“Why didn’t you fight?” one Governing Council member asked Hussein as their meeting ended. Hussein gestured toward the U.S. soldiers guarding him and asked his own question: “Would you fight them?”
— from The Washington PostNothing says "script kiddie"...
… like using a single MAC address to repeatedly attack nearby wireless networks for several days.
Unsuccessfully.
R.I.P, James P. Hogan
He died back in July, but I just heard about it a few minutes ago. The SF novels he wrote in the Seventies and Eighties are full of crunchy goodness, and the prologue to Code of the Lifemaker is just plain fun.
Zombie domains
It used to be that when domains expired, they were either redirected to some scam product site or overpriced “you can buy this domain” page, depending on their pagerank.
Now they’re turned into ad sites that look exactly like the original site, graphics and all. So, for instance, what was once the promotional site for the US release of Kino’s Journey is now a bunch of links to online “pharmacies” hidden behind the original text and graphics, and the domain itself is now registered in Costa Rica by a Russian.
Lt. Smash’s blog went the same way a while ago. It looks like his old site, but it’s just spam, with the HTML and images scraped from some archive. I’ve run into others, enough that I’m now wary of all my old bookmarks that still seem to work.
(…and which Apple now uses for auto-completion when typing URLs in Safari 5, one more reason that’s a really stupid feature…)
Modern Romance
Best music video I’ve seen in quite a while. Oddly enough, it isn’t even in Japanese… or Korean…
Advantage: Bing
It ain’t just the thought that counts. Especially when it’s an afterthought.
Dear Cnet,
If you’re going to redirect people from versiontracker.com now that you’ve closed it down and replaced it with a less-useful site, could you at least redirect them to a similar page? Honestly, how hard is it to forward versiontracker.com/macosx to download.cnet.com/mac?
[Update: ah, it seems they did a very narrow redirect with an exact string match, without checking for all the common variations saved in bookmarks, including trailing slashes, index pages, etc. The exact example above now works, but some of the other variations still don’t.]
Tera: a breath of fresh air?
So, the new kid on the MMORPG block will be Tera. All I want to know is, how did they make it so far without realizing that they named one of their races potpourri?
Did I say “fresh air”? I meant “air freshener”.
More promotion than they've had in years...
…and it’s for a coffee commercial. Seven former members of Morning Musume are the new kimono-clad coffee cuties for Georgia Coffee (only five featured in this ad), Afternoon Musume:
Surprising that someone didn’t think of it earlier, given that their first single was called Morning Coffee.
[Update: the actual commercial is up now]
In other promotional news, Yuko Nakazawa (front and center in this picture) has another campaign running at the moment, for a weight-loss product. 37 looks good on her.
