Category: linkblog

Saturday is the first Boston Pops Christmas gig of the season, and it’s free!

Free DNS for Google. Easier to remember, too: 8.8.4.4 and 8.8.8.8.

“Yes, we know that the numbers don’t add up, and it doesn’t matter.”

This might be a good solution for securing legacy applications where you don’t have the source code, or as an OS level feature. Generally speaking, it’s better to just fix the vulnerabilities.

Charlie is now forever stuck on the MTA.

I hope that Microsoft gets through to these users, especially the corporate ones, but if all the security issues don’t get through to them then what will?

The ignominious end of an era.

OMFG.

I love how, in this article, the dismissal of Peter Lalich is singled out by Groh as a reason that he’s going downhill: “When the player who was designated ‘quarterback to the future’ was not available to us, it put us on a different course.” “Was not available”? You know, if you were any sort of coach, your key players wouldn’t be leaving Charlottesville with indictments around their necks. You’re responsible for their behavior.

A pretty scary hack in which command statements are “encrypted” so that they appear to be paragraphs of English text.

I didn’t realize Hershey’s was still controlled by the family trust.

Yikes. Serious SQL injection vulnerability exposes Symantec customer password and credit card data. Here are the details.

Nice: historic whisky, lost on cold, cold storage for 100 years, found. Would love an invitation to that tasting party.

Looks like I’ve found my holiday listening.

Lovely. Glad that we’re bravely facing adversity.

Looks like I’ve found my next time waster.

I was thinking “Ig Nobel” material until I read the part about being used for TB testing. Then I decided this guy has a lock on next year’s medicine award.

Sounds much better, doesn’t it? Hiney Flu.

Interesting discussion about parts of the Bible that challenge faith when viewed from modern perspectives.

Interesting – an adaptable type specimen sheet for proofing web fonts.

As John Gruber wrote, I never thought I’d say it but I agree with Grover Norquist.

The problem with the original Google Books plan was “the agreement gives too much market power to Google over out-of-print books. How’s that again? Out-of-print books, by definition, are those for which there is no market today, nor likely to be one any time in the future.”

Jimmy Wales schools Poynter in how Wikipedia and the Internet work. Funny read. Best quotation: “There is no move to restrict editing on Wikipedia pages of living people. The rest of your question is negated by this fact.”

Interesting list of security, forensics, and general troubleshooting tools for the Mac OS X platform.

Awesome sounding fried chicken recipe including some fancy-schmancy sous vide.

Mobile deathmatch calls out the iPhone on management issues and the quality of the phone experience (thanks, AT&T).

Good explanation of the evolution of Twitter’s official retweet feature. My takeaway: RT in Twitter should now only be used as an amplifier. If you want to comment on someone’s tweet, comment on it and point to the original with a short URL rather than RT. This is instructive as a product manager to understand how Twitter thought through the product design process.

Chris Wysopal argues that more disclosure is needed to ensure that the avenues used to shake down RBS’s ATM network are not exploited at other firms.

SAS 70 Type II is a major milestone for the trustworthiness of “cloud” computing. This is a great option to have for deploying an application.

Interesting advice for how to stage features across multiple releases rather than going for the big bang. In my book the last point is the best–if you don’t get customer feedback before making your big-bang release, how are your customers going to have a voice in the future of your product?

Best wishes to Kareem.

Interesting advice on roasting vegetables for Thanksgiving dinner. For what it’s worth, put me down in the turkey camp.

Another perspective on Vadala’s case.

On the one hand: “hey, mobile phone vulnerability!” On the other hand, if you’re jailbreaking and installing ssh, but not changing your root password… maybe you shouldn’t be jailbreaking.

Yikes. Amputated toddler fingers = bad.

Review of the BSO/TFC performance of Beethoven’s 9th. Glad you enjoyed the show.