GHash is in a position to exercise complete control over which transactions appear on the blockchain and which miners reap mining rewards. They could keep 100% of the mining profits to themselves if they so chose. Bitcoin is currently an expensive distributed database under the control of a single entity, albeit one that requires constantly burning energy to maintain — worst of all worlds.
via It’s Time For a Hard Bitcoin Fork :: Hacking, Distributed.
The truth is more likely that it’s less to do with his site and more to do with Google seeing a pattern of what it considers to be unnatural linking by the publishers it is contacting. As Haughey guesses, it’s more likely that MetaFilter is “collateral damage,” with the damage being the annoying link removal requests rather than any real distrust of the site. That’s especially since its ranking drop seems to well predate these requests.
But it is worrisome, especially when Haughey writes about how much care apparently goes into trying to ensure all links are relevant:
via On MetaFilter Being Penalized By Google: An Explainer.
Earn respect. That’s your best defense if things go south with Google. It’s also your best offense for doing well in Google
Projects like Wikipedia, uses such as text and data mining, online access to cultural heritage and educational resources, and transformative use of the Internet do not follow the same logic as the traditional content industry value chains. Here limited user rights and long terms of protection become problematic and increased enforcement translates into chilling effects.
At the same time all of these types of uses are exactly what makes the Internet special and drives its potential to accelerate innovation and to democratize access to knowledge, tools and culture. The Internet is the first mass medium that is simultaneously enabling market driven uses, uses that are driven by public policy objectives (such as education or access to culture), and uses driven by people’s desire to create, collaborate and contribute to the commons.
Let’s start with the basics. How do you know which apps you need? How do you get them installed? How do you keep them updated? How many apps can you reasonably keep track of on a phone? On a tablet? Just the home screen? A few screens? A dozen screens? When you have millions of apps out there, this rapidly becomes less of a “slap a few icons on the page” problem and more of a search problem like the greater web. My son’s iPad has more than 10 pages of apps now, we don’t even bother with the pretense of scrolling through pages of icons, we just go straight to search every time.
A popular request is to block certain content types from being served to clients. Squid currently can not do “content inspection” to decide on the file type based on the contents, but it is able to block HTTP replies based on the servers’ content MIME Type reply.
via How to block flash videos using Squid proxy Server | Linux Blog.
I recently wrote a popular article on the history of computer power supplies, which led to speculation on what’s inside those amazingly small one-inch cube USB chargers sold by Apple, Samsung, RIM, and other companies. In the interest of science, I bought a cheap no-name cube charger off eBay for $2.79, and took it apart. It’s amazing that manufacturers can build and sell a complex charger for just a few dollars. It looks a lot like a genuine Apple charger and cost a lot less. But looking inside, I found that important safety corners were cut, which could lead to a 340 volt surprise. In addition, the interference from a cheap charger like this can cause touchscreen malfunctions. Thus, I recommend spending a few dollars more to get a brand-name charger.
via Ken Shirriff’s blog: Tiny, cheap, and dangerous: Inside a (fake) iPhone charger.
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Active measures, like those employed by Nmap, are unfortunately not available when doing passive analysis of live traffic or when analyzing previously captured network traffic. Passive analysis requires much more subtle variations in the network traffic to be observed, in order to identify a computer’s OS. A simple but effective passive method is to inspect the initial Time To Live (TTL) in the IP header and the TCP window size (the size of the receive window) of the first packet in a TCP session, i.e. the SYN or SYN+ACK packet.
The Internet and web applications have been enablers for these server farms, for these mainracks, if you will. People use these web apps on smartphones, on notebooks, on tablets, and on the fading desktop. The client paints pixels while the server farm — the mainrack — does the backend work. More than a dozen iterations of Moore’s Law later, and the Wheel of Reincarnation has returned us to terminals connected to Big Iron.
And there’s the rub. The movement to replace the mainframe has re-invented not only the mainframe, but also the reason why people wanted to get rid of mainframes in the first place.
This means that projects like OpenStreetMaps will be able to add over 2GBs of Chicago data to their site. This also means that companies and Chicago startups who would like to leverage this data are able to as part of daily business.
via The City of Chicago is on Github – The Changelog.
I downloaded the crime data dataset that supposedly includes all reported crimes from 2001. The CSV file was 1G in plain text. They could have compressed it but it doesn’t matter. It contained over 4 million records. Now I have to figure out how to slice and dice this dataset and for what purpose I don’t quite know yet.