Roo's News - Wednesday January 25, 2012
Hello.
What is this?
I don't know yet. My current plan is to (attempt to) send out a short little email every weekday, listing a few interesting things I've noticed online that you might enjoy. Giles Turnbull (http://lists.gilest.org/listinfo.cgi/gorjuss-gilest.org) and Robert Brook (http://tinyletter.com/robertbrook) have both taken to it like aquatic birds to liquid, and it seemed like something worth trying.
I promised that I'd start if 10 people signed up today, and so far I'm actually writing this to a rather wonderful 50 of you. Thank you for being brave enough to sign up and be a part of it from day one. I know you're busy, so I'll try to keep it short.
Today
It's been hard to miss the O2 mobile privacy debacle today. In case you missed it, O2 customer @lewispeckover noticed that his phone number was showing up in the header information when it made a request of his web server, so he made a little tool that listed all of the headers to help other people see whether they were affected. http://lew.io/headers.php
This revelation, as you might expect, got the internet very agitated indeed.
After an initially clumsy response (http://twitter.com/O2/status/161872584634408960) O2 quickly went into fire-fighting mode, responding to anyone who asked them (or even mentioned them). O2 fixed the problem at 2pm today and responded thus: http://blog.o2.co.uk/home/2012/01/o2-mobile-numbers-and-web-browsing.html (it seems something broke a couple of weeks ago and information which would normally only be seen by O2's trusted partners was suddenly visible to other website owners. Of course, now the hornets are stirred, many people are still cross and now want to know exactly who are O2's "trusted partners". It will be interesting to see how they answer that.)
Fact of the day*
The text of the current version of the English edition of Wikipedia is 14 GB compressed. I think I'll put it on a memory stick, just in case something awful ever happens. I know this because someone told me you could still fit all of Wikipedia on a first generation iPod, but it looks like this stopped being true quite some time ago.
http://static.wikipedia.org/downloads/current/en/
* N.B. there may not be a fact every day. We'll see.
Letters of Note is a great website you probably already love. Two letters that I've especially enjoyed reading recently are
1.) David "The consumer isn't a moron, she is your wife" Ogilvy, admitting in 1955 that he had "appalling" habits as a copywriter.
"I have never written an advertisement in the office. Too many interruptions. I do all my writing at home ... If all else fails, I drink half a bottle of rum and play a Handel oratorio on the gramophone. This generally produces an uncontrollable gush of copy."
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/01/i-am-lousy-copywriter.html
2.) Bill 'Foundation' Gates finally waking up to the potential of the internet in 1995, the year Windows 95 launched (initially without a browser).
"I have gone through several stages of increasing my views of its importance. Now I assign the Internet the highest level of importance. In this memo I want to make clear that our focus on the Internet is crucial to every part of our business. The Internet is the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981. ... One scary possibility being discussed by Internet fans is whether they should get together and create something far less expensive than a PC which is powerful enough for Web browsing..."
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/07/internet-tidal-wave.html
With SOPA/PIPA/ACTA in mind, some interesting quotes about piracy:
Wil Weaton - "[MPAA Chairman] Chris Dodd is lying about piracy costing us jobs. Hollywood's refusal to adapt to changing times is what's costing the studios money. That's it."
http://wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/16246156406/mpaa-directly-publicly-threatens-politicians-who
Tim O'Reilly - "In my experience at O'Reilly, the losses due to piracy are far outweighed by the benefits of the free flow of information, which makes the world richer, and develops new markets for legitimate content. Most of the people who are downloading unauthorized copies of O'Reilly books would never have paid us for them anyway..."
https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/BEDukdz2B1r
Jonathan Coulton - "Make good stuff, then make it easy for people to buy it. There's your anti-piracy plan. The big content companies are TERRIBLE at doing both of these things, so it's no wonder they're not doing so well in the current environment. And right now everyone's fighting to control distribution channels, which is why I can't watch Star Wars on Netflix or iTunes. It's fine if you want to have that fight, but don't yell and scream about how you're losing business to piracy when your stuff isn't even available in the box I have on top of my TV..."
http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2012/01/21/megaupload/
Finally, here's NimbleBit (creators of popular iPhone game Tiny Tower) 'congratulating' Zynga on the launch of their deja-vu inducing new iPhone game, Dream Heights.
https://twitter.com/eeen/status/161983237864955904 -> https://s3.amazonaws.com/nbpromo/dearzynga.jpg
I failed to keep it short. Tomorrow's will be shorter.
What is this?
I don't know yet. My current plan is to (attempt to) send out a short little email every weekday, listing a few interesting things I've noticed online that you might enjoy. Giles Turnbull (http://lists.gilest.org/listinfo.cgi/gorjuss-gilest.org) and Robert Brook (http://tinyletter.com/robertbrook) have both taken to it like aquatic birds to liquid, and it seemed like something worth trying.
I promised that I'd start if 10 people signed up today, and so far I'm actually writing this to a rather wonderful 50 of you. Thank you for being brave enough to sign up and be a part of it from day one. I know you're busy, so I'll try to keep it short.
Today
It's been hard to miss the O2 mobile privacy debacle today. In case you missed it, O2 customer @lewispeckover noticed that his phone number was showing up in the header information when it made a request of his web server, so he made a little tool that listed all of the headers to help other people see whether they were affected. http://lew.io/headers.php
This revelation, as you might expect, got the internet very agitated indeed.
After an initially clumsy response (http://twitter.com/O2/status/161872584634408960) O2 quickly went into fire-fighting mode, responding to anyone who asked them (or even mentioned them). O2 fixed the problem at 2pm today and responded thus: http://blog.o2.co.uk/home/2012/01/o2-mobile-numbers-and-web-browsing.html (it seems something broke a couple of weeks ago and information which would normally only be seen by O2's trusted partners was suddenly visible to other website owners. Of course, now the hornets are stirred, many people are still cross and now want to know exactly who are O2's "trusted partners". It will be interesting to see how they answer that.)
Fact of the day*
The text of the current version of the English edition of Wikipedia is 14 GB compressed. I think I'll put it on a memory stick, just in case something awful ever happens. I know this because someone told me you could still fit all of Wikipedia on a first generation iPod, but it looks like this stopped being true quite some time ago.
http://static.wikipedia.org/downloads/current/en/
* N.B. there may not be a fact every day. We'll see.
Letters of Note is a great website you probably already love. Two letters that I've especially enjoyed reading recently are
1.) David "The consumer isn't a moron, she is your wife" Ogilvy, admitting in 1955 that he had "appalling" habits as a copywriter.
"I have never written an advertisement in the office. Too many interruptions. I do all my writing at home ... If all else fails, I drink half a bottle of rum and play a Handel oratorio on the gramophone. This generally produces an uncontrollable gush of copy."
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/01/i-am-lousy-copywriter.html
2.) Bill 'Foundation' Gates finally waking up to the potential of the internet in 1995, the year Windows 95 launched (initially without a browser).
"I have gone through several stages of increasing my views of its importance. Now I assign the Internet the highest level of importance. In this memo I want to make clear that our focus on the Internet is crucial to every part of our business. The Internet is the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981. ... One scary possibility being discussed by Internet fans is whether they should get together and create something far less expensive than a PC which is powerful enough for Web browsing..."
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/07/internet-tidal-wave.html
With SOPA/PIPA/ACTA in mind, some interesting quotes about piracy:
Wil Weaton - "[MPAA Chairman] Chris Dodd is lying about piracy costing us jobs. Hollywood's refusal to adapt to changing times is what's costing the studios money. That's it."
http://wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/16246156406/mpaa-directly-publicly-threatens-politicians-who
Tim O'Reilly - "In my experience at O'Reilly, the losses due to piracy are far outweighed by the benefits of the free flow of information, which makes the world richer, and develops new markets for legitimate content. Most of the people who are downloading unauthorized copies of O'Reilly books would never have paid us for them anyway..."
https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/BEDukdz2B1r
Jonathan Coulton - "Make good stuff, then make it easy for people to buy it. There's your anti-piracy plan. The big content companies are TERRIBLE at doing both of these things, so it's no wonder they're not doing so well in the current environment. And right now everyone's fighting to control distribution channels, which is why I can't watch Star Wars on Netflix or iTunes. It's fine if you want to have that fight, but don't yell and scream about how you're losing business to piracy when your stuff isn't even available in the box I have on top of my TV..."
http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2012/01/21/megaupload/
Finally, here's NimbleBit (creators of popular iPhone game Tiny Tower) 'congratulating' Zynga on the launch of their deja-vu inducing new iPhone game, Dream Heights.
https://twitter.com/eeen/status/161983237864955904 -> https://s3.amazonaws.com/nbpromo/dearzynga.jpg
I failed to keep it short. Tomorrow's will be shorter.
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