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Blogging using clipmakrs

Clipmarks is a neat firefox/internet explorer addon which allows you to essentially cut-n-paste into your blog one or more chunks of content from any webpage with a single click. Very easy to use. For example, in this post I have clipped descriptions of clipmarks’ features from their website.

clipped from clipmarks.com Clip-to-Blog You can now post clips directly to your blog, with or without saving it to clipmarks.com. Supports WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, Movable Type, LiveJournal and Vox. Clip-to-Email You can now email what you clip without saving it first.

The story of Microsoft’s openness

Wired has this long but interesting article about how a few people at Microsoft went against their PR department and other top management to essentially start a culture of open communications with the outside world. This is now largely seen as a major success story - and Microsoft is one of the few major corporations that now has this culture of open blogging (with about 4500 employees blogging).

Lenn Pryor who started this initiative, go this idea after the following experience:

Pryor used to be terrified of flying. A close friend had survived a near-crash in the early ’90s, and it affected Pryor deeply. The idea of putting his life in the hands of two pilots he didn’t know gave him panic attacks. Before boarding a plane, he was routinely sick to his stomach, and he spent most of each flight alternately meditating and gripping his arm rests in fear. Then he met a pilot for Delta Air Lines. Pryor quizzed the pilot about every detail of flying jetliners, how many backup systems they had, what it would take to make a plane fall out of the sky. It worked. By getting inside the pilot’s head, he came to understand how safe flying actually is.

A decade later, Pryor was seeing similar signs of anxiety in the tens of thousands of software developers who create programs that work with the Windows operating system.

See full article

ACM Queue - Criminal Code: The Making of a Cybercriminal: Queue’s first-ever narrative chronicles one man’s transition from small-time hacker to big-time crook.

ACM Queue magazine has this fictional account of malware creators and their experiences. Although the characters are made up, the techniques and events are patterned on real activities of many different groups developing malicious software. Very interesting read.

“A guarantee? You want a guarantee?” Misha frowned at the screen. His negotiations with kru5h3r via IRC had been going well, till now. Kru5h3r wanted a full-function rootkit that he could distribute to build a botnet. He was willing to pay, but he didn’t want his investment to go up in smoke if his rootkit signature found its way into popular intrusion detection software.

“Nobody gives a guarantee,” Misha thought, but as he was about to type that reply, something made him pause.

“That’s right… we offer them insurance!” Misha grinned. Slava looked at him in disbelief. “Of course, they pay for the custom rootkit, but for a little bit extra every month, we will give them protection from the signature databases. If their kit is spotted and tagged, we’ll give them another one that does the same thing, but doesn’t match the known signature. They pay us a subscription fee through Aurum, so it all stays nice and anonymous.”

Read full story.

Suspended tower office block

This “supsended” tower is going to be built in Singapore. The basic idea is to reduce the amount of space used at the ground level!
Link

Real life real estate agency to sell virtual real estate

The internet has now begun blurring the lines between reality and virtual reality. It started with people spending large part of their lives (over 14 hours per day in some cases) inside the virtual worlds created by massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft, or Second Life. Second Life has for a while been attracting a bunch of non-gamers too, because it it not really a game. It is just a virtual world where people hang out, and in some cases, run businesses.

According to wikipedia Second Life is an Internet-based virtual world which came to international attention via mainstream news media in late 2006 and early 2007. Developed by Linden Lab, a downloadable client program enables its users, called “Residents“, to interact with each other through motional avatars, providing an advanced level of a social network service combined with general aspects of a metaverse. Residents can explore, meet other Residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, create and trade items (virtual property) and services from one another.

Soon, real life began intruding into Second Life. For example, the announcement of the release of Sun Open Java was also done inside Second Life in the form of a Press Conference. In early 2007 the Swedish Institute stated it was about to set up an Embassy in Second Life. Now, Coldwell Banker, a real estate agency in the US has bought a large tract of land inside Second Life. It plans on re-selling half of it and renting out the other half.

Coldwell, which employs over 120,000 real-world sales agents in the United States and operates in a total of 45 countries, isn’t in Second Life to make money, says Charlie Young, the company’s senior vice president for marketing. “In the end this is about buying and selling homes in the real world,” he says. “We’re trying to figure out how to reach what we call the ‘new consumer’.” Executives insist that any profits will be reinvested in Second Life real estate.

See full article.

How Police Interrogation Works

This is an interesting, and very detailed article on the techniques used these days by police to get confessions out of suspects. I believe the author is mostly referring to interrogations in the US, but in any case, it is rather interesting.

In looking for a replacement for illegal forms of coercion, police turned to fairly basic psychological techniques like the time-honored “good cop bad cop” routine, in which one detective browbeats the suspect and the other pretends to be looking out for him. People tend to trust and talk to someone they perceive as their protector. Another basic technique is maximization, in which the police try to scare the suspect into talking by telling him all of the horrible things he’ll face if he’s convicted of the crime in a court of law. Fear tends to make people talk. For a while, police tried such things as polygraphs to determine if the suspect was being deceptive, but polygraphs and polygraph training are expensive, and the results are almost never admissible in court. But some polygraph analysts, including a man named John Reid, began noticing that subjects exhibited certain outward, consistent physical signs that coincided with the polygraph’s determination of untruthfulness. Reid went on to develop a non-machine-based system of interrogation based on specific types of questions and answers that uncover weaknesses the interrogator can use against a suspect to obtain a confession. Reid’s “Nine Steps” of psychological manipulation is one of the most popular interrogation systems in the United States today.

See full article.

Barber cuts hair with fire

See this post for more details and other photos.

Don’t drink and drive coasters from Mumbai Traffic Police

Apparently, Mumbai Traffic Police are distributing these neat coasters to bars. They look like photos of regular people when dry, but when they get wet, parts become red, so it looks like the person is bleeding.

From here

Go Away/Come In doormat

Doormat which says “Come In” when you enter and “Go Away” when you leave

From Boing Boing

The human chameleon

See this interesting story of a man (identified as “AD” below) who has some brain damage due to which he has turned into a human chameleon. Whenever he meets someone, he “becomes” that person. So on meeting a doctor, he starts behaving like a doctor, and even makes up a story as to how he came about to be a doctor.

To investigate further, Giovannina Conchiglia and colleagues used actors to contrive different scenarios. At a bar, an actor asked AD for a cocktail, prompting him to immediately fulfil the role of bar-tender, claiming that he was on a two-week trial hoping to gain a permanent position. Taken to the hospital kitchen for 40 minutes, AD quickly assumed the role of head chef, and claimed responsibility for preparing special menus for diabetic patients. He maintains these roles until the situation changes. However, he didn’t adopt the role of laundry worker at the hospital laundry, perhaps because it was too far out of keeping with his real-life career as a politician.

See full article.