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12 posts from July 2010

July 23, 2010

Bill Murray: Hollywood horseman of the American Apocalypse?

I'm just going to let the quotes speak for themselves.  I will note, I received this with much hilarity, these are just the best parts:  

..in the midst of our current cultural and economic crisis there is one danger that is subtler than the violence and drugs that is normal fare for major motion pictures these days. That danger is represented in the actor known as Bill Murray.
He is a weak man, a murderer of lambs, a despicable hedonist who waves the white flag welcoming the end of American moral and economic primacy
Bill Murray is a fatal disease and the sad news we bring you today is that your children have been infected.
Murray has explored every cranny of shamefulness. He never appears clean cut or sober, never moral or compassionate. He is a hollow man, a two-dimensional figure mirroring contemporary society’s addiction to half-hearted hedonism
The pattern is familiar to criminologists and it’s not hard to draw similarities to the lives of Jeffrey Dahlmer or John Wayne Gacy. Murray has not yet been charged with anything more than narcotic arrests and drunk driving, but at the very least parents should be deeply concerned. Is it not better to be safe than sorry when dealing with a man who may be the next national scandal for his bloodthirst and perversion? Would you not do everything in your power to protect your children from death and failure?

You can read the original article here.

Originally written on email from Geeky Randomness

PSA: Dangers of high fives

I'm impressed with how much this is like some of the crappy PSAs that I've seen as a youth.  This one is quality!  You have to watch it.

Originally written on email from Geeky Randomness

July 20, 2010

Fun times from my last job.

I worked at a live video site, I'm sure anyone reading this blog knew about that already.  Anyhow, I wanted to post this mostly for posterity sake, but here are some moments from my last job that stick out the most! Special thanks to Adam Jackson, Swiftor, Witespy and Dylan.  You guys just rock.

Originally written on email from Geeky Randomness

July 16, 2010

It's a numbers game, where do you get analytics?

Analytics is important to all of us, the numbers are what brings in the dollars, sponsorships and advertisements.  So it's vital for a website to have the most accurate analytics they can have.  So who do you use to measure your analytics and how do you know if their measurements are accurate?  

Well, in an astoundingly unusual show of transparency (at least unusual in the sense of large websites), reddit has given screencaps of all of their analytics.  So what does things say? 

More than 8,000,000 unique visitors in the last 30 days and 400,000,000 pageviews. This is a typical month for us. In fact, our numbers would have been even higher if not for some site issues at the end of June.
 
 
..reports that we get around 927,000 unique visitors a month. Their page views number for us isn't available to the public, but we're told it's similarly sorry-looking.
 
 
Quantcast:
They paint a picture of a visit count drooping from around 13,000,000 to 10,000,000 so far this year. It isn't. It's two to four times as much, and we haven't had two consecutive months of declining traffic since spring 2007.
 
 
Alexa:
They don't seem to like tallying actual totals, and instead seem to prefer to rate sites by their "percentage of total Internet traffic." If I could find their guess for last month's total global Internet traffic
 
Nielsen:
..to their ranking service tells us that they estimate our "Online Market Size Estimate" (whatever that is) to be 652,000
 
 

So see the original blog post for their screen captures of their analytics in the clip below: 

Originally written on email from Geeky Randomness

July 14, 2010

If only Huffington Post used clp.ly

I see a lot of websites that put screencaps of other websites in their posts.  I saw this rather amusing post today that I wanted to replicate with clp.ly instead of a screencap :) Original article by Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/14/one-armed-mans-arrest-lea_n_646516.html (Please don't hate me Huff).

With clp.ly


 And the amazing headlines keep rolling in. And like last time, the best part is that it's totally real - not just an oversight by the writer. The website MassLive.com (who we assume entertains Western Massachusetts with headlines like this on a daily basis) ran a story titled, "Springfield Police Charge One-Armed Man With Unarmed Robbery." Sure, the guy's a criminal. Sure, he's asking for it by having a nickname of "Lefty." And sure, he robbed an old man. But hasn't he suffered enough? That's just a slap in the face isn't it, Springfield Police?

Clipped from: www.masslive.com (share this clip)




Without clp.ly

Screen shot 2010-07-14 at 1.34.41 PM
 

July 13, 2010

This Bee dances better than I do...

It's totally not fair, take a look at the bee mascot below.  It's a dancing fool:

Originally written on email from Geeky Randomness

The man your man could smell like, answers your questions!

Hello gentle readers, look at your man now look at the clip below.  The man from the clip below will answer your questions today.  What's this? An AMA (ask me anything) on Reddit.  Go ahead, you know you want to ask him how big his...

Towel is.

Originally written on email from Geeky Randomness

July 08, 2010

This is NOT a case of responsible disclosure

As I'm gearing up to head to Def Con, this particular story jumped up at me and slapped me in the face with anger. Many times in the past we've read news about famous people and websites getting hacked and people's information leaked and from the outside it's easy to point or laugh or scorn people for not taking the proper security measures needed to ensure their information is safe. What we are forgetting though is that  responsible disclosure is key.

So what happened?  Some Argentinian hacker discovered some SQL injection vulnerabilities at the Pirate Bay that led them straight to user information on the site. The kind of information they had was usernames, email addresses, IP addresses and MD5 hashed passwords.  

If there were any damned place that responsible disclosure is important it's here.  The entertainment industry have long been waging war against regular people over copyright infringement.  They aren't even interested in justice or doing the right thing.  The RIAA is happy to throw out thousands of people in scattershot style cases.  They've even sued people for filesharing who didn't even own a computer. Seriously? Everyone knows that RIAA and the MPAA are going to do absolutely everything they can to get ahold of this information and potentially ruin almost 4 million pirate bay users. 

Russo maintains that at no time did he or his associates alter or delete information in The Pirate Bay database. But he acknowledges that they did briefly consider how much this access and information would be worth to anti-piracy companies employed by entertainment industry lobbying groups like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA),
 
The hacker responsible for finding this vulnerability should've disclosed this directly to the Pirate Bay administrators and let them deal with the situation.  Instead, he touted that he did it to show people how private they really are on the internet.  No, fuck that. This guy wanted to get a shot at the media so that he could pimp out his "subscription-based software vulnerability exploit service."  There was nothing altruistic about this, it was greed and hubris. Nothing makes me more angry than blackhat douche nozzles who use their skills for malice.  I think Bruce Schneier needs to woop his ass. 

“Probably these groups would be very interested in this information, but we are not [trying] to sell it,” Russo told KrebsOnSecurity.com in a phone interview. “Instead we wanted to tell people that their information may not be so well protected.”
 

Originally written on email from Geeky Randomness

In case you missed it...

So last night, I had insomnia (as I am often infected with) and I was playing with my iPhone.  I decided to get a doodle app and started drawing people I knew.  I started with my good friend Morgan and finished off with a drawing of a lady I don't know who reached out to me on twitter

I'm probably going to do some more at some point in the future, until then take a look at my flickr set for them clipped below!

Originally written on email from Geeky Randomness

July 06, 2010

Nothing says "Self Respect" like cleaning poop in a Video Game

A while ago, I was pretty confused by having a quest in World of Warcraft that involved cleaning berries from piles of dung.  I thought it was pretty demeaning at the time, to spend 60 levels of being the Hero of Azeroth only to get to Outland and have to do stupid messenger and poop cleaning quests as if I were a mere mortal.
A hero of Azeroth and I'm picking berries out of poop?

Now Zynga has followed suit with Blizzard to present more epic poop cleaning in FrontierVille, how special.  I'm glad we're loved
Zynga loves to try new things. Today, it is testing the theory that its fans are so hopelessly addicted that they will literally amass piles of virtual shit.

Clipped from: www.wired.com by clp.ly
 

Originally written on email from Geeky Randomness

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