February 2, 2005

NET NOTES

ON CAMPUS
It's a disgrace that some of the nation's law schools, objecting to the Pentagon's "discrimination policies," refuse to permit military recruiters to make their pitch on campus, relegating them instead to unofficial off-campus venues. Law students pondering their first career move can be wined and dined by fancy firms that set up recruitment tables at campus job fairs, but they have to stroll over to the local Day's Inn to seek out the lonely military recruiter.

To put it another way, the same liberals who object that the military includes too many lower-class kids won't let military recruiters near the schools that contain students who will soon join the upper-class elite. It's almost enough to make us contemplate restoring the draft, starting with law school students. -- The Wall Street Journal

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BUTTERFLIES AND BRAINS
"Friendly skeptics sometimes ask me: "Isn't it presumptuous for cosmologists to claim to explain anything about the vast cosmos?" My response is that what makes things hard to understand is how complicated they are, not how bigthey are. Under extreme conditions -- inside the stars or in the hot early universe -- everything breaks down to its simplest ingredients. A star is simpler than an insect. Biologists, tackling the intricate multilayered structures of butterflies and brains, face tougher challenges than astronomers." -- Martin Rees, Our Cosmic Habitat

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HIDE YOUR IPOD, HERE COMES BILL

"About 80 percent of Microsoft employees who have a portable music player have an iPod," said one source, a high-level manager who asked to remain anonymous. "It's pretty staggering."

The source estimated 80 percent of Microsoft employees have a music player -- that translates to 16,000 iPod users among the 25,000 who work at or near Microsoft's corporate campus. "This irks the management team no end," said the source.

So popular is the iPod, executives are increasingly sending out memos frowning on its use....

For example, an internal e-mail circular sent to several senior managers in mid-December talked about iPod shipments to Apple's nearby store in Bellingham.

The e-mail said: "FWIW, the gal at the Bellevue Square Apple Store said that they are getting in two shipments of 200 iPods every day to keep up with this week's demand, and are nearly constantly selling out."

The note prompted a curt reply from Dave Fester, general manager of the Windows Digital Media division, who wrote the group: "I sure hope Microsoft employees are not buying iPods. We have great alternatives. Check out http://experiencemore."

Fifteen minutes later, the manager responded: "I don't know what I was thinking. I'm sure that Microsoft employees are not buying iPods, or Macs or PlayStations."

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I'M NOT A BLOG SPAMMER, I'M A "SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISER"
When Sam spams tons of blogs and sites with links to his sites - which are affiliates of bigger PPC sites - people see the links and, seeking some porn, pills or casino action, click through to his site, and from there to the parent site, which pays Sam for each person landing there. The PPC sites can see revenues of £100,000 to £200,000 per month, says Sam. He gets a slice of that - and he wants it to stay that way.

Perhaps the affiliate system could be seen as a form of outsourcing: the top-level site gets lots of people competing to find the best way to get visitors to the site. Darwin would understand. Link spamming, with its abuse of common resources, turns out the most efficient, just as cutting down virgin Indonesian and Amazonian rain forest is the most efficient way for loggers there to get wood. If it raises the global temperature of the blogging community, well, that's life on planet internet, isn't it?
--
Interview with a link spammer | The Register

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ONE OF FIVE THINGS HE LEARNED FROM WARREN BUFFET
3. Be Trustworthy

This may be a minor point that Mr. Buffett was trying to make, but he told a simple story that affected me greatly. He told of the Founder of the Nebraska Furniture Mart, one of his companies, and how she came from a poor Jewish family and couldn't read, write or speak English. She was had survived the Holocaust, spent 16 years bringing her family to the U.S. (at $50 per person), and grew the Nebraska Furniture Mart from a $500 initial investment to do $350 Million annually from a single location in Omaha.

She told Warren at one point that the way she evaluated people was simple: She simply asked herself, "Would they hide me?" What a great way to judge your instincts about whether to trust someone or not.
-- Darren Johnson at Stuff I Think : The Wisdom of Warren Buffett

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DOOCED
Losing your job for something you wrote in your online blog, journal, website, etc.

Did you hear Mary got fired yesterday for writing about Becky in her blog? Yeah, she got dooced.
-- UrbanDictionary.com

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NEVER LOOK AT A REFERENCE BOOK WHILE DOING A FIRST DRAFT
You want to write a story? Fine. Put away your dictionary, your encyclopedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus. Better yet, throw your thesaurus into the wastebasket. The only things creepier than a thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time. Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule. You think you might have misspelled a word? O.K., so here is your choice: either look it up in the dictionary, thereby making sure you have it right - and breaking your train of thought and the writer's trance in the bargain - or just spell it phonetically and correct it later. Why not? Did you think it was going to go somewhere? And if you need to know the largest city in Brazil and you find you don't have it in your head, why not write in Miami, or Cleveland? You can check it ... but later. When you sit down to write, write. Don't do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.
-- Everything you Need to Know About Writing Sucessfully: in Ten Minutes (Stephen King)

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WARDRIVING
To start off, lets define the word "wardriving" : the act of locating and possibly exploiting connections to wireless local area networks while driving around a city or elsewhere. [techtarget.com] Wardriving can be a very useful tool if you don't feel like paying a monthly fee for a high speed internet connection. It also can be useful if you want to search the web anonymously.

Wireless networking is fairly insecure, especially in the hands of Joe Schmoe who wants to be cool with a wireless network. More than 75% of the networks you'll find will have the default SSID, and more than likely, the default router login. ie. Just about all Linksys routers can be connected through via http://192.168.1.1/, leaving the username blank, and using "admin" as the password.

But if you get access to a person's access point (AP) are you really anonymous? No, you are not completely anonymous. Yes, you aren’t using your own internet connection so the ip you are surfing the web from isn’t linked to your ISP account, but if you are constantly using the same person's AP you are bound to get caught. But there is an easy solution to this:

First off, NEVER USE THE SAME AP MORE THAN TWICE IN THE SAME MONTH! Better yet, never use the same AP more than twice!

Second, change your MAC address. You might be asking yourself what is a MAC address. Well it's the address that goes along with your network card. There are programs out there that can do this for you. Macmakeup and SMAC to name a few. (I will be getting into more detail about this later on in the tutorial.)

Third, use some form of a proxy after logging into the AP, to help anonymize yourself even more from whoever might be trying to track you down.
-- Wardriving To Stay Anonymous - Taking Advantage Of Technology

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GOTTA GET MY STUFF DONE
The video.

Which reminds me.... I gotta get my stuff done. Later.

Posted by Vanderleun at February 2, 2005 8:56 AM
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Comments:

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"It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood." -- Karl Popper N.B.: Comments are moderated and may not appear immediately. Comments that exceed the obscenity or stupidity limits will be either edited or expunged.

Wanted to say "thanks" for that Stephen King bit.

Posted by: Harvey at February 2, 2005 8:55 PM

Does anybody besides me think that Stephen King feeling that a thesarus or cliff notes being creepy is like 10 gallons of irony in a 5 gallon bucket?
Sorry about the way the sentence flows, I just can't seem to cast it right.

Posted by: ed in texas at February 6, 2005 8:36 AM