how now brownpau
I sign on, and Mic messages me that there have been bus bombings in the Philippines: in Makati, General Santos, and Davao. Abu Sayyaf has claimed responsibility. I just talked to Mom on the phone, and the family’s all okay at home. (Updates will be posted to this entry as I see them. Leave a […]
Nothing beats coming home from work and finding out that some vigilante has posted a comment to your weblog with the personal information and contact numbers of a number of people at SMS.ac (deleted), then finding a message on the answering machine from SMS.ac’s legal office requesting information on that commenter (answered), then opening up […]
(Continued from this entry: Spam from SMS.ac.) Update: Joi Ito received an empty legal threat from Kevin Jones at SMS.ac. Kevin Jones also left a message on my answering machine asking for information on vigilantes who had been posting SMS.ac executives’ personal info in my comments. I’ve noticed GMail and Yahoo Mail are now automatically […]
When I started getting repeated and persistent SMS.ac invitations from old friends — and even from an ex-girlfriend — I knew something was up, so I looked into it; you may have noticed the related links I posted to my del.icio.us spam tag. More details now from Joi Ito and Community Mobilization. The gist of […]
(A note to companies thinking of resorting to referrer log marketing: don’t. It’s annoying and unethical, it has little effect on your search engine rankings since most referrer logs are private, and your money is wasted on a few lines of code that any script kiddie could throw together in a few minutes. People — […]
Not too far from the wreckage of its reentry heatshield, Mars Rover Opportunity has found an iron meteorite lying in the soil. My first thought was that it might just be more heatshield debris, but no part of a spacecraft looks so clearly like a shiny rock as that, and the rover scientists seem to […]
No sooner has weblog spam become a significant issue to me than Google steps in with rel=”nofollow”, a proposal to keep links from being abused by spammers. (Also see the news from Six Apart.) This has applications towards referrer spam as well; all it takes is a line or two of code in our referrer […]
Small, cheap, no display: Daring Fireball on last week’s new Mac hardware offerings. I’m quite impressed with the Mac Mini and iWork: both wonderfully affordable, finally giving the average PC user a cheap gateway into the Mac world. Judging by the buzz I’m hearing on various Internet communities, the Mac Mini is it — the […]
ESA is finally putting out more Titan data: stitched descent panoramas and color photos, and sounds from the Huygens microphone. The people at Planetary.org people have more detailed Huygens sound data, with processed WAVs and sound spectograms. The sound files are historic; this is the first actual sound we’re getting from an alien atmosphere. Hissy.
I’m home, after a journey that, with transfers and trips to and from airports, took about 35 hours, the longest part of which was the fourteen hour stretch from Dubai to New York. This was once again spent in an economy class seat on an Emirates A340-500, only this time beside a friendly but restless […]