In my not so humble opinion, the Internet is an open, international medium. It shouldn’t matter where you come from – once you’re online, you should be able to access all public information and services. Yet it tends to happen increasingly often that some resource just tells you something like [Access denied. You are not in an approved area. Now please go have an intercourse with yourself.] which is a thing that irritates me.
It’s a long day at work and I wanted to refresh myself with some music. Blast, I had no music on my new laptop (ThinkPad T500, wee!) yet, so I tried to use Pandora, which I remember as a very clever, customizable and enjoyable streaming music service. To much disappointment, I was greeted with the message “We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S.” I wonder who’s behind this – my guess is RIAA and their cronies… No matter; my patience was gone, and my cyber artillery armed and ready for a devastating barrage.
A simple message for everyone who would impose borders upon the Internet: I fart in the general direction of your futile and annoying restriction attempts.
And I can teach everyone else and their granny how to do it, too. » » Find more of “Internet Without Borders + HowTo” inside » »
Who wouldn’t want a perfect partner with looks that could be envied by Maxim cover gils, mental stability of a rock, and house-keeping skills that could put your grandma to shame? And the best thing… she never ever nags. Meet Aiko, the first step on the way.
She would read you newsfeeds every morning after she fixed you a breakfast, she could read a map and navigate, and her daddy, Mr. Le Trung, even believes that she can even be “tweaked” to turn into a sexual partner, and one that’s blatantly easy to turn on, for that matter. ;-) Le gleefully explains that “her software could be redesigned to simulate her having an orgasm.”
Seriously now, I do hope she’s open source. :-D Here’s a toast to bright future, and stable relationships. At least now I know I won’t be sad and lonely when I’m sixty-four. ;-)
Every once in approximately 31 556 926 seconds the Earth completes its orbit around the only star around for almost 1.29 parsecs. Apparently, the fact that Earth is yet again located in the same relative angular position from the Sun as the day you were born, is a reason to celebrate. And there’s more. As Sheldon has eloquently put it, some people even participate in the mass cultural delusion that the sun’s apparent position relevant to arbitrarily defined constellations at the time of your birth somehow affects your personality.
Be that as it may, I’d like to share with you some of the greatest and most witty birthday wishes I ever got, and treasure them so much that it would be a pity for them not to be shared… I won’t be explaining the mechanics behind these in detail, because this could spoil the fun for the geeks reading this, and the rest of you don’t care, anyway, or probably have stopped reading by now. :-D
All of those were created two years ago, when Fox started this on our discussion forum, although his wish is so otherworldly, that I’ll keep it for the end. ZZ used unix shell to write a clever pipe of two commands, which looks very cryptic at the first glance, but is in fact very simple. echo pTaalqbirtARTlqtoqloyhqATaalqbirtARTlqto\ qloyhqATaalqbirtARTlqRXTrqfXvXrXzRhqATaalqbir\ tARTlqtoqloy.qsqIonqxXqzTIqzXoDXr\!|tr fTaplb\ iqMthRtoyhDAmXsInxzr RapHybi\ rthdtou,zhDeAmcsnr
It translates into Happy Birthday song lyrics, along with a suggestion that I shouldn’t get too wasted partying that night. Nick immediately created a very smart contra in C programming language:
#include<stdio.h> int main(void) { long long int L = 729987139091064141LL; while (L) { putchar(L&0xFF); L >>= 8; } return 0; }
If compiled, this gem prints out nothing more than “Me too!”. And finally, Fox, who started all this, used Brainfuck language for this jewel of code: >+++++++++[< ++++++++>-]< .>++++++[< ++++>-]< +.>+++[< +++++>-]< .. >++[< ++++>-]< +.[-]>++++++++[< ++++>-]< .>+++++++[< +++++++++>-]< +++. +++++++.>++[< ++++>-]< +.++.>+++[< ---->-]< .----.---.>++++++[< ++++>-]< . [-]>++++++++[< ++++>- ]< +.[-]++++++++++.
Lovely. It even made me code a simple Brainfuck compiler, to sate the curiosity. One of my friends adorably described this piece of code as: a dead fish without a head, followed by a dead fish without head and a tail, followed by random chopped pieces of dead fish.
So that’s it. :-D Thanks a lot guys, it was a load of fun… Have any more clever geek birthday wishes to share?
And after a brief break, the thing that everyone has been expecting has finally come! Step right up, step right up, everyone, and read the latest shreds of my mighty wisdom, this time about how the witty and the pretty prevail over the shitty security, and how is that no pity. Uh, okay, okay, sorry, keep the eggs and tomatoes to yourself.
According to the BBC: A virtual stripper is helping to defeat anti-spam security checks. Spammers have created a Windows game which shows a woman in a state of undress when people correctly type in text shown in an accompanying image.
Of course, the text comes from online captchas, designed to prevent automated abuse of the resources and services a company provides, intended to make sure that an actual person is trying to access.
Well.. I know I shouldn’t side with the shady lowlifes, but this is just so ingenious. :-D Why not let the horny, libidinous losers do the dirty work, that your algorithms can’t? They will even have fun in the process, and improve their cognitive and typing skills as well.
Whee, that looks interesting, MacGyver would be proud. It probably is not one of the most convenient and inconspicuous surveillance methods, but hey, not everyone is 007. :-) I just have hard time believing that the signal from the photo-cell can get strong enough without being amplified somehow. (http://youtube.com/watch?v=YVas2_bt6xc)
It’s a long day at work and I wanted to refresh myself with some music. Blast, I had no music on my new laptop (ThinkPad T500, wee!) yet, so I tried to use Pandora, which I remember as a very clever, customizable and enjoyable streaming music service. To much disappointment, I was greeted with the message “We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S.” I wonder who’s behind this – my guess is RIAA and their cronies… No matter; my patience was gone, and my cyber artillery armed and ready for a devastating barrage.
