Tag: internet

Oversharing

#blessed

A 18-year-old woman from Carinthia is suing her parents for posting photos of her on Facebook without her consent. She claims that since 2009 they have made her life a misery by constantly posting 100s of photos of her, including embarrassing and intimate images from her childhood.

Largest DDoS yet

the attackers behind this record assault launched it from quite a large collection of hacked systems — possibly 100k of systems. “Someone has a botnet with capabilities we haven’t seen before. We looked at the traffic coming from the attacking systems, and they weren’t just from 1 region of the world or from a small subset of networks — they were everywhere.”

Ebooks tipping point

“Yes, the established publishing companies that belong to the AAP are selling fewer e-books. But that does not mean fewer e-books are being sold. Of the top 10 books on Amazon’s Kindle bestseller list when I checked last week, only 2 were the products of major publishers. All the rest were genre novels (6 romances, 2 thrillers) published either by the author or by an in-house Amazon imprint.”

“‘Big 5′ publishers’ share of Kindle unit sales fell from more than 40% at the beginning of 2014 to 23% in May. Because they tend to sell their e-books for a lot more than $4.99, the Big 5 share of gross revenue is still around 40%, but it’s falling fast, too. And self-published “indie” authors — in part because they get a much bigger cut of the revenue than authors working with conventional publishers do — are now making much more money from ebook sales, in aggregate, than authors at Big 5 publishers.”

Meme Politics

Unlike TV, Print, and most forms of online communication, memes are built for consumption on smartphones and visual modes of social networking. They are also built for speedy consumption, providing a quick emotional hit in comparison to a long winded article with an uncertain payoff. No other form of political communications compares.

IETF is past prime

So if the objective of the IETF is to foster the development of Internet Standards specifications, then strictly speaking it has not enjoyed a very stellar record over its 30-year history. Almost one half of these Internet Standard specifications were generated in the 1980s (42 RFCs have original publication dates in the 1980s), just 19 in the 1900’s and 26 in the 2000’s. There were none in 2010, 4 in 2011, 1 in 2012, 2 in 2013, 1 in 2014, and none in 2015. There have been 3 so far in 2016.

Terror Autodeath

Who is the man who dies in every terrorist attack?

To verify this story, FRANCE 24 managed to contact the man pictured in all these photos. We decided not to publish his real name. When speaking to our team, he didn’t deny being caught up in legal proceedings. My photo is everywhere because of someone who started it as a prank after a legal dispute. I never reported the people who did this to me because, in Mexico, nothing ever happens in these kind of cases. Now, my photo has appeared in several stories that were widely shared on Twitter. I contacted several media outlets like the BBC and the New York Times and asked them to delete my photo but they never responded.

Encryption Backdoors

They’ve been threatening this for months now, but Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein have finally released a “discussion draft” of their legislation to require backdoors in any encryption… and it’s even more ridiculous than originally expected. Yesterday, we noted that the White House had decided to neither endorse nor oppose the bill, raising at least some questions about whether or not it would actually be released. Previously, Feinstein was waiting for the White House’s approval — but apparently she and Burr decided that a lack of opposition was enough.

This is what happens when your government is run by elderly, luddite lawyers instead of engineers.