taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

• great set of photos from Chernobyl : scary stuff. amazing how accurate some of the Pripyat sets in Call of Duty 4 were
  (tags: chernobyl urban-decay pripyat nuclear-power accidents tragedy photos images tourism decay)

• Quantum Crypto Broken : ‘The attack is brilliant in its elegance. They essentially jam the receiver. A bright pulse of laser light is sent and it blinds the receiver, which allows the eavesdropper, Eve, to decode the same photons that Alice and Bob are decoding, and thus get their key.’ doh
  (tags: quantum-crypto crypto security via:emergentchaos science physics papers)

• Bristol Traffic: entertainment and datamining : this is actually quite a nifty idea; extending a simple “crappy parking” complaint blog with datamining opportunities, by tagging with street names, districts, license plate numbers etc. and letting the blog engine (and Google) take care of the rest
  (tags: datamining data bristol parking blogging cars driving)

Tags: accidents, blogging, bristol, cars, chernobyl, crypto, data, datamining, decay, driving, images, nuclear-power, papers, parking, photos, physics, pripyat, quantum-crypto, science, security, tourism, tragedy, urban-decay, via:emergentchaos

• Emergent Chaos: Certifiably Silly : Adam Shostack tells the truth re Firefox 3’s stupid self-signed cert bug. ‘imposing yet another security tax, based on a static analysis of attackers and some certificate authority pixie dust, isn’t going to help things for very long.’
  (tags: firefox firefox-3 security certificates ssl tls ca pki adam-shostack ui usability)

• Image Cerberus: a SpamAssassin plug-in against image spam : a new plugin, subject of a paper at this year’s CEAS conference it looks like
  (tags: plugins spamassassin anti-spam image-spam images ceas conferences)

• Twitter drops SMS-notification support for EU users : interesting, I haven’t received the mail, and it claims to still be sending updates to my Irish mobile (update: I’m not actually *getting* any updates, though)
  (tags: twitter phones mobile sms ireland eu uk)

Tags: adam-shostack, anti-spam, ca, ceas, certificates, conferences, eu, firefox, firefox-3, image-spam, images, ireland, mobile, phones, pki, plugins, security, sms, spamassassin, ssl, tls, twitter, ui, uk, usability

I shaved my beard, and made an animated GIF of the process! Enjoy…

Tags: animation, beard, gif, images, shaving, silly

Remember the C=64-izer, the quick hack to display an image in the style of the Commodore 64?

Recently, I’ve started getting hits to this demo image of the “O RLY?” owl — lots of ‘em.

It turns out that the C=64-ized rendition of this image is now the top hit for “O RLY” on Google Image Search; pretty bizarre, since there are obvious better images on the first search page, one result along in fact. What’s more, the page listed as the ‘origin page’, http://taint.org/tag/today, doesn’t even use that text.

This has resulted in lots of Myspace kiddies etc. obliviously using the C=64 rendering. Yay for Commodore ;)

Tags: c64, c64izer, commodore, google, hacks, images, o-rly

Images: Jim Winstead’s walk up Broadway from a few days ago has already garnered a few interested parties, since he’s Creative-Commons-licensed all the photos, and they’re easily findable via Google and on Flickr.

I find this interesting; the collision between open source, photography and cartography is cool. The result is a version of maps.A9.com, where you can actually use the images legally in your own work. More people should do this for other cities.

Tags: images, jim-winstead, los-angeles, mapping