February

Some RSS readers are vulnerable to security exploits and other annoyances embedded in RSS/XML feeds. This morning, Phil showed me a proof-of-concept sample for Newsgator, the Outlook-based RSS reader, triggered by VBScript code in an RSS feed that e-mails a random person in your Outlook address book.

Other readers may not be vulnerable to Outlook-style hacks, but they can still be screwed up by Javascript. Try subscribing to this RSS feed I created with your reader of choice. Syndirella displays the popup window and crashes on the Javascript alerts. How about other readers?

Just to be clear, I’m not saying this is a serious issue. Users only subscribe to trusted RSS feeds, and feed providers are extremely unlikely to put malicious code in their feeds. It’s just interesting that it works.

My friend Mat Honan and his wife Harper have been backpacking across Southeast Asia for the past five months. While staying in Laos, the country sandwiched between Cambodia and Vietnam, they contracted the dengue virus, or “break-bone fever.” His weblog entry is a gripping survival story.

I stayed home sick from work today with a head cold and sore throat; now I feel like a big sissy.

Congratulations to my good friend “Crazy Uncle Joe” Utsler on the birth of his new daughter, Zöe Alexis Utsler. Welcome to the world, kid!

I followed a link from Boing Boing this morning to this Tripod-hosted Disney website, but was instead prompted with an error: “The Tripod page you are trying to reach has exceeded its hourly bandwidth limit. The site will be available again in 1 hour!”

The site’s owner can then pay Tripod for bandwidth upgrades. But why can’t the end user volunteer to pay the upgrade fees, so they can get to the information they want? Similarly, readers of Blogspot-hosted weblogs can’t volunteer to “gift upgrade” their favorite websites to Blogspot Plus accounts; only the site’s owner can upgrade.

Is there a good reason for limiting their revenue like this? Is there some sort of privacy issue I’m not aware of? It seems like a huge oversight.

As discussed in Rob Malda’s journal, Slashdot is considering allowing early access to pending Slashdot stories for premium subscribers. But who cares about seeing one or two stories an hour, 10 minutes before it goes live?

A much better idea would be to allow paid access to the massive Slashdot submission queue, a business model made popular by Fark and FuckedCompany. This would allow eager newshounds and journalists to access a real-time feed of unedited story ideas and breaking news items, updated hundreds of times an hour.

I promised myself last year that I’d never go again, but the tentative lineup for this year’s Coachella Festival in Palm Springs is too tempting. How can I pass up seeing Badly Drawn Boy, Ben Folds, Ben Kweller, Cat Power, Gomez, the White Stripes, Ladytron, Tortoise, Sonic Youth, Polyphonic Spree, Soundtrack of Our Lives, Mouse on Mars, RJD2, El P, Amon Tobin and Stereo Total at a single event? Even at $140 for a two-day pass, it’s a deal.

Update: Goldenvoice posted the official set list. Looks like Cat Power was removed. (It’s probably for the best, since Chan Marshall has difficulty enough playing small clubs.)

For insightful commentary regarding the Google/Pyra buyout, look no further than the Yahoo Message Boards thread.

Yahoo Message Boards continues to be one of the strangest web-based communities ever. I’d love to see someone break down their user base to see if there are regular contributors, or if it’s completely composed of transient users clicking on news items.

Holy crap, indeed. This little news item will soon be #1 with a bullet, but Ev just announced at the Blogosphere panel I attended that Google bought Blogger. Ev told me after the panel that the deal has been in the works for four months and he’s already moved offices from San Francisco to Mountain View.

I would expect this means dedicated searching and ranking of weblogs a la Daypop/Blogdex, displaying aggregated weblog content in Google News, and time-based searching of weblogs. But they could do all those things now… Why buy Pyra? Is Google moving toward an expanded portal model of offering publishing/hosting services beyond searching?

In case you missed the memo, the peer-to-peer application du jour is DirectConnect and its better open-source cousin, DC++.

Their website says a petabyte (1,024 terabytes) is being shared on the network and I believe it. On any given public hub, it’s not uncommon to find individuals sharing 250 gigs or more of data; usually feature films, console games, and software. That’s insane.

What makes it different from the countless other peer-to-peer apps out there? Instead of relying on a central server or networked nodes, DirectConnect looks more like IRC: public or private hubs of individuals, each acting as networked file servers. You can only search the files shared by people connected to your own hub, which means less files but increased security.

Plus, it’s easy to create a private hub for your company or a group of friends, undetectable to any unwanted guests (like the MPAA). You can password-protect your hub too, for the very paranoid.

I’d love to set up a hub for archaic, out-of-print, or unavailable media, like Song of the South, abandonware, arcade ROMs, and bootleg remixes. Is anyone interested?

Loudon Wainwright’s “Something for Nothing” is an entertaining and fair commentary on file sharing, from a songwriter’s perspective. Download the MP3 first, and read the lyrics below. (I’m not sure, but I think Loudon would approve.)

Freenet/Locutus creator Ian Clarke will be speaking at 7pm this Sunday at Chinatown’s C-Level, the neat art/tech collective co-founded by my friend Mark Allen.

Freenet was the first of the next-generation P2P applications, more concerned with anonymous and decentralized content redistribution than with swapping the latest Shania Twain single. Locutus is the commercial arm of Freenet, allowing people to search shared files in controlled groups. Following the lecture, there will be an open meeting of the spanking-new Los Angeles Art and Technology Hackers club. Should make for an interesting evening.

Matthew Ostrowski tacks MP3 headers onto random files, listening for interesting patterns in the raw data. According to Matthew’s friend, super-librarian Brewster Kahle, he found that .exe files sounded more interesting that plain .txt or .doc documents. So, courtesy of the Internet Archive and Etree.org, here’s Microsoft’s Word.exe file as an MP3.

Not easy listening, by any means, but a strange comfort to anyone waxing nostalgic for the music of synchronizing modems.

You might remember the sad story of Richard Goddard Jr. and David Winkleman, the stepfather/stepson that sued an Iowa radio station for failing to pay them each $125,000 to permanently tattoo the station’s logo on their foreheads (photo!).

According to a new article, Richard Goddard Jr.’s problems didn’t end with the unfortunate tattoo. Unable to find a job because of his tattoo and a history of legal trouble, Goddard was “really upset,” his grandmother said.

After several weeks of hearing him complain, his roommates at the Kershaw Trailer Park did something about it. They tried to kill him; first by hanging, then by beating his face with a ball-peen hammer.

The Audioscrobbler plugin for Winamp/XMMS aggregates listening habits by tracking the artists/songs you’ve listened to, and comparing that information with all of the other users in the database. If this catches on, a system like this would be a really effective way to discover new artists and find people with similar tastes. (My personal stats.)

A simple idea, but brilliant. (Thanks, Cameron.)

Update: Audioscrobbler’s service provider took the site offline because of increased bandwidth usage. The site’s creator is looking for a new host.

This Washington Post article, published 32 minutes before mission control lost contact with the Space Shuttle Columbia, offers a sad glimpse into a parallel ending to today’s disaster (via Mefi).

“We’ve taken all reasonable measures, and all of our landings so far since 9-11 have gone perfectly,” said Lt. Col. Michael Rein, an Air Force spokesman. …

Some of Columbia’s crew members didn’t want their time in space to end.

“Do we really have to come back?” astronaut David Brown jokingly asked Mission Control before the ride home.

NASA’s next shuttle flight, a space station construction mission, is scheduled for March. The next time Columbia flies will be in November, when it carries into orbit educator-astronaut Barbara Morgan, who was the backup for Challenger crew member Christa McAuliffe in 1986.