iDallas!JenniCam, the webcam site of a girl named Jenni that has inexplicably been an Internet phenomenon for 7 or so years is closing down at the end of the month, according to this notice. I have never been a regular ‘viewer’ of the site, but I checked in on it from time to time whenver it crossed my mind. I don’t know if Jenni has plans for another kind of web project or if it has just become time to move on. Either way, good luck Jenni!
A New York Times editorial entitled Hack the Vote reveals more information about Diebold, a company that makes electronic voting machines. They were in the news recently when their software was discovered on an insecure ftp site, free for all to download. From the sound of it, things are even worse than they seemed.
According to this Pitchfork article, the highly influential Warp Records will be releasing their entire catalog of releases in high-quality mp3 format via their Bleep.com website. All tracks will be available for $0.99 each. Maybe some big labels will follow suit, but I doubt it.
The House of Representatives has passed a bill that will make it illegal to do many of the things common to spamming. It also legalizes some spam email, which will no doubt make geeks everywhere froth at the mouth. Overall, the description in the article seems pretty reasonable to me. The most important part in my mind is making it illegal to send spam with a misleading subject or falsified headers. That always seemed like it should be illegal to me.
In this Wired interview Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, says some pretty insightful things about the nature of science and technology and some hard choices we all might have to make in the decades to come. He also goes on to talk about his ‘meditation wall’ being designed by world-class engineers for his New York apartment (he lives in Aspen, CO). Interesting fellow.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 was one of my first few Playstation 2 games and gave me reason to worry about my future as I played it almost non-stop for the first few weeks I had it. Pro Skater 4 didn’t inspire quite the same fear for my life, but I still distinctly remember the moments as I unlocked each level.
With much excitement, I bought a copy of Tony Hawk’s Underground the other day. The series has taken a bit of a turn with this addition, going with more of a story-based format. You can read about the specifics on all the usual game review sites.
After playing it for several hours, here’s my thoughts. The addition of multiple difficulty settings is GREAT. Not everyone is a career game player and some people actually like to do their best to avoid frustration in their lives. The story mode is good enough and the dialog has made me chuckle more than once already. The skating is great (of course) and the new trick options are fun. Interestingly, some of the missions involve driving cars or running and jumping instead of just skating (strange, I know). The variety is welcome and the missions are still fun, but those parts aren’t nearly as well implemented as the skating parts. Overall, the game’s well worth the purchase price if you’re a fan of the series and if you’ve never played a Tony Hawk game before this is a good one to start with. It makes new strides in teaching you the moves as you complete the missions.
I heard about this at some point a long time ago, but I never tried it out until now. If you have cable tv service, call up your cable company and ask if they have any promotions you can take advantage of. They probably will and you’ll probably get some premium channels for free for 3 months or something. Easy!
I got an interesting spam today that seems to perhaps be an attempt to reduce the effectiveness of these Bayesian statistics-based spam filters that have become the rage recently. The message contains white text on a white background so it appears to be blank, but the words appear if you run a selection over them all. Once visible, they seem to be all random words. Most of the words are harmless, but some of them are words that are probably common to spam. You lose either way because marking it as spam will add in non-spam type words into the filter database potentially increasing the rate of false positives, but leaving it as non-spam reduces the score of the spam words contained in the message potentially increasing the rate of false negatives.
The ever-popular Spamassassin has a Bayesian component in its arsenal, but uses more traditional content-based filters as well. Apple’s Mail client has a built-in Bayesian Junk Filter, and Bogofilter is a unix-based Bayesian filter that I use myself.
According to this message on the mp3.com site, they have been consumed by CNET and will be taking their site offline on Dec 2. They will be destroying all content so all people with mp3.com sites will need to find alternative hosting. MP3.com will return in another format at a later time. Man, the Internet’s growing up, and I don’t like it one bit.
BBC Article
Some researchers have figured out how to make small amounts (very small) of electricity by simply passing water through very small channels cut into a hunk of glass. It’s not even close to being commercially viable now, but the possibility of being able to power small electronic devices with water is very exciting.