Socially Generated, Machine Filtered, Hand Polished, Electronic Newspaper for Geeks, Designers & Venture Capitalists

TPUTH lists as its captains of industry four stalwart icons of the modern era: Eric of Google, Bill of Microsoft, Steve of Apple and The Jesus of Lebowski. Niiice.

Pullin' the trigger till it goes *click*.

via Daring Fireball.

Walked into an Iraqi Police Headquarters this evening where they were all sitting there watching Anchorman. Strange.

Doesn't get much more surreal than that. It's the little things.

What really bakes my noodle now, though, is the trail of breadcrumbs and the use of modern communication which led up to this whole snapshot.

1. A dispute over poorly-aligned, antiquated punch-card paper ballots in Florida created controversy over whether George W. Bush was our properly elected President in 2000.
2. A bunch of Saudi fundamentalists, trained in remote, mountainous, largely illiterate areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan and armed with simple box cutters, stole jumbo jets -- small, fuel-filled flying towns -- and crashed them into mountain-sized buildings in Manhattan.
3. The Towers collapsed, killing thousands of people whose days had been spent working on computers, communicating instantly with colleagues around the world and using the very latest technology to run America's financial sector.
4. The summary justification for U.S. involvement in Iraq is based on questionable satellite images and photos from surveillance planes presented to the world by Colin Powell, in classic tv anchor style, as proof that Iraq's tyrant was building nukes and/or biological and chemical weapons.
5. We went to war in Iraq, quickly freeing the Iraqi people from a tyrant's grip. Saddam, overthrown and on the run, is captured and later executed. That execution is illicitly recorded on a cell phone and posted on YouTube for the world to see.
6. Using jury-rigged, hand made, improvised explosives, insurgents from around the world gather in Iraq to fight off the Americans and our Western allies.
7. My friend, who I haven't seen since high school, joins the Army and finds his way to Iraq.
8. There, he works with Iraqi citizens who themselves are working to create order and stability. He stops by their office, a police headquarters, and finds them watching Will Ferrell in Anchorman, a movie lampooning San Diego, America in the 1970s, the absurdity of America's recent misogynistic past, and local U.S. tv news generally and on-air personalities in particular. The Iraqi police certainly have no context for any of the subtle humor, though Ferrell in that 'stache and those classic seventies' outfits goes a long, long way.
9. An Army MP goes back to his barrack, fires up his computer and logs on to Facebook, updating his status.
10. As Facebook is what reconnected us, I'm able to glimpse his surreal day from the opposite side of the globe, mixed-in with updates about one friend's Christmas cookies and another friend's love of cheese melted on burgers.

The mind. It boggles.

Pete McFerrin: because helping residential property values should be the only goal of public policy, right? If I were a T-Mobile subscriber and I lived near that guy I would urinate on his front door every day, at the very least.

SecretAgent: @Pete McFerrin: And he would take photos of you exposing yourself and you would then be another perma-loser on a state wide data base.

Pete McFerrin: @SecretAgent: "8-year-olds, Dude. 8-year-olds."

SecretAgent: @Pete McFerrin: 8 year olds? That would place you yet again on another data base.

Pete McFerrin: I am considering a boycott of this blog on the grounds that not enough people get Lebowski references. This aggression will not stand!

SecretAgent: @Pete McFerrin: I'm calmer than you, Dude. Calmer than you.
And if you're going to piss on someones property then at least do it on his area rug. You know the one, the kind that really ties the room together.

If only every wish to urinate on an idealogical enemy's property turned out so well.

(via Laura, who first introduced me to the greatness that is The Big Lebowski)

Once again, The Times Magazine looks back on the past year from our favored perch: ideas. Like a magpie building its nest, we have hunted eclectically, though not without discrimination, for noteworthy notions of 2009 — the twigs and sticks and shiny paper scraps of human ingenuity, which, when collected and woven together, form a sort of cognitive shelter, in which the curious mind can incubate, hatch and feather. Unlike birds, we can also alphabetize. And so we hereby present, from A to Z, the most clever, important, silly and just plain weird innovations we carried back from all corners of the thinking world. To offer a nonalphabetical option for navigating the entries, this year we have attached tags to each item indicating subject matter. We hope you enjoy.

via The Ninth Annual Year in Ideas - Magazine - NYTimes.com (and Waxy)

"It appears incredibly benign," he said of the categorization that Google and Yahoo were doing. "It almost makes some people who worry about privacy look foolish, because it says, 'You like bicycles.'"

"What is not shown in this kind of thing, and possibly because Google doesn’t do this sort of thing — maybe because they don’t implement it yet — are the various kinds of psychographic, demographic activities that go on behind the screens."

Also interesting is the fact that both Yahoo and Google allow you to opt-out of categories that you've been sorted into via their ad algorithms (Not Slytherin. Not Slytherin. Not Slytherin).

I'd been to Google's new Dashboard before, but hadn't realized that, well, there's where you need to go to opt-out, if that's what you wish to do. To opt-out of Yahoo's categories, visit their Interest Manager (nice Orwellian ad-speak, no?).

via At F.T.C. Conference, Concerns About Advertising and Privacy - Media Decoder Blog - NYTimes.com (via Prof. Tuthill).

Shortly after Threat Level reported this week that Yahoo had blocked the FOIA release of its law enforcement and intelligence price list, someone provided a copy of the company’s spying guide to the whistleblower site Cryptome.

The 17-page guide describes Yahoo’s data retention policies and the surveillance capabilities it can provide law enforcement, with a pricing list for these services. Cryptome also published lawful data-interception guides for Cox Communications, SBC, Cingular, Nextel, GTE and other telecoms and service providers.

. . .

The Compliance Guide reveals, for example, that Yahoo does not retain a copy of e-mails that an account holder sends unless that customer sets up the account to store those e-mails. Yahoo also cannot search for or produce deleted e-mails once they’ve been removed from a user’s trash file.

The guide also reveals that the company retains the IP addresses from which a user logs in for just one year. But the company’s logs of IP addresses used to register new accounts for the first time go back to 1999. The contents of accounts on Flickr, which Yahoo also owns, are purged as soon as a user deactivates the account.

. . .

The price list that Yahoo tried to prevent the government from releasing to Soghoian appears in one small paragraph in the 17-page leaked document. According to this list, Yahoo charges the government about $30 to $40 for the contents, including e-mail, of a subscriber’s account. It charges $40 to $80 for the contents of a Yahoo group.

via Yahoo Issues Takedown Notice for Spying Price List | Threat Level | Wired.com.

Bruce Sterling’s comment about "Nazi layers" in his recent address to augmented reality (AR) company Layar comes true very fast, as the BNP releases a "British layer" that superimposes on your camera view of any British town a hyperlocal guide to population pressure, of "indigenous" British supposedly being "forced out" by what the rest of us call simply "other people". AR is self-selected mediation of the world. It lets us choose the glasses we want to see through. A nicked iPhone and credit card lets you buy criminal layers that establish where CCTV is densest in relation to regions with the wealthiest demographic, establishing the easiest predation. Soon enough, citizens of the digital cities are peering at everything through their AR phones, seeing not the city that’s in front of them, but the city they want to see.

via ‘Look out for Hollywood films about spelunking on the Moon’.

The year’s not quite over yet, but it’s over enough to observe a few of the most interesting high-tech highs, lows and trends of 2009. Besides, it’s Thanksgiving — a perfect time to contemplate the future that’s starting to take shape.

via State of the Art - Some 2009 Technology That Won’t Be Novel Long - NYTimes.com.

This clip made me all smiley. Twelve games in four minutes. Punch-Out! + Gauntlet = WIN

Also great is the production company's name: Alaskan Military School

(Via Waxy and GameSetWatch.)