom of speech?

Oboy. A little open mic moment opens up the conservative side of the conventional wisdom. Now the only people who haven’t weighed in on Palin and McCain are the swing voters.

One Two Three Pull! Hee hee.

Guess we have to see how it goes tonight to see if Jay is correct, but this is scary shit.

I won’t miss the gross incompetence and malfeasance of the Bush administration.

This is an interesting thought: Google Chrome is really closer to an OS project than a browser.

Did anyone do more than look at Sarah Palin’s picture before offering her the veep slot? I’d say having your spouse be a member of a secessionist party is probably more damning than having them, say, write a thesis about racism in the Ivy League.

Hilarious dissection of Google’s blog posting announcing the new Chrome browser.

Security = privacy? Does Google Chrome have any better anti-phishing, anti-CSS, or anti-malware features? If not, why bother building a new browser?

Or, where the really, really shitty iPhone apps come from: business plans! With synergy! And corporate sponsorship! You gotta be kidding me.

Am I nuts, or does this sound like a new malware vector? Still, lyrics would be nice…

Interesting approach allowing cross-domain interaction between data and functionality in a secure way.

Interesting example of JavaScript code manipulation across iframes.

Open source media player alternative to Front Row gets facelift.

On being Alec Baldwin. No, wait. The article is actually funny.

Well, this certainly puts his (adult-audience) Uncle Oswald stories in a different light.

Fairly brilliant concept–I may need to use it when I finally redirect my old blog to the WordPress site.

The Palin pick was a second choice?

So let me get this straight: Comcast has slower bandwidth than everyone else AND they’re going to cap your usage AND they’re not providing you with a way to monitor that AND if you breach it twice, they shut you off for a year? Sign me up!!!

I hadn’t heard of a couple of these approaches. The login-lockdown and CHAP signing plugins sound particularly interesting.