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Monday, May 16, 2005 |
DDoS being used in extortion schemes. Criminals are increasingly targeting corporations with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks designed not to disrupt business networks but to be used as tools to extort thousands of dollars from the companies. [InfoWorld: Top News]
10:13:54 PM 
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Alex: Nature's Top Ten Inventions.
Here's a fun little tonic for restoring your awe of nature -- Life's top 10 greatest inventions, from the eye, the brain and language, to sex, death and symbiosis:
Symbiosis has many definitions, but we'll take it to mean two species engaging in physically intimate, mutually beneficial dependency, almost invariably involving food. Symbiosis has triggered seismic shifts in evolution, and evolution in turn continually spawns new symbiotic relationships. ...
Symbiosis has popped up so frequently during evolution that it is safe to say it's the rule, not the exception. Angler fish in the deep ocean host bioluminescent bacteria in appendages that dangle over their mouths. Smaller fish lured by the light are easy prey. At the ocean surface, coral polyps provide homes for photosynthetic algae, and swap inorganic waste products for organic carbon compounds - one reason why nutrient-poor tropical waters can support so much life. The algae also produce a chemical that absorbs ultraviolet light and protects the coral. More than 90 per cent of plant species are thought to engage in symbiotic couplings.
(via IDFuel)
[WorldChanging: Another World Is Here]
10:13:18 PM
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- Latest sober worm sends German spam. E-mail users perplexed by the barrage of German-language spam waiting in their inboxes Monday morning can point the finger of blame at the latest version of the Sober mass mailing worm which began rapidly spreading over the weekend.
- MIT's Negroponte expects $100 laptops next year. An ambitious plan by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Media Lab to develop and distribute a laptop computer costing no more than $100 is expected to take a major step forward next month with the receipt of the first order.
[InfoWorld: Top News]
4:47:30 PM
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Broadcast Machine: Publish RSS / Torrent Video Channels.
Preview of Participatory Culture's P2P video publisher that turns a website into a TV channel.
Broadcast Machine is software for your website that can publish fullscreen video files to thousands, using torrent technology to reduce or eliminate bandwidth costs. It is free, open source, and designed for easy installation. Broadcast Machine features an intuitive interface, integrated torrent creation, and flexible channel management. It creates a browsable archive of videos on your website, but its real purpose is to be the perfect publishing tool for our video player that comes out in June. Broadcast Machine creates channels that, viewed in the player, give people a TV-like experience.
[unmediated]
4:45:38 PM
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King Kaufman's Sports Daily.
"We want to burn witches." An interview with Will Carroll, author of "The Juice," who studied baseball's drug problem and found out how much we all don't know.
[Salon.com]
4:44:54 PM
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The parable of the managers, by flatlander.
And the manager Ahimelech and the manager Balazar did meet,
even at a sushi bar, and did contend mightily in faith. For both
purported to follow the way of the profits, but could not agree how
best to follow the teachings. And they agreed to go forth, and to tend
their vineyards, and to meet again on this day to see who wouldst be
the victor.
And in that year the manager Ahimelech had one servant, and the manager
Balazar one servant likewise.
And Ahimelech said unto his servant, "Go thou quickly and set thyself
to toil in the codebase, forgetting all else. For we must maximise our
chargeable hours, and have not the time or leisure to waste on that
which does not profit us. For we could spend even unto half our lives
writing the tests of unit or setting up the build of nightliness, and
for this the customer payeth not."
And Balazar said unto his servant, "Go thou likewise and toil in the
codebase, but before thou goest, write thou thine documents of design
and set up thy server of continuous integration, and as thou goest, do
not fear to tarry by the roadside and write thy comments of
documentation."
(Helpfully pointed at by matisse, over in
the conversation with Scott
Berkun topic in the Inkwell.)
11:40:46 AM
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E-Mail Irritants Act at Different Speeds. The first step for any spammer is finding e-mail addresses, usually by harvesting them on the Web. After that, some spammers work much faster than others, according to the spam tracking service Project Honey Pot. By ALEX MINDLIN. [NYT > Business]
6:42:08 AM
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Poor David's almanac.
Poor David Brooks -- the guy's timing is simply awful. Here he is, offering a column -- "Meet the Poor Republicans" -- that tries to explain why a particular contingent of not-so-well-off voters has lately been voting for the GOP. His answer? Unlike the poor folks who vote for the Democrats, these poor people "agree with Horatio Alger": they believe that they've got a reasonable shot at moving up the ladder, living the American dream, making a fortune and leaving that word "poor" behind. Poor Democrats, on the other hand, tend to be people who think that the cards are stacked against them.
Unfortunately for Brooks, his column ran on the very same day that the Times kicked off a mega-series on "Class in America" -- the central premise of which is that there's a lot less class mobility in America than people believe. (Lest you conservatives fear that this is simply a plot by that filthy liberal Times rag to fill our heads with lies, the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story last week reporting pretty much exactly the same thing.)
This juxtaposition of material couldn't possibly have been intended by the Times' news editors to make Brooks look like a condescending idiot or a closet Democrat, but that's the result. Because there's no way to put these two articles together without concluding that those poor people out there who vote Republican because they think they have a chance to get ahead, those people whose praises Brooks are singing, are, sadly, chumps. They have been sold a bridge. They believe in something that, like creationism or Saddam Hussein's WMD arsenal, is contra-factual. On the other hand, those poor Democrats, however unfashionably glum and not-with-the-morning-in-America program they may be, seem to have a clearer picture of the state of the union.
One could go further and begin to lay out how the policies of the Bush-era GOP, supported by Brooks' "poor Republicans," are only further locking in the sort of class immobility the Times (and Journal) articles note. But let's not kick Brooks while his own paper has tripped him sprawling, face-down, on the political floor.
[Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]
6:40:13 AM
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No Wrong Answer: Click It. Students call them clickers -- handheld devices used to key in instant response to a professor's question. The class can see results on an overhead readout, and the gizmos seem to increase student participation in discussions. [Wired News]
6:37:39 AM
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