Google Operating System explains how you can simply change your country.

[Via GB]

No tags

“Can you imagine a speech given by president Bush that would convince you that he has had a change of heart and could actually be the president of your dreams? It is all too easy to criticize our president and his administration. Life changing events (often of the extremely painful variety) force us to reevaluate our values and actions. What if something like this happened to our president. What if he were humbled in some way which caused a profound change in his outlook on life and his role as the leader of our country – turning the aggressive posturing of an all-attack-all-the-time leader into a gentler, wiser soul determined to demonstrate the power of honesty and vulnerability.”

With this idea in mind I put out an open call for people to write speeches for President Bush, offering a $50 cash prize.

A group of five students, ages 7-10, from Rooftop Elementary in San Francisco accepted the challenge. Upon receiving their humorous and thoughtful contributions I had the speeches recorded by Jim Meskimen, a professional impersonator based in Los Angeles. The prize money was used to throw a cake party for the kids and their classmates.

Link

Some of the entries are very moving, some very funny. It is interesting to see the wonderful idealism of these children being read by Mr. Bush.

I particularly like this:

[A long list of pacifistic (is a word) and pro-welfare policies]…Also, no more homework for kids, because child labour hurts.

[Via Waxy]

No tags

Have a look at this interesting statistics experiment. Do you really have free choice?

Link

No tags

I asked Digg for clarification on why they contradicted themselves. This is their reply

Dear Sir,

Yes, at first they appeared to be valid accounts to us, on a daily basis we’re confronted with lots of spammers, we have an internal system that automatically detects mass fraudsters, some of the things the system looks for is, are these accounts all coming from one IP, are these accounts promoting their site, are these accounts using proxies, are these accounts digging stories from 1 user only and many other things. The system did not detect anything wrong with this group of users. To our surprise many many users had them on their friend list one of them being Kevin Rose, we just couldn’t find anything wrong at first. We asked our team of coders to look into it and they confirmed to us that there are instances of these users using a script. We asked ourself, why would these users use a script, the content they were submitting was quality content, the sites they were submitting were extremely well known websites, there stories would have been dugg anyways. Users ask well why was Kevin Rose name also there, he just happened to digg both stories one after the other, like any other user will do when they have a user on their friend list. Other users ask us why did you block forevergeek, forevergeek was blocked only after the system found that multi accounts were being created all from one IP in the sole purpose of spamming digg. The user with the IP emailed us and asked why did you block my IP and URL, we explained to him that it is against our Terms Of Use to create multi accounts and accuse users of abuse in public, we told him we will unban his account if he agreed not to do this again, just like we do with all other users, but the user kept on creating accounts while just minutes before the user had agreed not to do it, he emails us again and this time he agrees, we unblocked his account and URL, the URL being forevergeek. Your account also got caught in this mix, you also went on creating another account, if you had created more then 1 account your URL would have also being automatically blocked. We ask our users to email us when they have a problem or when they come across instances of abuse, not to our surprise all those who went on making out of this a conspiracy never contacted us. We here at digg have learned something out of this and that is we need to improve our internal fraud/spam detection system. Digg is and will always be controlled by you and digg users. Such things are bound to happen, it’s just the reality of giving thousands upon thousands of users 100% moderation control of a website and what makes digg inherently different. I hope I have answered your questions, if you have more questions or if there is something still unclear to you, please email us and we’ll do our best to help you .

Thank you for your patience,

-The Digg Watch Team.

My first piece of advice to Digg is to learn how to paragraph.

More seriously though, I’m reasonably satisfied with their explanation. We’ll never no for sure whether Kevin Rose was part of the scam but it is possible that he wasn’t.

The only thing I have a real problem with is this:

Such things are bound to happen, it’s just the reality of giving thousands upon thousands of users 100% moderation control of a website and what makes digg inherently different.

Digg does not give 100% moderation control. If it did then there would be no administrators, moderators, etc. Everyone would be the same. One way to describe it might be ‘non hierarchical editorial control’. Currently there are administrators who can delete a post because they do not like it, this is what happened to my posts, they weren’t automatically deleted. They were deleted by a human.

In my opinion another flaw is the burying process in which a pretty small minority can censor a majority of Diggers anonymously. If those who Digg a post are revealed why can’t those who bury it be revealed also? But I gather this is to be changed. There needs to be a method to resuscitate buried posts. Especially those with 1400 diggs.

No tags

Did you know that the American government spends 1.4 cents on every one cent coin it produces?

And I hadn’t really considered:

The real problem could come if metals prices rise so high that it would be economical to melt down pennies for the metals they contain. [it goes on to explain the metals actually cost 0.8 cents]

Britain would be better off since I believe that melting down money is illegal over here.

Asked if the mint had a backup plan for what it will do if zinc prices rise far enough that it could pay to melt down pennies, a spokesman said that such issues were for Congress to decide. Perhaps the mint could go back to making steel pennies, as it did during World War II when copper was needed for the war effort.

Pennies, meanwhile, are in high demand. Last year, the mint made 7.7 billion of them — more than the number of all the other coins it produced. In the first three months of this year, the pace of penny production rose to an annual rate of 9 billion — the highest since 2001.

Why so many? Perhaps there is now some hoarding in expectation that metal prices will keep rising, but mostly it is an issue of sales taxes, which in most states are added to the retail price and assure that the total price of many items will require pennies to be given in change if a customer pays with dollar bills. That helps explain why the idea of eliminating the penny has gone nowhere.

The last paragraph reminded me of what I (a Briton) was amazed at in America. None of the prices are in any way round. In Britain all consumer prices include VAT and most are a normal figure like exactly £2 (or in some cases the slightly more annoying £1.99).

[Via Digg - no I'm not boycotting it ]

No tags

I saw something Damn Interesting today.

Dr. Gerald Wilde of Queens University in Ontario proposes a hypothesis he calls risk homeostasis. In a nutshell it proposes that human beings have a target level of risk with which they are most comfortable. When a given activity exceeds their comfort level, people will modify their behavior to reduce their risk until they are comfortable with their level of danger. So far, that’s not exactly a controversial observation. But risk homeostasis proposes another half to that continuum – according to Dr. Wilde, if a given person’s level of risk drops too far below their comfort level, they will again modify their behavior. This time though, they will increase their level of risk until they are once again in their target zone.

Its far more interesting than it sounds with the actual examples the article provides.

[Via Reddit]

No tags

Have a look at Richard Stiennon’s article on this rather disturbing device. It looks innocuous, plugs into the PS2 port and then the keyboard plugs into it and it can store 130,000 keystrokes. The user just needs to type into a password to get the information off it. (I imagine it sends the correct keypresses to type out its logs)

Rather disturbingly it is available on ThinkGeek for just $89.99. Now I’m really paranoid!

Of course this is exactly how the greatest attempted bank heist in history was pulled off. The bank robbers installed these devices on machines inside the bank and eventually got access to Sumitomo Bank’s wire transfer capability. They then proceeded to transfer more that $440 million to various accounts in other countries. Read all the gory details in this article I just published.

The one thing I do not mention in the article is that it is reported that Sumitomo Bank’s best practice for avoiding a repeat attack is that they now super-glue the keyboard connections into the backs of their PCs.

[Via Reddit]

---

Unconnectedly but also via Reddit: I strongly reccomend this list of 101 films you must see before you die.

This isn’t like Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” series. It’s not my idea of The Best Movies Ever Made (that would be a different list, though there’s some overlap here), or that they were my favorites or the most important or influential films, but that they were the movies you just kind of figure everybody ought to have seen in order to have any sort of informed discussion about movies. They’re the common cultural currency of our time, the basic cinematic texts that everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat “movie-literate.”

No tags

This follows on from Suspicious Digging

If you’re interested in my response to Kevin Rose’s blog post on Digging Fraud. I also recommend you read ForeverGeek’s.

I would reiterate that some stories were buried and it is possible these were buried by the user base and not the admins. Burial means that the item is removed from the digg queue or the front page but it is still accessible at its URL and with a search if ‘buried’ is ticked. However, my submissions (and those of others) were deleted virtually without trace. This is something that only administrators can do. Only the titles were left intact Notice the “?” in this one‘s title? And notice that there is an error message which isn’t displayed on this totally non-existent page. More information is on my initial post.

In addition I was banned and when Digg acquiesced to my request to be unbanned I received this:

As we have told other users that have emailed us about this subject, there is no abuse involved here, we have investigated it and yes it does look suspicious to the eye, but they are all legit users and therefor [sic] we can not ban them. We ask you kindly to email us if you believe a story is being abused.
[Entire email is in original blog post]

Kevin, wrote this:

Recently it was brought to our attention that several users have created accounts to mass digg and promote stories. While these accounts appear to be valid, they have in certain instances been used for automated in-order (scripted) digging. This is a violation of our terms of service and the accounts have since been banned.

As you can imagine with over 250,000 registered users (and adding thousands more per week) we are constantly monitoring and looking for user SPAM/fraud. Internally, we have several methods for detecting fraud which results in DOZENS of banned accounts per day.

In my opinion what happened in between is that Digg realised this couldn’t be hushed up. Note the long time it took Mr. Rose to answer about the issue.

A few more thoughts (update):
One thing that is annoying me in discussion of this issue is comments which state the obvious. Comments like: “Kevin owns it, he can do what he likes”, “the administrators have a right to exert editorial control, its a business”.

Of course Digg has the right to do whatever it wants on its own server. Indeed its TOS states:

Digg may remove any Content and Digg accounts at any time for any reason (including, but not limited to, upon receipt of claims or allegations from third parties or authorities relating to such Content), or for no reason at all.

Nobody is claiming Digg have broken the law. They have a right to censor what we submit, but we have a right to complain about it. They have the right to artifically promote items to the front page (I’m not necessarily suggesting they have, and I never have), but we have the right to complain about it.

Digg claims on its front page:

Digg is a technology news website that employs non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.

And its success is due to people believing that. It’s what separates it from Slashdot and makes it to some more attractive.

If what it claims is not true then people are bound to seek to expose the truth. If people who seek to spread the truth on Digg are prevented from doing so, then Digg is being dishonest. They’re allowed to be dishonest on their own site, but I’m certainly going to complain about it.

Update: reply received

No tags

Update: follow up in the next post

Have a look at this blog post, which talks about Digg potentially being misused. I posted this partly because I was unable to digg that post. If you scroll down to the list of diggers here and here, you will notice that the order of the first 16 diggers is identical and that only 2 of the 24 vary in each.

You can click the images to confirm the results yourself. Whether this is a coincidence (KevinRose is there) or more malicious (trying to accelerate things to the front page) I don’t know. Read about it on ForeverGeek.
Also: See ForeverGeek’s follow up.

Update:
I submitted this post to digg a while ago. I was puzzled that it dissappeared after about five minutes. This was it( highlighting is because of this):

So I submitted it again:

Again it has vanished. They were located at: here and here. You will notice that the title of those pages is correct, whereas this displays nothing. That shows they WERE there.

Update 2:
I then found I was no longer logged into digg, tried to log in and:

A little 1984-ish.

Update 3:
Made a new account, posted a comment linking to this post here (please digg up manchild’s comment). My comment was promptly deleted and I am now blocked from logging in by IP.

Update 4:
After an email to abuse@digg.com, explaining that I did not believe I had broken the ToS I received this reply:

Dear Sir,

As you pointed out “to abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Digg users”. We have had many problems in the past due to users accusing other users of abuse based on false facts. As we have told other users that have emailed us about this subject, there is no abuse involved here, we have investigated it and yes it does look suspicious to the eye, but they are all legit users and therefor we can not ban them. We ask you kindly to email us if you believe a story is being abused. We would have done the same to any other user that might have been accusing you. You can post negative comments and negative stories [I had implied perhaps unjustly in my email that I was blocked for submitting negative stories about Digg] about digg, but please restrain from accusing or intimidating other users. Your account has been unblocked. If you have any other questions, please email us and we’ll do our best to help you.

Thank you,

-The Digg Watch Team.

So I now have an account back, which is nice. I guess they could well be telling the truth when they say there was nothing suspicious going on. It wasn’t the initial story ‘gaming of digg’ that annoyed me rather it was the censorship of submissions that sort to point that story out.

I think Digg should rely on its users to make editorial decisions. Users can do a lot to rectify incorrect submissions as in this case. Stick by the text on the front page: “With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.”

Update 5:
Ken points to an Aviran’s Place story about more Digg editorial control. The same thing seems to have happened to ForeverGeek which is why I wrote this post at all.

Update 6:
OK. Digg has now not deleted Digg Corrupted even after 47 minutes and with 49 diggs.

However, it has not made it to the front page. These two screen captures were taken at the same time. The former is from the front page, the latter is still in diggall.

You will note that the one on the front page has less diggs than the other. This is despite the fact that it was submitted almost a day ago whereas the other was submitted less than an hour ago. This means that the “Digg Corrupted” submission has received almost 24 times as many diggs per minute. And yet it has not been promoted to the front page. I smell ‘hierarchical editorial control’. The articles are buried so they’ll never make the front page, I guess they could’ve been user buried. But this doesn’t detract from the fact than mine and other’s submissions were deleted (not buried).

Update 7:
Well at time of pressing Save button an article has made it to the Digg front page unburied. Ironically it points to the Slashdot item about ‘Growing Censorship Concerns at Digg’. Oh, and that links to me so hello Slashdotters! (and Diggers turned Slashdotters!)

Update 8:
Kevin Rose’s response. I will respond to it when I have time, but I don’t at the moment. It contradicts the email above.

Update: follow up in the next post

No tags

This TIME page has questions from (American) readers and answers from Iraqis. It is very interesting to get the impression from eyewitnesses and it shows just how much violence is a part of every day life. There are a few differing points of view.

What do you think of the American soldiers stationed in Iraq? Are they an annoyance? A help? Just part of the scenery?

Ali Fahad responds:

I don’t have any negative feelings toward them, because they’re part of the situation in Iraq. Through my work, I’ve been on a lot of bases with correspondents. When I see an American soldier on the base, he’s a human being. He’s so kind and helpful. On the other hand, when he is in the street, probably because he has orders, he’s a completely different person. I can feel he’s been given an order not to talk to anyone, to be careful and be attentive.

They deal with people in a tough, aggressive way, probably because they don’t understand the Iraqi personality or the culture. For example, when they arrest someone, they push him on the ground and put something over his head and tie his hands behind his back. For an Iraqi, this is something really awful.

When the soldiers drive, they are in a hurry and they don’t care who’s in the street. They’re on alert, and that can cause problems. If something happens suddenly and they start shooting wildly, for an ordinary Iraqi citizen, who is in the street, what is his guilt? That is why when I see the convoys on the street, I feel a bit edgy.

No tags

On the thirtieth Cypriot women will break the bra chain record (apparently there is one) joining 100,000 together.

Reuters

NICOSIA (Reuters) – Women on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus hope to form the world’s longest chain of bras with the twin aims of heightening awareness of breast cancer and winning a place in the Guinness Book of Records.

The Cypriot, British and Dutch organizers hope to string together as many as 100,000 bras on April 30, beating the current record of 79,000 bras held by Singapore, and forming a 56 mile chain. “It’s an odd thing to do, but it’s the perfect way to get the message across. Its important that people are aware of the risks, and the need for regular screening,” said Louise van Rooij, a Dutch resident of Cyprus.

Women as far afield as Alaska have contributed bras, including Betty Boothroyd, Britain’s first female speaker of the House of Commons and a regular visitor to the holiday island.

Breast cancer kills about 400,000 women worldwide each year, and doctors say regular screening, especially for women over 50, is vital for early detection which is crucial to a woman’s chances of survival.

No tags

ZDNet has this entertaining video describing why DRM (Digital Rights Management) is actually a euphemism for C.R.A.P.
Video

[Via Google Blogoscoped]

No tags