Month: December 2014

Web standards overview

For example, it’s long been held that when you define an extension point in a standard, you generally need some way to coordinate it. The IETF does this with registries; the W3C had a fashion for using URIs as namespaces for a time (and then vendor prefixes — but that’s another rant). If browsers themselves become that lynchpin, you don’t need registries or namespaces; you just edit the spec — provided that the spec is faithfully reflecting what the browsers implement. The argument goes that in a browser-ruled Web, other software using the specification doesn’t want to diverge from the behavior of a Web browser, because doing so would cause interoperability problems and thereby reduce that software’s value. So, just make sure the browsers are walking in lockstep and document what they do in the specs; you don’t need no stinking registry.

Nice overview how Web standards work these days

Spam Nation

Fascinating writeup

But Krebs’s access to the inner workings of the spam underground was massively expanded when the 2 largest spam-bosses went to war against one another, paying corrupt Russian cops to investigate and incarcerate one another. Part of this war involved rival hackers breaking into one another’s internal networks and grabbing enormous troves of emails, chat-logs, and message-board databases that were fired off to law enforcement — and Krebs. From these insider resources, Krebs pieces together a gripping — and even, at times, thrilling — story about the strange business of pharmaceutical spam, an industry that is bizarre, sprawling, dysfunctional and contradictory. Fueled by world-beatingly high price of pharmaceuticals in the USA, the pharma-spam business uses millions of hacked PCs to send out come-ons advertising all manner of drugs, from anti-depression meds to fertility meds to powerful, controlled painkillers — and, of course, erectile dysfunction medication.

On the Road

nice takedown of a book that is way overrated.

On The Road is a terrible book about terrible people. Kerouac and his terrible friends drive across the US 7 zillion times for no particular reason, getting in car accidents and stealing stuff and screwing women whom they promise to marry and then don’t.