linkmachinego.com

9 March 2009
[fun] Massive Timewaster: Definitive List of The 99 Things You Should Have Already Experienced On The Internet Unless You’re a Loser or Old or Something.
13 February 2009
10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know‘I figured that many people would benefit from a thorough overview on how to protect your privacy on Facebook. Below is a step by step process for protecting your privacy…’ [via Metafilter]
19 December 2008
[work] Revealed: Amazon staff punished for being ill‘[Amazon] Staff were warned that days off for illness, nonattendance or lateness would result in “points” against them. Any sick days, even if justified by a doctor’s note, resulted in a point against the worker.’
16 October 2008
[funny] ‘I Am Under 18’ Button Clicked For First Time In History Of Internet … from the Onion‘In an unprecedented and historic event Monday, the “I Am Under 18” button, an Internet security device which if selected restricts access to websites featuring adult content, was clicked for the first time ever. “I knew I could simply claim to be over 18 and continue onto my desired destination, but I also realized that I would have to live with that lie for the rest of my life,” said local resident Garrett Kinley, 17.’
23 September 2008
[internet] Sept. 19, 1982: Can’t You Take a Joke? … Wired on the origins of the emoticon‘The modern emoticon does trace its lineage directly to Fahlman, who says he came up with the idea after reading “lengthy diatribes” from people on the message board who failed to get the joke or the sarcasm in a particular post.’
8 August 2008
[tech] Internet Protocol Address Exhaustion Counter … a web page counting down the number of days until we run out of internet addresses (on the current scheme) … ‘892 days’
3 July 2008
[google] Is Google Making Us Stupid? … interesting article suggesting that the internet may well be altering the way we think … [via Metafilter]

‘The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.’

15 February 2008
[funny] Oh Fuck, The Internet is Here… [via More(ish)]

oh fuck. the internet is here.


8 January 2008
[fun] Concentrated Stupid — a webpage showing a random example of the concentrated stupidity of the Internet‘u kno dissin tom and if he knew he be deleted all of uscryingnaw playingprobly delete u for posting thislol’ [via Waxy]
18 December 2007
[funny] Porn For Girls By Girls.com — another spoof website from The Internet Now in Handy Book Form

roughly taken...

6 December 2007
[spam] Inside the “Ron Paul” Spam Botnet — facinating behind-the-scenes look at the methods and tools spammers use … ‘Reactor Mailer operates with a software-as-a-service model. Spammers are given accounts on a Reactor server, and use a web-based interface to manage their spam tasks.’
27 November 2007
[tv] Adam Curtis : an Audio Special — audio from Andrew Orlowski’s Adam Curtis interview.
13 November 2007
[books] The 48 Laws of Power‘Law 17 – Keep Others in Suspended Terror: Cultivate an Air of Unpredictability’
6 November 2007
[comics] Diesel Sweeties: Being A Girl On The Internet Used To Mean Something… (more…)
1 October 2007
[internet] An IM Infatuation Turned to Romance. Then the Truth Came Out — great Wired article proving once and for all that on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog (and how that can destroy lives) …

He tried to explain what drew him to his computer. “When I’m talking to Cindy or you like this, face-to-face,” he said, “it’s hard for me to say what I feel.” As Tommy, however, the words came easily. And then there was Jessi. He loved her, or at least believed he loved her, though he knew he was “never going to meet her.” His plan was to “kill Tommy off” in Iraq, but Cindy intervened too soon. He nearly committed suicide because of his guilt about having lied to Jessi.

24 September 2007
[internet] Why is Matt Drudge in hiding? — facinating profile of Matt Drudge‘Drudge’s own influence stems from the fact that he loves news, in a way that great newspeople do, and his news sensibility is extremely sophisticated. When he was a kid, he figured out that though thousands of people get murdered, only a few murders are news. He enjoys the changing fashions in news, the plot shifts that he has a hand in engineering. As he’s entered middle age, something noir and futuristic has entered his sensibility. The site is obsessed with global warming, with the dangers of mobile phones and cloning, with all manner of tabloid horrors. He’s a storyteller, and the stories are dark.’
23 August 2007
[wifi] Is Stealing Wireless Wrong?‘Philosopher Julian Baggini says he can’t see what all the fuss is about. “I’m pro the stealers on this one. If you are doing it systematically to avoid chipping in your bit you are a freeloader and that’s immoral. “But casual and occasional use while travelling is a bit like reading your book from the light coming out from someone’s window. It’s like eating someone’s leftovers.”‘
9 August 2007
[spam] Damn Spam — The New Yorker on Internet Spam [via qwghlm]…

‘After selecting six hundred West Coast addresses, Thuerk realized that he would never have time to call each one of them, or even to send out hundreds of individual messages. Then another idea occurred to him: what if he simply used the network to dispatch a single e-mail to all of them? “We invite you to come see the 2020 and hear about the DECSystem-20 family,’’ the message read. As historic lines go, it didn’t have quite the ring of “One small step for a man,” yet Gary Thuerk’s impact cannot be disputed. When he pushed the send button, he became the father of spam. The reaction was immediate and almost completely hostile. “This was a flagrant violation of the Arpanet,’’ one recipient wrote. Another noted that “advertising of particular products” should be strongly discouraged on the network. The system administrator promised to respond at once, and Thuerk was harshly reprimanded. Nevertheless, his company sold more than twenty of the computer systems, for a million dollars apiece.’

22 June 2007
[quotes] Grouphug.us: ‘In third grade, I cheated on my history exam. In fourth grade, I stole my uncle Max’s toupee and I glued it on my face when I was Moses in my Hebrew School play. In fifth grade, I knocked my sister Edie down the stairs and I blamed it on the dog…When my mom sent me to the summer camp for fat kids and then they served lunch I went nuts and I pigged out and they kicked me out…But the worst thing I ever done — I mixed a pot of fake puke at home and then I went to this movie theater, hid the puke in my jacket, climbed up to the balcony and then, then, I made a noise like this: hua-hua-hua-huaaaaaaa — and then I dumped it over the side, all over the people in the audience. And then, this was horrible, all the people started getting sick and throwing up all over each other. I never felt so bad in my entire life.’
15 June 2007
[tv] BBC, ITV, Channel 4 Plot Single Broadband TV Player‘The BBC, ITV, and Channel 4 are said to be aiming to create a “one-stop shop”, open to other channels too, which would allow legal broadband viewing from one programme. According to The Guardian, the plan is dubbed “Project Kangaroo” and will “do for broadband what Freeview did for digital television”. It is expected to operate like Joost, perhaps hinting at some P2P element.’
11 June 2007
[interview] Stephen Fry on the Internet — great video interview with Stephen Fry – he comes over as really loving the internet.
9 June 2007
[tv] Diamond Geezer Reviews the BBC’s iPlayer: ‘I have caught up with the Doctor Who Confidential I missed while I was on the train coming back from Dungeness, and a couple of programmes I only realised were worth watching after I’d read the review in the following day’s paper. iPlayer can really change your viewing habits.’
4 June 2007
[lolcats] Roll Your Own LOL, Not Just For Cats Anymore — some funny examples of lolcats mutations … ‘no cry, albino’
29 May 2007
[comics] The Truth About Wireless Devices

cartoon about wifi

27 May 2007
[web] Burst Culture — Warren Ellis on Boing Boing, magazines, blogs, tumblelogs, Ad-sense and more… ‘I love print. I love magazines that commit and pay for long articles and long fiction. The web rewards neither approach. It’s a packeted medium, a surf medium. Short bursts are the way to go. The web isn’t a replacement medium — it’s *another* medium.’
21 May 2007
[internet] Ask Metafilter: Has thirteen years of WWW ruined my brain?‘At home, at work, whenever I can, I’m bouncing from website to website, ingesting these quick hits of information and moving on to the next site at the slighted twinge of boredom. Doing this for 2-3 hours a day since 1994 has left me unable to concentrate on anything that’s not absolutely scintillating to me — I get impatient with conversation with my wife, I can’t pay attention during meetings at work, and what’s worst, it’s very difficult to do my job, which is not interesting to me…’
8 May 2007
[web] YouTube: Everyone Knows Your Name … Just Remember – Think Before You Post.
22 March 2007
[net] Glanced At: ‘sfearthquakes’ on Twitter

“One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs is, find an old UNIX command that hasn’t yet been implemented on the web, and fix that. talk and finger became ICQ, LISTSERV became Yahoo! Groups, ls became (the original) Yahoo!, find and grep became Google, rn became Bloglines, pine became Gmail, mount is becoming S3, and bash is becoming Yahoo! Pipes. I didn’t get until tonight that Twitter is wall for the web. I love that.”

17 March 2007
[books] Douglas Coupland on bloggers, YouTube and Bubble 2.0‘In the future, all these kids now with MySpace pages who put absolutely everything out there, like number of tampons they used, everything, in 40 years there’ll be a political culture where stuff like that, minor details, don’t shock anymore. Now in the States if you hire a maid who doesn’t have her papers you have to withdraw from politics. I hope I live to see the day when stuff like that doesn’t matter, but at the moment I think after a certain age – I tag it arbitrarily at 22 – everyone’s more withdrawn in fear.’
1 March 2007
[censorship] The Great Firewall of China — test any website to see if it is censored by the China’s firewall. [via Metafilter]
29 December 2006
[net] Just Can’t Get E-nough — the New Scientist on unhealthy habits created by technology. On Cheesepodding: ‘In certain circles there is even an ironic cool to be had from out-cheesing your friends. There is a problem, though. As with all addictions, you end up needing bigger and bigger hits to get the same buzz. Once I started downloading Celine Dion power ballads, I knew it was time to stop. Fortunately, I have found a variant that is, if anything, more entertaining. I download songs I know my wife hates and put them onto her iPod while she isn’t looking.’ [via the Guardian’s Technology Blog]
15 December 2006
[future] Bruce Sterling’s Final Prediction — Sterling’s last column and Prediction for Wired Magazine … ‘The Internet, for instance, crawled out of a dank atomic fallout shelter to become the Mardi Gras parade of my generation. It was not a bolt of destructive lightning; it was the sun breaking through the clouds. Everything we do has unpredicted consequences. It’s good to keep in mind that some outcomes are just fabulous, dumb luck…’
14 December 2006
[net] Map of the Internet — neat hand-drawn map of the address space of the internet. [via Waxy’s Links]
7 December 2006
[tv] Imagine Links — nicely annotated link list covering Alan Yentob’s BBC documentary on the Internet. ‘I did try to track down Yentob’s myspace and livejournal but they appear to have been removed.’
12 November 2006
[secondlife] Warren Ellis on Second Life: ‘The laissez-faire nature of SL has turned much of the mainland into a retard’s toybox. Second Life is, by and large, an ugly, stupid-looking place, a riot of bad signage, lurid coloured blocks and constructions that’d embarrass a four-year-old playing with Lego.’
6 November 2006
[net] The Guardian’s Web 2.0 Feature — an article and interviews covering Web 2.0 (the interviews are with people like Matt Mullenweg, Evan Williams and Joshua Schachter) … ‘Sit someone at a computer screen and let it sink in that they are fully, definitively alone; then watch what happens. They will reach out for other people; but only part of the way. They will have “friends”, which are not the same thing as friends, and a lively online life, which is not the same thing as a social life; they will feel more connected, but they will be just as alone. Everybody sitting at a computer screen is alone. Everybody sitting at a computer screen is at the centre of the world. Everybody sitting at a computer screen, increasingly, wants everything to be all about them. This is our first glimpse of what people who grow up with the net will want from the net.’
20 October 2006
[games] The View from the Top — the final confession of a recovering World of Warcraft junkie … ‘The worst though are the people you know have time commitments. People with families and significant others. I am not one to judge a person’s situation, but when a father/husband plays a video game all night long, seven days a week, after getting home from work, very involved instances that soak up hours and require concentration, it makes me queasy that I encouraged that. Others include the kids you know aren’t doing their homework and confide in you they are failing out of high school or college but don’t want to miss their chance at loot, the long-term girl/boyfriend who is skipping out on a date (or their anniversary – I’ve seen it) to play (and in some cases flirt constantly), the professional taking yet another day off from work to farm mats or grind their reputations up with in-game factions to get “valuable” quest rewards, etc… I’m not one to tell people how to spend their time, but it gets ridiculous when you take a step back.’ [via Waxy’s Links]
16 October 2006
[internet] Some Tech-Gen Youth Go Offline — Wired News on the growing disillusionment with social network websites … ‘Bugeja often lectures students about “interpersonal intelligence” — knowing when, where and for what purpose technology is most appropriate. He points out the students he’s seen walking across campus, holding hands with significant others while talking on cell phones to someone else. He’s also observed them in coffee shops, surrounded by people, but staring instead at a computer screen. “True friends,” he tells them, “need to learn when to stop blogging and go across campus to help a friend.”‘ [via meish.org]
2 June 2006
[con] The Perfect Mark — the inside story of a Nigerian 419 Con‘An enduring trait of Nigerian letter scammers — indeed, of most con artists — is their reluctance to walk away from a mark before his resources are exhausted. On February 5, 2003, several days after the checks were revealed as phony, after Worley was under siege by investigators, after his bank account had been frozen, after he had called his partners “evil bastards,” Worley received one more e-mail from Mercy Nduka. “I am quite sympathetic about all your predicaments,” she wrote, “but the truth is that we are at the final step and I am not willing to let go…”‘
20 April 2006
[murder] eBay, Manga and Murder — the Guardian on Kevin Underwood‘It is almost certainly true that you can find out more about Underwood’s personality from poking around the internet than his co-workers ever bothered to. But looking through the trails he left online, an awful fact becomes clear. Almost everything he did there to express himself was simply a record of the things he liked to buy or rent. Even his depression was understood in terms of the pills that he did or didn’t take.’
22 March 2006
[firefox] Firefox ‘Causes’ Relationship Breakup‘She installed Firefox for herself, and happened to need to edit the list of sites to never save passwords for. She quickly realized that he had been visiting dating sites in secret, and was also able to determine that he was still an active member of some of the sites. As one might expect, this led to a breakup. Should the Firefox uninstaller offer to delete profile data…?’
7 March 2006
[web] Top 11 Worst Firefox Extensions‘6. SoundOfCher – Embeds an annoying Cher midi file on every page you visit. Up to 60 different tunes!’
1 February 2006
[web] The Grand Support Email Speed Contest — how long does it take 10 companies to respond to a simple emailed question? [via meish.org]
24 January 2006
[web] Murdoch to bring MySpace to UK‘A debate rages about whether parents have the right to view their offspring’s online musings on what is after all a public site site. Perhaps people should be more concerned that, unlike previous generations, today’s youth are likely to see their moralistic rantings, crushes and fashion and hairstyling disasters preserved online, for eternity…’
17 January 2006
[net] Random Personal Picture Finder — find random pictures from Google based on filenames from various types of digital cameras.
4 December 2005
[web] When Murder Hits the Blogosphere — this actually should be titled “Murder on MySpace”. ‘…[Kara Borden’s MySpace] page was brightly colored with pink-lined black boxes listing her friends and hobbies, a rainbow striped white background and a picture of her in a pink top, smiling with lips closed to hide her braces. She listed her interests as soccer, talking on the phone, the beach and partying. “Books are gay,” she wrote. She lied about her age, listing it as 17. A few hours later she allegedly stood by as her boyfriend, David Ludwig, 18, shot and killed her parents.’
27 November 2005
[distraction] The Scribbler — fun, web doodling toy (which has just reminded me to link to Doodleblog)
28 June 2005
[web] Kill the Drudge Popups in Firefox — how to kill the annoying adverts on the Drudge Report‘To block pop-ups from plugins, open your Firefox 1.0 or 1.0.1 browser, type about:config in the address field. Right-click in the resulting config page somewhere and select New -> Interger. Type privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins in the resulting dialog, hit OK, type 2 in the next dialog and you’re all set.’
12 March 2005
[spyware] Adware-infected PCs net slimeware firms $3 a pop‘Webroot’s spy audit suggests an average PC on the net (whatever that is) has at “least two pieces of adware on it”. ClickZ Stats indicate that there are 280m active PCs on the internet. Multiplying the number of PCs by the average number of adware items on each by the revenue per app figure allows Stiennon to guesstimate that the illicit advertising market is worth $1.6bn a year.’
4 January 2005
[tech] Life Interrupted — interesting article about how multi-tasking is affecting our lives … ‘Two Harvard professors see evidence of what they call “pseudo-attention deficit disorder” — shorter attention spans influenced by technology and the constant waves of information washing over us. When the brain gets excited over some rapid data and is stimulated, it releases a “dopamine squirt,” they say.’