Category: Uncategorized

Real-time Flash visualization of weblog postings around the world as projected onto a world map.

A Delaware Online article looks at a turn-of-the-last-century era system for transmitting music on demand to telephone users.

The 1910 subscribers called the “music operator” for a transmission and paid 3 cents for each one. Grand opera cost 7 cents, not surprising considering tenor Enrico Caruso did more than any other artist to popularize records. Subscribers had to guarantee $18 a year. Should more than one subscriber request the same record, the telephone exchange could connect many wires to the same phonograph.

Using phone lines to transmit recorded and live music wasn’t that new, said Allan Koenigsberg, a lecturer at Brooklyn College. He has written about the telephone and phonograph and is considered one the most prominent chroniclers of late 19th-century inventions. Yet he had not heard of the Wilmington innovation.

Almost since the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, concerts in Boston and Cambridge were transmitted over phone lines. Koenigsberg said the telephone and phonographs were considered means to disseminate culture to the masses. In Paris in the 1880s, a “theatrophone” brought subscribers live opera performances. Hotels had coin-operated listening areas as far back as 1882.

It’s funny… I’ve been exchanging email with Talbot from Ochre Records for years now, but I had no idea he was actually in The Land Of Nod until they came through town a couple of weeks ago.

Anyway, they recorded a session for John Peel’s Radio One show and it’s being broadcasted this week. Listen in to it.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf Drinking Game for when you absolutely, positively have to get completely smashed in the shortest period of time.

No pictures from the bust unfortunately.

SAN DIEGO — Federal authorities arrested six Mexican men and seized 6,000 pounds of marijuana smuggled into the United States in a shipment of squid. The arrests, announced Thursday, were made Monday after inspectors at the Otay Mesa border crossing, found bundles of marijuana hidden in a squid shipment inside a tractor-trailer.

Because eventually, everything DOES turn up on the net.

I remember seeing the British animated version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm way back when I was in high school. Little did I know that the production was funded by the CIA.

Mind-croggling collection of City/World/House Of The Future/Tomorrow web sites. The Retrofuture begins here.

Cook high-geek-quotient technology + open source freaks = Holy Cow! Freevo is a free open-source TiVo clone. As Anil Dash points out – “you can tell it’s open source because the menus are skinnable and they’re going to add an RSS reader to it.”

The blogging is heavy on the lead story in the latest Crypto-Gram, but it’s a pretty spectacular story.

In December 2002, the notorious “spam king” Alan Ralsky gave an interview. Aside from his usual comments that antagonized spam-hating e-mail users, he mentioned his new home in West Bloomfield, Michigan. The interview was posted on Slashdot, and some enterprising reader found his address in some database. Egging each other on, the Slashdot readership subscribed him to thousands of catalogs, mailing lists, information requests, etc. The results were devastating: within weeks he was getting hundreds of pounds of junk mail per day and was unable to find his real mail amongst the deluge.

Ironic, definitely. But more interesting is the related paper by security researchers Simon Byers, Avi Rubin and Dave Kormann, who have demonstrated how to automate this attack.

If you type the following search string into Google — “request catalog name address city state zip” — you’ll get links to over 250,000 (the exact number varies) Web forms where you can type in your information and receive a catalog in the mail. Or, if you follow where this is going, you can type in the information of anyone you want. If you’re a little bit clever with Perl (or any other scripting language), you can write a script that will automatically harvest the pages and fill in someone’s information on all 250,000 forms. You’ll have to do some parsing of the forms, but it’s not too difficult. (There are actually a few more problems to solve. For example, the search engines normally don’t return more than 1,000 actual hits per query.) When you’re done, voila! It’s Slashdot’s attack, fully automated and dutifully executed by the U.S. Postal Service.