Bruce Schneier on Real Security

This has been linked far and wide, but it can’t be dis­sem­i­nated far enough or wide enough. Words of wisdom.

Fuck This Decade Part III

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The Rude Pundit fin­ishes up his decade end ret­ro­spec­tive. I cer­tainly agree with the fuck you’s.

A New Low for TechCrunch

Gods know I hate TechCrunch. Fuck, they’re prob­a­bly respon­si­ble for at least a third of the mate­r­ial for the Angry Mac Bastards pod­cast. But yes­ter­day, TechCrunch and Erik Schonfeld sank to an abysmal new low.

In the arti­cle, which is so dis­jointed and point­less that it makes the aver­age third – grader’s book report look like a master’s the­sis, Shonfeld cas­ti­gates DeviantART (an online artis­tic com­mu­nity com­posed of user – sub­mit­ted works) for the fact that the one hun­dred mil­lionth user sub­mis­sion, or “devi­a­tion” as they are styled, hap­pens to be a gay sex story. I hon­estly can’t get what Shonfeld is going on about here. Is he offended by the sub­ject mat­ter, or just jeal­ous that the peo­ple at DeviantArt actu­ally pro­duce some­thing other than pro­pa­ganda for Google and end­less com­edy mate­r­ial for those of us bag­ging on the CrunchPad? Or, as is most likely given that this is TecCrunch, is he just trolling for links to keep his mas­ter Arrington from bust­ing out the cat-o-nine-tails and pun­ish­ment dildo?

Whatever the moti­va­tion, the arti­cle is rep­re­hen­si­ble. Seriously, how dare a jumped up tabloid like TechCrunch crit­i­cize DeviantART. It’s true that a large chunk of the mate­r­ial on DeviantART

Continue read­ing A New Low for TechCrunch


Fuck This Decade Part II

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The Rude Pundit con­tin­ues his farewell to this shitty decade; this time slag­ging off on the hon­keys who fucked us up. Again, I can’t find much to dis­agree with.

I Feel So Safe

Warning! Political and Local Interest con­tent ahead! Proceed at your own risk!

It’s nice to see that the United States has become a nation of panty-waisted shrink­ing vio­lets. Apparently two poor fucks fly­ing into this shit-hole of a state were detained by the cracker-jack (because that’s the box out of which they get their cer­ti­fi­ca­tions) agents of the TSA. Of course, upon inves­ti­ga­tion, they were released. And what, you might ask, were these poor sods’ crimes? Well:

  • Looking “Middle Eastern”
  • Talking “loudly” in a lan­guage that some grass-fucker hon­key didn’t recognize
  • Either watch­ing the movie “The Kingdom” or being present when the snitch was watch­ing it (the story is idi­ot­i­cally unclear on this point. As an aside, “The Kingdom” is a fan­tas­tic movie and fea­tures stunts by a good friend of mine…go rent it.
  • Getting up to take a leak.

There you have it. All you swarthy fuck­ers bet­ter make sure to keep you mouths, and your pros­trates, clamped shut, or it’s the inter­ro­ga­tion room for you. I swear I am so sick and tired of this nation of ter­ri­fied racist cunts. And don’t get me started on the com­ments to the arti­cle. Seriously,

Continue read­ing I Feel So Safe


Fuck This Decade

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Via the Rude Pundit. There ain’t much there I dis­agree with.

Terminology Matters

Everyone’s favorite cranky old jack­ass Dave Winer is all a’flutter about WordPress and Tumblr imple­ment­ing the Twitter API in a post titled How open stan­dards are cre­ated. The meat of his post is a bunch of typ­i­cal Winer bull­shit about how won­der­ful it is that WordPress and Tumblr have imple­mented the Twitter API (which is true) and how that fact may well make the Twitter API and open standard.

I’m going to ignore, for the time being, the patent absur­dity of Dave’s asser­tion. Last time I checked, for some­thing to be an “open stan­dard” it had to be both open, which The Twitter API hardly is; and a stan­dard, which I don’t think being used by your­self, and two blog host­ing com­pa­nies qual­i­fies as. It’s not really that that irks me about this piece.

What bugs me here is some­thing that Winer does inces­santly, and really chaps my ass. He com­pletely mis­uses and con­flates two dif­fer­ent tech­ni­cal terms. To quote:

If Facebook were to imple­ment the Twitter API that would be it. We’d have another FTP or HTTP or RSS.

No, Dave we wouldn’t. The Twitter API is just that, an Application Programming Interface. FTP, HTTP and RSS are

Continue read­ing Terminology Matters


Hump Day Kvetching

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So, you may have noticed a short-lived ban­ner ad at the top of the page here. I (retard­edly) decided to lis­ten to the peo­ple who have sug­gested that I make some attempt to cash in on the not-trivial traf­fic I get. Unfortunately, see­ing as how I’m appar­ently black­listed by Adsense (prob­a­bly because the con­tent here isn’t “family-safe,” but who fuck­ing knows; Google is a black box) I went with a lesser provider. The results were less than stel­lar, so I’ve pulled the whole thing. Why the fuck is this shit so difficult?

I’ve Seen Things You People Wouldn’t Believe…

The greater techno-sphere got their col­lec­tive panties in a twist this week­end over the quasi-unveiling of the rumored Google Phone. I’m not going to link to any of the cov­er­age, I’m lazy and you all can use a search engine just fine, but it behooves me as an opin­ion­ated cock-sucker and gen­eral bas­tard to throw in my two cents.

So, what do we know about this bad boy? Basically, it’s a re-branded (or should that be “unbranded”) HTC phone run­ning the lat­est ver­sion of Android. Supposedly it will be offered carrier-unlocked (no word on pri­ce­points) and it works on T-Mobile’s vari­ant of the GSM spec­trum in the U.S. What that means, for those who don’t under­stand the vagaries of cel­lu­lar data net­works (New York Times, I’m look­ing at you) is that it a) won’t be run­ning on your pre­cious fuck­ing Verizon, and b) will only oper­ate at EDGE speeds on AT&T.

My take on this: “So the fuck what?”

The vast mouth-breathing major­ity of the blo­gos­phere is agog with com­ments about how this strap­ping young lad of a phone will “change the indus­try” and other such hyper­bolic twad­dle. The phrase “iPhone killer” has even been bandied about. The thing is,

Continue read­ing I’ve Seen Things You People Wouldn’t Believe…


Easy as ?

This amused me. Apparently Ubuntu Linux now fea­tures a system-wide noti­fi­ca­tion frame­work inspired by the Growl project from Mac OS X. Unlike Growl, though, Ubuntu’s noti­fi­ca­tions are bound to the upper-right cor­ner of the screen, which appar­ently vexes some peo­ple. Not to worry though! Lifehacker comes to the res­cue with a post link­ing to the Ubuntu Forums. All you have to do is fol­low the sim­ple advice to move the noti­fi­ca­tions to the bottom-left cor­ner. There is one lit­tle caveat though:

The fix requires down­load­ing and installing the source code for the noti­fi­ca­tions, and might require deal­ing with addi­tional depen­dency instal­la­tions if you get back errors on try­ing to install the source code.

Oh Linux, you crazy bas­tard, don’t you ever go chang­ing on me.