The Awesome Destructive Power of the Corporate Power Media

This commentary, however, is not about the merits of Howard Dean. If a mildly progressive, Internet-driven, young white middle class-centered, movement-like campaign such as Deans flush with money derived from unconventional sources, backed by significant sections of labor, reinforced by big name endorsements and surging with upward momentum can be derailed in a matter of weeks at the whim of corporate media, then all of us are in deep trouble. The Dean beat-down should signal an intense reassessment of medias role in the American power structure.

• ETCON calendar – iCal subscribable calendar via eventSherpa – pretty nice interface/service it looks like, but why the heck is the default timezone Montreal (err, ETCON is in San Diego) – this of course completely screws up everyone who say, actually uses Time Zones correctly?
• The Web and Identity Goods – esr talks a bit on books
• Creating A Super-Router (For Free) – like I said, I bought the wrong wifi ap
• PRIMARY RESULTS: Delegate Scorecard – You know what’s interesting, the games just afoot right now

• Re: Shell based text editor for writing prose – highlights vim’s lack of ability to automatically reflow text. In theory one could bind a script to run on each keystroke and constantly reflow (or count and reflow when necessary?)
• SourceForge P2P projects
• Semantic Blogging
  

  The central idea is to apply ideas, techniques and tools from the semantic web and apply them to blogging. Our intuition is that semantic principles can be applied to enrich and extend the blogging metaphor. We use the bibliography management domain to focus our efforts and to provide grounding for our demonstrator. However, we envisage that our efforts will be (or should be) applicable to more than just the bibliography domain. In addition, if we can show how the semantic web can add value, within the context of a pre-existing, popular and powerful metaphor, then it will make a convincing showcase for the semantic web.

• The Center for Public Democracy: Who Bankrolls Bush and his Democratic Rivals?
• SF IndyMedia: Kerry & Bush are both of Skull and Bones (Secret Society)…see the streaming video (FYI, Kerry is also a member of the Bildeberg club [more info])
• Yale bones dug up in fight to be president
  

  The phenomenon of the “Yalies”, as Yale alumni are known, has provoked intense debate, since in a democracy of about 300 million people, the battle for power will be waged among candidates drawn from the 4000 who graduated from Yale in different years of the 1960s. [Bush, Kerry, Dean, and Lieberman]

While sitting in your chair, lift your right foot slightly off the ground and move it in clockwise circles. Now draw the numeral “6” in the air with your right hand. Your foot will involuntarily reverse direction.

Cory Doctorow has published his second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe. Like his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory’s made his book freely available for download under a Creative Commons License.

Cory has a write up of what he’s trying to do:

The future is my business, more or less. I’m a science fiction writer.
One way to know the future is to look good and hard at the present.
Here’s a thing I’ve noticed about the present: more people are reading more words off of more screens than ever before. Here’s another thing I’ve noticed about the present: fewer people are reading fewer words off of fewer pages than ever before. That doesn’t mean that the book is dying
— no more than the advent of the printing press and the de-emphasis of
Bible-copying monks meant that the book was dying — but it does mean
that the book is changing. I think that literature is alive
and well: we’re reading our brains out! I just think that the complex
social practice of “book” — of which a bunch of paper pages between
two covers is the mere expression — is transforming and will transform
further.

(The comments are also quite worth reading.)

So, I’ve only had layovers in Alaska and Missouri. Does that even count? In any case, yes, I’m due for a big-ass roadtrip sometime.

• MozWho, AndyEd’s ongoing work on creating a personal adaptive hompage. See also the MozWho Labs, tabWatcher, and prior art
• Bookie – centralized Java bookmark server
• del.icio.us
• Bookmark Links from last year

New review of bookmark tools:

• del.icio.us – I can see the good things about it, but the interface is clumsy and I don’t really care about the social software aspect of it. still very alpha, no organization (see REST api
• Between Book Pages (BBPS) – pretty minimal
• ol’bookmarks – mature, but fat rendering
• online-bookmarks – YABS
• PHP Bookmarks – simple listings, has separate admin/browse views
• SiteBar – very feature rich, has DHTML tree view (not dynamically loading)
• Tasks – it’s not bookmarking software, but has nice features that could be applicable when designing a bookmarking system
• b. – collaborative bookmarking w/ some interesting features/ideas; nice looking also, but clumsy interface, very shoestringy (flat files/cgi)
• Booby – nicely done, has import/export, also has contacts, todo, notes and news (RSS), but is a big slow fat interface
• Bookmark4U – lots of features, not sure how many are useful, refresh too annoying to take closer look
• Bookmarker – this is the OG. Err, it hasn’t really been updated for the past 3 years though

Desired Features:

• Mozilla Integration
• Multiple Bookmark lists
• Multiple Sorts, Filtering, Fuzzy Searches
• Faceted Navigation
• DHTML/XUL interface, remote scripting
• Ability to handle duplicates
• Rating/data collection
• Metadata storage, Caching (what is an ‘url’ object model composed of?)
• Import/Export single links, RSS, XBEL
• Eventual Browser History integration
• Eventual KB/Wiki integration
• Bonus: Multi-user/group, fine grained access control
• Bonus: locally caching?

I’ll give SiteBar and Bookmark4U a try, but I have a feeling that I’ll probably not like either enough to stick w/ them.

I’ve been looking around and am sort of surprised that no one has created a comprehensive PHP secure cookie/session library. Am I missing something?

• DB sessions
• Optional Client-Side Login Hashing
• Request-based Session Regeneration
• Page Tokens (even better w/ Session ID masking)
• Optional IP Locking
• User/Session checking/limiting
• Cookie Envelopes
• Forging/Brute Force detection, actions (tarpitting, lock-outs/bans)
• Cookie shredding

DSS Papers to write:

• Methods for controlling personal data propagation within SSNs
• Trust models in DSS systems