Technology

I’m reminded to spread some Googlejuice: jew should not return an anti-Semitic site as the top result, and I personally think Air America (original) ought to return that new liberal talk radio station for those who are feeling lucky. It occurs to me that Google now has humans hand-optimizing its index. These are the first benevolent Googlebombs I’ve ever seen, and they do potentially represent some sort of group consensus about what pages ought to be top results for certain search terms. Which, I suppose, is what Pagerank has always been. Interesting to see it intentionally manipulated for good ends, though. ...

I registered for BloggerCon II (original) this morning. The list of registrations is pretty cool; there are a number of people there who I look forward to meeting. David Pinto is conspiring to baseball blog, which sounds fun to me. Wouldn’t mind shaking hands with Oliver Willis at all. And the eponymous TPB, Esq. will be there — one of two people on my blogroll who I’d read for the quality of their prose alone. I’m starting to look forward to this.

How to build an invisible firewall. Noted for later use.

The next BloggerCon is gonna be free. Big thumbs up. I’m pretty sure I’ll attend that.

Vernor Vinge was right. Again. There is a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 5 that can be triggered by loading a bitmap image. No Javascript, no ActiveX, nothing fancy. You load the bitmap, and arbitrary code runs on your system. Or you load a page with the bitmap embedded in it. And it’s not a particular bitmap, it’s a general technique. If you are currently browsing the Internet with Internet Explorer 5, you can be owned at any moment. ...

It would be great if Ecto was actually working, instead of getting caught in some messed up state where it can’t remember my accounts. And losing data. Seriously: it seems like the worst thing you can do when transitioning from shareware to commercial product is to make the commercial product less stable than the old version. I’m looking forward to Zempt for the Mac.

Super-nifty color chooser (that works under Safari) Forms without tables (original) (coming soon: Malazan Empire wiki) That is all.

Anyone happen to remember seeing a recent Dave Winer post linking to this recap of Disney’s comments at ETCon? I could have sworn I saw him link, but now I don’t see it.

I fought the law, and the law won. The new Pepsi commercial, featuring illegal downloaders. The kid with the speaking role can’t act, but I like it anyhow.

Newsweek breaks the news: Jeff Bezos is funding a space venture. Some dot-com CEOs buy basketball teams; some buy spaceships. Carl’s comment: “I guess he took to heart the analysts who pointed out that Amazon’s valuation required selling to other solar systems.” Oh, and Neal Stephenson is working for the Bezos venture. That’s funky. I was all set to feel smart about pointing out that Elon Musk, who founded PayPal, is also doing a private space company but Newsweek got there first. Alas. Still, it’s kind of a cool way to spend all that money. ...