Hi all, here are some notable links that I ran into lately:
1. https://duckduckgo.com/ is a web search engine by geeks and for geeks, that uses information from crowd-sourcing sites. One thing it doesn't do is make you live in a bubble: http://dontbubble.us/ . I recall that while a search for "flickr shlomif" yields http://www.flickr.com/photos/shlomif/ as the first hit for Google for me, it didn't display it anywhere at the top on my therapist's computer. On https://duckduckgo.com/?q=flickr%20shlomif it is always the first hit. :-) Google has recently been going against their “Don't do evil” policy by aggressively bubbling search results, by filtering “copyright-violating” content, and by having a practically non-existent tech support, which makes its users very frustrated and angry at Google. DuckDuckGo aims right at Google’s cornerstone - its web search - and if Google loses that, it may become yet another multi-services provider. 2. I found these two videos on YouTube by two independent artists to be excellent: * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-8syShivTc - Tiffany Alvord’s “So Alive” - I feel it is her best original song yet. * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNq1bkrWjbk - “One Big Family”, part of the “Above All That is Random” series by Christina Grimmie and Sarah Happlesful 3. Touting my own horn, I have recently prepared some captioned images (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolcat ), and you can view one of them here: http://www.shlomifish.org/humour.html#yo-nsa-publish-or-perish . They are amazingly easy to create using Inkscape, and I can highly recommend it. Both China and Iran block the Cheezburger network, and I suspect they both do that because the fact that they allow people without great artistic skills to create something quickly, which makes many of them be junk, but a minority be incredibly subversive. Anyway, reading from the image's description on http://www.stumbleupon.com/content/9YaUU0 : <<<<<<<<<<<<<< "Yo NSA: Publish or Perish" - a captioned image. The NSA (National Security Agency) is the greatest money sink in the computer security world. Made out of many people with a Ph.D. in Mathematics, who yet did not have the sense (intuition or wisdom) to not know that joining the NSA will put them into a Galt anti-Gulch where they cannot share their findings with their world, and are under constant stress from what they know and think they know. Such a person deserves to become crippled for life. Compare this to the happy and healthy computer security hackers' (yes enthusiasts and amateurs - not crackers) and researchers, and you'll see. The NSA faces two options: either publish all their findings like other security centres do, or quickly become and more irrelevant and eventually dismissed as a huge waste of money. Just some points of highlight: the NSA recently complained that the security researchers publish too many research papers that they cannot keep up with them. ("Too much of a good thing is a bad thing."), and the NSA know of Al-kaida's intentions to bomb the world trade center, and yet did not prevent it, yet it was the CIA who eventually hunted and killed Bin-Laden without any casualties. >>>>>>>>>>>>>> ====================== Cheers, Shlomi Fish -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ Apple Inc. is Evil - http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/anti/apple/ He has a high degree of idealism, a high degree of stubbornness, and an even higher degree of inability to distiniguish between the two. Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply . _______________________________________________ Haifux mailing list Haifux@haifux.org http://haifux.org/mailman/listinfo/haifux