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Archive for January, 2010
Mute button pacifier
I visited my friend at her home yesterday. She just had a baby boy, who is the proud owner of this adorable little pacifier that doubles as his very own mute button. You can buy it on Amazon for $6. I might have to order a couple just to have on hand for gift-giving opportunities.
Adobe hits back at Apple
They were a bit upset that all the promotional clips for the iPad showed Flash operating on the webpages. Apple has since apologized and edited the marketing pics. Luckily, Flash has been dying for months.
Australian censor board demands large-breasted porn stars
A reader writes, "Australian Classification Board (ACB) is now banning depictions of small-breasted women in adult publications and films. They banned mainstream pornography from showing women with A-cup breasts, apparently on the grounds that they encourage pedophilia, and in spite of the fact this is a normal breast size for many adult women. [...]
Why a man plays Super Mario Brothers
I'm 33 and, with mixed emotions, I play games that star Super Mario. The people who sell Mario games would say it's great to play Mario games. Mario is for everyone. My gut tells me that playing Mario, the adventures of a fat plumber in a Mushroom Kingdom of warbling enemies and happy conflict, is juvenile. My mind tells me I'm a more [...]
Gorilla Rack shelving units are awesome
I've been decluttering my garage and I ordered a few Gorilla Rack shelving units from Amazon. They are awesome. I've assembled shelving units before, and they required either nuts and bolts or little brackets, but the Gorilla Rack units have parts that fit together without extra hardware. I built the first shelving unit in about 30 minutes. The [...]
“Get what’s yours!” Demented, explosion-filled ad for injury lawyer
Pittsburgh is home to Berger and Green, a law firm specializing in injury cases. Its recent television advertisements are tasteful, white-backgrounded affairs. As you can see here, this was not always the case. Larry Green is angry because you have not received all the money the law allows.
Inside-out Teddy Bears!
Kent Rogowski takes portraits of cute teddy bears that are gutted and turned inside out to reveal their even more lovable sides. The series of photographs is compiled in the delightful 2007 book Bears.
Panopticlick: EFF’s tool for telling you how unique your browser profile is
Electronic Frontier Foundation staff technologist Peter Eckersley has published some new research showing that individual browsers can be identified to a high degree of accuracy without cookies or other tracking technology. EFF has produced a tool called "Panopticlick" that tests how unique your browser is, and they're using the results from it to [...]
Craig Cunningham Has a Simple Solution for Getting Bill Collectors Off His Back. He Sues Them.
Craig Cunningham has made $20,000 from 18 lawsuits he's filed against debt collectors for violating the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA). In fact, it's something a part-time job/hobby for him. To ensnare his first FDCPA-violating collector, with voice recorder running, he called back the number they left on his answering machine, and [...]
SoCal school district bans the dictionary
Southern California's Menifee Union school district has banned the Merriam Webster's 10th edition from use in fourth and fifth grade classes, over this salacious definition of "oral sex": "oral stimulation of the genitals." "It's hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we'll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature," district [...]
United States Government data-laundering: Using corporate databases to get around privacy law
"Buying You: The Government's Use of Fourth-Parties to Launder Data about 'The People'," a paper by Columbia Law School's Joshua L. Simmons in the Columbia Business Law Review, describes the way that US government agencies circumvent the fourth amendment and privacy statutes by outsourcing their surveillance to private credit reporting bureaus and [...]
Walking Dead 11: zombie comic is a parable about the ethics of survival and disaster
The Walking Dead Volume 11: Fear The Hunters came out this month, and I happened on it this weekend and promptly fell into it, emerging an hour later feeling like the world was coming to an end. For the uninitiated, The Walking Dead is Robert Kirkham, Charlie Adlard, Tony Moore and Cliff Rathburn's superb and terrifying zombapocalypse graphic [...]
Fighting spam with captured botnet hosts
Clever spamfighters are allowing botnets to infect one isolated computer, then analyzing the spams it sends to figure out the template used to generate its messages. This template is then propagated to spam-filters... "This is an interesting approach which really differs by using the bots themselves as the oracles for producing the filters," says [...]
New Super Mario Bros Wii – 99 Lives Trick
I remember it just like it was yesterday. The rumor in 1986 that went around the school yard and passed from kid to kid during the summer. The rumor was said to get an infinite amount of lives in Super Mario Bros. for the NES. Very few could master it, and whoever could pull off the feet was king for the day. Nintendo really kept New Super Mario [...]
Skype 2.1 Beta 2 Puts Screen Sharing in Linux Version
Skype 2.1 beta 1 for Linux finally gets an upgrade, version 2.1 beta 2 comes with a bunch of new features to boost the stagnant growth rate in which Skype for Linux finds its self. The major feature here is certainly the addition of Screen Sharing, a feature long present in the Windows and Mac versions of Skype. Screen sharing means – you can [...]
Critical Commons vs. Hitler: resource for free/open media and fair use
Critical Commons has created its own entry in the great Hitler in the bunker remix meme. Steve Anderson sez, "The video is also promoting the fair use advocacy site Critical Commons, which is a fair use advocacy and media sharing site, funded by the MacArthur Foundation. This is currently the most radical media-sharing site on the open internet. [...]
Naked airport scanner catches cellphone and misses bomb components
Check out this German TV clip highlighting the failure of the new, privacy-violating full-nude scanners going in at an airport near you. As Bruce Schneier notes, "The scanner caught a subject's cell phone and Swiss Army knife -- and the microphone he was wearing -- but missed all the components to make a bomb that he hid on his body... Full-body [...]
Pirate Bay’s VPN goes public: Ipredator
As governments around the world consider proposals to hand surveillance powers to the entertainment industry and twitchy cops, the Pirate Bay is striking back. Its new €5/month IPRedator service is an encrypted VPN that you can use to hide your traffic (whatever it may contain) from prying eyes. The name comes from Sweden's adoption of IPRED [...]
Windows hole discovered after 17 years… Affects 3.1 through to Windows 7
Just to clarify, that's Windows NT 3.1, not the old 16-bit Windows 3.1. I was wondering how the hell you could have a privilege escalation bug on an OS with only one level of privilege. The problem is caused by flaws in the Virtual DOS Machine (VDM) introduced in 1993 to support 16-bit applications (real mode applications for 8086). VDM is based [...]
