[Haifux] Sharing Some Links

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi all,

here are some notable links that I ran into lately:

1. https://duckduckgo.com/ is a web search engine by geeks and for geeks, that
uses information from crowd-sourcing sites. One thing it doesn't do is make
you live in a bubble: http://dontbubble.us/ . I recall that while a search for
"flickr shlomif" yields http://www.flickr.com/photos/shlomif/ as the first hit
for Google for me, it didn't display it anywhere at the top on my therapist's
computer. On https://duckduckgo.com/?q=flickr%20shlomif it is always the first
hit. :-)

Google has recently been going against their “Don't do evil” policy by
aggressively bubbling search results, by filtering “copyright-violating”
content, and by having a practically non-existent tech support, which makes
its users very frustrated and angry at Google. DuckDuckGo aims right at
Google’s cornerstone - its web search - and if Google loses that, it may
become yet another multi-services provider.

2. I found these two videos on YouTube by two independent artists to be
excellent:

*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-8syShivTc
- Tiffany Alvord’s “So Alive” - I feel it is her best original song yet.

* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNq1bkrWjbk - “One Big Family”, part of the
“Above All That is Random” series by Christina Grimmie and Sarah Happlesful

3. Touting my own horn, I have recently prepared some captioned images (see  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolcat ), and you can view one of them here:
http://www.shlomifish.org/humour.html#yo-nsa-publish-or-perish . They are
amazingly easy to create using Inkscape, and I can highly recommend it. Both
China and Iran block the Cheezburger network, and I suspect they both do that
because the fact that they allow people without great artistic skills to create
something quickly, which makes many of them be junk, but a minority be
incredibly subversive.

Anyway, reading from the image's description on
http://www.stumbleupon.com/content/9YaUU0 :

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
"Yo NSA: Publish or Perish" - a captioned image.

The NSA (National Security Agency) is the greatest money sink in the computer
security world. Made out of many people with a Ph.D. in Mathematics, who yet
did not have the sense (intuition or wisdom) to not know that joining the NSA
will put them into a Galt anti-Gulch where they cannot share their findings
with their world, and are under constant stress from what they know and think
they know. Such a person deserves to become crippled for life. Compare this to
the happy and healthy computer security hackers' (yes enthusiasts and amateurs
- not crackers) and researchers, and you'll see.

The NSA faces two options: either publish all their findings like other
security centres do, or quickly become and more irrelevant and eventually
dismissed as a huge waste of money. Just some points of highlight: the NSA
recently complained that the security researchers publish too many research
papers that they cannot keep up with them. ("Too much of a good thing is a bad
thing."), and the NSA know of Al-kaida's intentions to bomb the world trade
center, and yet did not prevent it, yet it was the CIA who eventually hunted
and killed Bin-Laden without any casualties.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

======================

Cheers,

	Shlomi Fish

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
Apple Inc. is Evil - http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/anti/apple/

He has a high degree of idealism, a high degree of stubbornness, and an even
higher degree of inability to distiniguish between the two.

Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .