Tag Archives: xkcd
Randall Munroe tackles those “silenced” for holding controversial opinions.
Randall sez:
“I can’t remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you’re saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it’s not literally illegal to express.”
FIGHT!
You can’t have missed the coverage of the Heartbleed exploit which potentially effects 17% of the internet.
Bruce Schneier describes the impact as:
“Catastrophic” is the right word. On the scale of 1 to 10, this is an 11.
Randall Munroe of XKCD does a fantastic job explaining in layman’s terms what the bug actually is – something that the security community (as usual) has struggled with.
You can use Filippo Valsorda’s handy tool to see if a site is potentially vulnerable (Broadsheet’s server uses a version of OpenSSL that is not vulnerable to this particular attack).
Threat from Heartbleed grows as flaw found in some routers (Irish Times)
Today’s XKCD is a little bit of nostaliga for an undocumented feature in a Windows product. But for Colin Birge, it reminded him of the woman who talked to Clippy.
What a lot of people didn’t realize was that Clippy, by default, sent anything you asked it to Microsoft, anonymized.
— Colin Birge (@WoS) December 18, 2013
No evil intent. We had no idea who asked what. It was a way of knowing what we’d screwed up. Lots of queries on a topic? Bad feature design.
— Colin Birge (@WoS) December 18, 2013
Somebody, probably a woman in the US Midwest, was typing a sentence at a time. Clippy would answer nonsensically. She’d type another one.
— Colin Birge (@WoS) December 18, 2013
Somebody, probably a woman in the US Midwest, was typing a sentence at a time. Clippy would answer nonsensically. She’d type another one.
— Colin Birge (@WoS) December 18, 2013
She’d lost her job. Her boyfriend was beating her. She was so lonely, and so afraid. All her waking nightmares, told to a paperclip.
— Colin Birge (@WoS) December 18, 2013
We couldn’t help. We didn’t know who she was. We’d gone to great lengths to make sure that we COULD not know who she was.
— Colin Birge (@WoS) December 18, 2013
So we read her story. One sentence after another. Soul-searing honesty, told to a little paperclip that could never, ever answer her.
— Colin Birge (@WoS) December 18, 2013
It looks like you’re crying out for help, would you like some assistance? (Storify)
A fabulously simple explanation of an Apollo program space rocket.
Meanwhile, Happy Science Week:
Richard Bruton, Professor Mark Ferguson and Sean Sherlock this morning launching Agenda 2020, an eight-year investment investment plan by the government’s science agency, Science Foundation Ireland.
Previously: I Could Earn A Lot More In The Private Sector
Understanding The Science Foundation Leak Crisis
(Sasko Lazarov/Photocall Ireland)
