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CSRF goes mainstream.
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How scale free nodes intersect with bandwidth caps.
Month: September 2008
Grab bag: Bailout out
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Krugman discusses the options faced by the Democratic Congressional leadership. Screwed, or more screwed, but not as screwed as the House Republicans.
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Transcript of Pelosi’s remarks. And that was what so inflamed House GOP that they voted against the bill? Yougottabekiddingme.
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Something to do with your multimonitor PC when the market tanks: screensavers.
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Good thing that John McCain took credit for the bailout before his House friends voted against it. Really helped my 401(K). And then blamed Obama for killing the deal? Thanks, John!
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There are two ways to combat smear chain emails: reply aggressively, publicly, and loudly, or dig deep to uncover the source and expose it to daylight. I tend to do the first, and this researcher does the second.
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Strong analysis of Obama’s presence and challenges in Appalachia.
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The performances really were something extraordinary. Levine came out at the end to express his appreciation for putting out a powerful performance at what he admitted were slower than usual tempi–and for producing an even more dramatic effect.
Brahms Requiem: gearing up
I’ve been in rehearsals all week at Symphony Hall for the Tanglewood Festival Chorus’s first concert of the 2008-2009 Symphony Hall season, the Brahms Requiem with the Boston Symphony under James Levine. It’s an amazing work–I’ll try to describe it in more detail after our performances. But the two really amazing things for this weekend for me are the same things that Jeremy Eichler flagged in his review of Wednesday’s season opener, namely, Levine himself and the windows in the Hall.
Losing Levine to two months of cancer treatment after the opening of the Tanglewood season was a blow to audience and performer, although some of the resulting performances under guest conductors were still pretty spectacular. But it’s great to have him back and he is as energetic as ever.
The clerestory windows … well. Eichler gives the background in his article (part of the original design of the hall, they were covered over during World War II to comply with blackout requirements and never reopened). But what he doesn’t mention is the effect on the hall’s sound. The window openings had actually been plastered over, and the removal of all that plaster and introduction of glass (albeit a special glass that doesn’t resonate) means that there’s a new brilliance on the sound in the hall. Levine remarked on it, our director remarked on it, and it was even apparent on the stage in the reflected sound during our rehearsal. We’ll see tonight whether it makes as much difference when the hall is full of people.
It certainly has a striking visual effect, especially for a daytime rehearsal. I only had my iPhone on me so the picture I got was pretty poor, with lots of streaks from the light sources running through the pictures, but you can still see how alive the hall looks now.
Grab bag: Patch and grab your ankles
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Update, update, update.
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“The point is this is one of the most important irrevokable economic decisions we will ever make. Let’s make it in a state of panic.” — Steven Colbert.
Grab bag: Google Android, free Wilco, astroturf, more
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Some valid counterpoint to the Agile drumbeat.
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You didn’t think astroturf wrote itself, did you?
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You know, if you have to bet consumer against industry, I’m pretty sure consumer is going to win. Every single time.
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Pledge to vote on Wilco’s website, get a free download of Wilco and the Fleet Foxes covering Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released.” Sweet!
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McCain’s ties to Freddie and Fannie are now down to one degree of separation. So why does he keep insisting that Rick Davis has no connection with them?
Grab bag: Bailout, continued
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PDF exploit toolkits spotted in the wild. Update your browser plugins, kids, it’s going to be a fun ride. Better yet, if you’re on Mac OS X, uninstall Acrobat Reader entirely.
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Hysterically funny and very pointed at the same time.
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The proper solution to the dilemma is, of course, taking an equity stake in exchange for purchasing the distressed assets.
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No way that my tax dollars will go to buy distressed mortgage debt at above market value. I might as well just flush the money directly down the toilet; at least that way it would be entertaining and I’d have a small chance of getting the money back.
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I’ve long thought that a good statistical mechanics analysis was going to be necessary to fix the Boston roads; I might be right.
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Hard to believe that the administration tried to make the bailout non-reviewable, but here it is: “Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency. Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency. “
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Levine was in New York for the Met premiere to conduct Renee. He’ll be in Boston this week for the BSO season premiere. Nothing like hitting the ground running.
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Beta story-sharing feature on the New York Times. Nice UI. Don’t know if they have enough readers online who are into this sort of thing to build a real network.
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Alex Ross receives a Genius Grant. Right on.
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Wil Shipley has common sense about the Apple Store. I don’t want to read any more stories about Apple pulling apps that compete with its own. Ever.
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Inspirational listening: MLK speech about civil disobedience. “Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at ninety. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. You died when you refused to stand up for right. You died when you refused to stand up for truth. You died when you refused to stand up for justice.”
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I have a couple bags full of VHS tapes that are worth BILLIONS.
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Heh. The bailout letter as Nigeriam spam. Brilliant.
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Real time commentary on the bailout bill. Go nuts.
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The source of that Bernie Sanders quotation (below). Yes, it’s very left-wing stuff, but it’s also thought provoking. How much of the risk taking was enabled by the thought that senior government officials like Paulson would be there to bail them out?
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I think–I hope–Krugman nails it here. The Bush administration tried to slip a fast one by us, a last gift for his cronies. There are enough people who were paying attention that it slowed down. Now, with Bernie Sanders, we can ask, “We’ve been told…we can’t afford—that the government providing healthcare to all people is just unimaginable; it can’t be done. We don’t have the money to rebuild our infrastructure. We don’t have the money to wipe out poverty. We can’t do it. But all of a sudden, yeah, we do have $700 billion for a bailout of Wall Street.”
David Byrne visits Newport News
David Byrne Journal: 09.21.2008: On the Road Again. I know that this post was primarily about the new show and not about David Byrne’s Life in the Bush of Hampton Roads, but I can’t resist the pointer:
In Newport News, a group of us biked to the beach on the banks of the James River — a long trip, mostly on local highways, passing chain restaurants, industrial parks, gas stations and a steak joint offering square dancing. The residential areas are tucked in behind these strips, I guess, as there were none visible from these connecting roads. There’s an airbase nearby as well. Fighter jets streaked overhead now and then. There’s no town visible in any direction, just endless sprawl. At one point we reached a crossroads, which appeared to be the remnants of a small town, now mostly converted to a row of antique stores, but still pretty quaint. Eventually we found a small beach next to a massive bridge beyond which lay a huge naval station and port. A few of us waded in the water as a film crew set up nearby to shoot a girl in Goth makeup for a TV commercial.
Having grown up in the residential areas tucked behind the strips, I would say, yes, he got it about right. I’d love to see a street map of where he went–Hilton Village, which was built to house sailors shipping out during WWI? It sounds as though he made it all the way over to the 664 bridge.
Very cool. I will say that performing with James Levine and other opera superstars, you get applause inbetween the classical reserve and the pop mania that’s described here. I’ve never been blown back by applause at one of our concerts, though.
The decentralization of publishing
Lately it seems I spend more time on Facebook and Twitter than on the blog. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; it just reminds me that I need to make an effort occasionally to write longer form content, as fun and entertaining as it is to write bite-sized summaries of links on Delicious.
But when I think about how user-created content has changed in the last seven or eight years, it’s kind of amazing. We’ve gone from monolithic content management systems like Manila, Radio, and Blogger to what can only be characterized as swarms of lightweight, single-purpose applications: Delicious, Flickr, Twitter. The CMSes are still there–WordPress being, as far as I can tell, the leading personal CMS right now. But what’s changed is the assumed ability to suck content out of multiple services and put it into one place. Or multiple places: my posts to Delicious are picked up nightly by my blog and then syndicated into Facebook posts, for instance. Twitter content can appear in my sidebar. Flickr photos can be syndicated or blogged from within the application.
And then there’s Facebook. It manages, by virtue of its application ecosystem, to be all of the above: a swarm of lightweight apps, a walled garden… and an Outlook replacement. It’s astonishing how many people that I know now communicate with their friends primarily, if not exclusively, on Facebook. If they made their app sync events to the iPhone calendar, it would pretty much completely replace the traditional mail/calendar/address book troika for most purposes. Not all, and I certainly think that the platform has a long way to go before it replaces email. For starters, allowing us to download our inbox from the service would be a good idea; I don’t like anyone holding all my data and not letting me move it. But I bet someone’s working on an app to do that, if it doesn’t already exist.
On data portability: back in 2004, I insisted to a meeting of the Berkman Bloggers’ Group that there was a tradeoff between having all your content resident on your own server and using these decentralized apps. At the time it was a native photo management system vs. Flickr. What I didn’t take into consideration was how much harder it is to move content that’s resident in a CMS vs. decentralized in the cloud. When I switched this blog over from Manila to WordPress, it wasn’t the images that were in Flickr (and even on .Mac) that were the problem; it was all the image content in Manila.
We’re in a golden age for personal publishing right now. Which makes it all the more ironic that people are still fighting the blogging vs. journalism battle (previously linked here). While you’re doing that, folks, it’s turned into blogging and Twittering and Facebooking and Deliciousing and and and and. Never has it been so easy for people to share what they want to say with …
And that’s the other interesting part. Part of it is, of course, communicating with your closest friends, a la Facebook. Part of it is communicating with people who subscribe to my blog via RSS (all twelve of you, for whom I am very grateful). But a big part of it, for me, continues to be communicating with people who might find the site through a Google search (what I’ve called my time-delayed audience). And writing just keeps getting easier, because formats like Delicious and Twitter provide a proper channel for bite sized content, while WordPress provides a fantastic way to write longer form stuff.
Grab bag: Bailout edition
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I think–I hope–Krugman nails it here. The Bush administration tried to slip a fast one by us, a last gift for his cronies. There are enough people who were paying attention that it slowed down. Now, with Bernie Sanders, we can ask, “We’ve been told…we can’t afford—that the government providing healthcare to all people is just unimaginable; it can’t be done. We don’t have the money to rebuild our infrastructure. We don’t have the money to wipe out poverty. We can’t do it. But all of a sudden, yeah, we do have $700 billion for a bailout of Wall Street.”
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Great article by Steven Weinberg on the ongoing collision of religion and science.
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The investor in me agrees with the administration’s request for full speed ahead on the mortgage bailout. The citizen in me says that should be “all deliberate haste” and particularly thinks that the request not to weigh down the leglislation with “provisions that would undermine” the bailout–i.e. provisions to ensure the money is spent correctly and that individual mortgage holders get some relief too–is disingenous at best, crap at worst.
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Cisco buys Jabber; much concern about the future of Jabber as an open source platform. These guys were among the first to help leverage standard blogging APIs, so Mazel Tov.
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An aircraft carrier, apparently built to minifig scale. We’re gonna need more gray pieces.
Grab bag: end of the week
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Of the massive bailouts, Matthew says: “I hereby propose that, from now on, any banker who disparages government arts funding as unfairly rewarding organizations that can’t make it in the free market gets the business end of a broken beer bottle.” Yep.
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Levine is back, and better. Can’t wait to work with him next week on the Brahms Requiem.
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Um. Nothing I can say about this post could possibly be taken the right way.
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OMFG. The look inside Barack Obama’s email inbox is funny, but his deleted mail is even funnier.
Grab bag: How many more weeks until November 4?
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Free lightweight BitTorrent client for MacOSX.
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Obama seizes the attack, sharpens his criticism of McCain’s economic policies: “The ‘old boys network’? In the McCain campaign, that’s called a staff meeting.”
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David Weinberger summarizes McCain’s interview in which he apparently confuses the Prime Minister of Spain with a leftist Latin American official, then stands by the position when he’s corrected.
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Did SEC rules exemptions lead directly to the collapse of Lehman, Bear Stearns, et al?
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Incisive thoughts about the ethics of blogging vs. the ethics of journalism, boiling down to closed vs. open means of production for the written word.
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Clear, calm articulation of the Obama plan for the economy. Spread the news.
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Interesting list of WordPress plugins that speak Twitter.
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Interesting perspective: “I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.”
Grab bag: Why govt email on private accounts is dumb
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…and here’s how they could have done it. Not every hack requires the knowledge of exploiting buffer overflows and SQL injections… sometimes there’s just plain bad design at work.
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From the same twisted impulse (though probably not the same people) who brought you “HillaryIsMomJeans.com”.
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There is, of course, a web application security spin to this story, but I would guess that social engineering is involved in the hack. The real question is, how much light does it shine on Palin’s governing style and on the whole shady practice of using personal email for government business?
JohnMcCainInventedTheBlackberry.com
Sheer brilliance from my good friend Greg Greene: http://johnmccaininventedtheblackberry.com. Feed it suggestions on Twitter via #invented.
This was the straw that broke the camel’s back, btw: you can now follow me on Twitter too. Just don’t expect any deep thoughts.
Aglianico, aglianico
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Nice summary of aglianicos on the market. I’m with Eric–I’ll happily drink any aglianico I find on a wine list, which isn’t many.
Instant karma
There are some moments of karma that are just too good not to post. This is one of them: GOP delegate’s hotel tryst goes bad when he wakes up with $120,000 missing. An attendee of the RNC convention who argued that the US should “bomb the hell” out of Iran and seize its resources to pay for the invasion picks up a woman in the hotel bar, who … makes him drinks, gets him bombed, and seizes his resources:
In an interview filmed the afternoon of Sept. 3 and posted on the Web site LinkTV.org, Schwartz was candid about how he envisioned change under a McCain presidency.
“Less taxes and more war,” he said, smiling. He said the U.S. should “bomb the hell” out of Iran because the country threatens Israel.
Asked by the interviewer how America would pay for a military confrontation with Iran, he said the U.S. should take the country’s resources.
“We should plant a flag. Take the oil, take the money,” he said. “We deserve reimbursement.”
A few hours after the interview, an unknown woman helped herself to Schwartz’s resources.
Heh.
Via.