Great short piece from the New Yorker wondering what Philip K. Dick would make of the Total Awareness Office. I came because the title of the piece – Too Much Information – which is fun. I blogged because of the fantastic payoff in the last paragraph. Sometimes you suspect people write whole columns just to be able to finish them on flourishes like that. Or, as in this case, you just know they did.
Small tweak to the bookmarklet below – I’ve stuck in an escape function call to cope with news URLs with GET parameters. The bookmarklet will still have problems with URLs that willfully stick in user information into the URL (like MSNBC), but it’ll do much better with quite a few others.
Here’s your Google News bookmarklet, courtesy of the amazing (and currently not quite as lazy) Rod Begbie.
Another (slightly trickier) URL hack. Bookmark this google news bookmark in Moz, and give it a shortcut (as in the last entry) – say “gn”. Now, if you’re at a news article, and you want to see what other news sources have to say about it, just replace the “http://” bit of the URL with “gn “, hit return, and Google News will spew out the cluster of news stories that are similiar to your news article. So, if you were at “http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2568223.stm”, a news story about Yemen, change the URL to “gn news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2568223.stm” would take you to http://news.google.com/news?num=30&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=cluster:news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2568223.stm which is the index page for all the news stories Google knows about this topic.
This could probably do with turning into a platform-independent bookmarklet. Any volunteers?
Bookmark this link in Mozilla or Phoenix, and then go to “Bookmarks/ Manage Bookmarks”, select the new bookmark, choose “Edit/Properties…” then give the damn thing the keyword “ntk”. Then, whenever you type in “ntk foobar” into the location bar, you’ll search NTK for foobar. Here’s another one for Oblomovka.
NTK plugged a Brussels European Parliament meeting on the EU’s moves to adopt software patents last month. Here’s a summary of what happened there. For those who want the juicy bit (any juicy bit), here’s EuroLinux’s list of cases where software patents are currently blocking development and availability of free software.
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They’re giving the EFF ten dollars for every copy sold until the end of December. (From Doc’s weblog).
The always excellent c’t magazine analyses the hypotheticals of the Dutch IP-surveillance scandal:
According to anonymous sources within the Dutch intelligence community, all tapping equipment of the Dutch intelligence services and half the tapping equipment of the national police force, is insecure and is leaking information to Israel. How difficult is it to make a back-door in the Dutch Transport of Intercepted IP Traffic system?
Lloyd keeps sending me advance notice of West Coast missile launches from Vandenberg and I keep forgetting to blog them. Heads up, as it were:
Hi All:
Be advised that a modified Minuteman II missile will be launched from Vandenberg AFB on California’s central coast several hours from now.
The vehicle is scheduled to leave northwest Vandenberg on Wednesday morning, December 11 at 00:01 PST (right after midnight), the start of a four-hour launch window. This translates to DEC 11 08:01 to 12:01 UTC.
Following launch, the vehicle will fly a ballistic trajectory and send an unarmed warhead and decoys to the central Pacific as part of a missile defense test. Several minutes later, an interceptor launched from the Marshall Islands will attempt to kill the warhead.
The Minuteman launch should be visible at least as far away as Phoenix, Arizona; Saint George, Utah; and Reno, Nevada. Look for a bright orange “star” in the direction of Vandenberg. If you have binoculars or an astronomical telescope, you might want to use it to view the launch (the view could be impressive).
If you see anything tonight, let me know.
Regards,
Brian Webb
Viva Memory Hole