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Woes
I had to disable comments. This blog has been drowning in a deluge of comment spam these past few months despite my captchaing efforts. Recently Google marked it as a dangerous site. Horrifying. One of the downsides of deciding to script my own site (as opposed to using a WordPress or Blogger kind of service) is ...
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Report: DDoS Attacks on Independent Media and Human Rights Sites
Last week the Berkman Center released the report “Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Against Independent Media and Human Rights Sites.” It’s the product of a project I was privileged to have been a small part of this past summer, alongside Hal Roberts, Ethan Zuckerman, Jillian York, and John Palfrey. The gist: The Internet provides an ...
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Semester Wrap-Up (aka Reentry into the World)
Phew. First semester of my first year in the CRDM program at NCSU has come to an end. Overall I’m pretty happy, despite having to now pick up the pieces of my life that have fallen into disarray over the last month. I got to do a bit more work with Wikipedia, which I remain ...
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Pixel Cityscapes
I’m a softy for pixel art. Needless to say, this collection is really exciting. PIXEL CITYSCAPES I love the range of styles he exhibits: dark, cold, and corporate; decaying; majestic reverence for grand structures; plastic and depthless; abstract; hot and antagonistic; claustrophobic; mysterious light shows… The one thing markedly missing from every single image is ...
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Poofy Cork Is Not Easily Googleable
Computers and the Internet have made many facets of my life easier. Getting hopelessly lost in an unfamiliar city is a thing of the past. I rarely have to count cash. If I want to get a message out to the world, I can do so instantaneously. I can shop for the best pizza deals ...
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The New World
Two years ago I decided to pursue a career in academics. 10 months ago I was losing my mind while applying to doctoral programs. 4 months ago I made my decision on where to go. 2.5 weeks ago I drove a moving truck for 17 hours from Boston to Raleigh. Today I found out that ...
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Twitter, Blip.FM
I created my Twitter account shortly after the site launched, did a little ethnography project about it for a class assignment, then abandoned it for lack of personal utility. Well, I would seem to have joined the crowd now. No longer the new media heretic! (I still hate Apple, though). Username: Antisomniac. Also discovered Blip.FM, ...
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Hitler Finds out About the DMCA
The “Hitler finds out…” videos were removed by YouTube en masse recently at the request of its copyright holder, Constantin Film. If you’ve missed this meme, the concept starts with a particular clip from the movie Downfall in which Adolf Hitler rages at his generals. The audio and video are left untouched, adding only subtitles ...
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1968 1337
There are many cats in many videos on YouTube, many of them animated. To my knowledge, however, this is the only ASCII animation of a cat from 1968.
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Anonymous vs. Anonymity
Update: This post has been depreciated. Writing this led me to do a bunch of research for a paper in early 2011, aiming to better understand Anonymous during Operation Payback, through the various AnonOps fronts, and into the AntiSec era. My relationship with Anonymous at this point could best be described as a kind of ...