Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

I love the way given a heterogeneous audience a single bit of humor can be at once all kinds of humor.

Dave Roberts) choosing to pass over it’s author’s fun but sarcastic invective and labels it sardonic irony.

In the good old days audiences were more homogenous. It was easier then for the humorist to know his target audience. That informs the question of why it is so widely presumed that nice people don’t do humor.

More links…

Franco is still dead, and Stanford B School researchers say that who you know dominates who get’s the job (abstract); now with improved with social networking.

Very fun screen cast of about the Java Script library known as Mochi.

Cool winter weather browser shows snow cover, percipitation, tempurature, elevation, etc. etc. etc. Those guys at the national weather service? They Rule!

A nice complement to my attempt to estimate the cost/mile of driving the car; here’s an attempt to estimate cost/mile of shoes.

And from that same source hiding images in sound.

I gather that the president of U of Chicago said:

A university is “an aggregation of sovereignties connected by a common heating plant.”

The internet is a aggregation of sovereignties connected by a common search engine? The general pattern here is that if you drop down Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs sooner or later a point to rendezvous your common cause will emerge.

Interesting posting by Liz Lawley on how players of CMU’s picture classification game game the system. The players quickly discover that there certian schemes garner more points than others. Liz illustrates a number of examples where that tags the pictures with less than optiminal tags.

I have a bone to pick with the folksonomy fans. It seems to me that these folks have never met a institution they found worthy. The larger the institution the less worthy it’s outputs. Or in short: individuals good, institutions bad.

Let’s adopt that mindset and look at what Liz uncovered. The players in this game develop more allegence to the game than then classificaion task. They strive to supress thier individual knowledge. They attempt to socialized their behavior to that of their model player. Oh my God! Look! It’s group think.

This slashdot comment reflects a common misunderstanding about how open source works…

“I just setup an Apache web server for use at home, and now I’ve got 4 Apache developers living in my basement. When they showed up, they said they were my Apache community overhead and I had to let them stay there. Oh, and I apparently have to feed them too!”

You do not need to feed them. If the demand for food is strong enough somebody will volunteer.

If you do sysadmin tasks for a group of people one of the challenges of the job is that your log files are full of bits of info that should be kept private. Here’s an example I’d not thought through sufficently: the DNS (Domain Name Server), actually the DNS cache. When one of your users visits a site (for example the url: http://cult-of-the-vile-snail.com/) the DNS server helps them.

Most DNS servers keeps a cache of the names looked up. That makes later attempt to lookup the cult-of-the-vile-snail faster and reduces upstream load. Here’s a curiosity. The protocol for talking to the DNS server has ways that allow you to ask just for immediately availably entries; and not look further upstream.

Thinking about starting an inquisition? Worried about your colleagues falling for the snail cult? Ask the DNS server. In some scenarios the DNS server can leak information about what the other users at your site are doing. By asking the DNS server if it has cult-of-the-vile-snail in it’s cache you can discover if anybody local has visited that site.

I had known for a long time about this privacy leak around local DNS caches.

I hadn’t realized what this paper points out. You can use these tricks on DNS servers out in the wild. For example say you wanted to squat on some domain names and you wish to know which misspelt domain names would be good choices. By poking a few thousand public DNS servers you can get a good estimate of which misspellings are common. Or say you wanted to do market research on how popular a competitor’s domain name is; same trick.

Here is a guy using this trick to get a picture, and amazing pictures they are too, of how wide spread the Sony rootkit is.

I certainly hadn’t realized how subtle the privacy implications of getting a good configuration for your DNS server is.