ninme

“Bwahaha:”

digg - Boston police blow up traffic counter chained to lightpost

Thanks to the Boston Police bomb squad, this is one traffic counter box that won’t get a chance to kill anyone.

I love this comment (those of you that saw this funniest item of the day will get it):

Allright Bostonians, let’s just face it, our city lost its geek cred after ATHF-gate, but this is just ridiculous (rediculous? retahded?) Just one more explosion and we’ll hit the False-Alarm Trifecta! C’mon guys, we can do it. We’ve no more face to lose as it is. Why not become a bigger laughingstock? (Oops, sorry, that wasn’t a hair question…)

So the interviews are a little hokey, but hey:

I mean, if you think of it, walking is a pretty bizarre thing. “Controlled falling,” Peter calls it. And dogs aren’t exactly built for it. Well, evidently they are. Does this mean if Faith has puppies dogs will finally figure, “The hell with this” and start walking around? What will they do with their front paws then? All they need are some opposable thumbs before they start smoking.

First:

SWEET MERCIFUL CRAP, RUN

A picture.

Second:

And holy crap, what’s Thailand’s problem

WTFSrsly - Thai actress punished for wearing sexiest dress ever

And, a bonus (somebody a little jealous of California?):

digg - Australia to Ban Sale of Incandescent Light Bulbs

The Australian government today announced they will be phasing in a ban on incandescent light bulbs, over the next three years. Householders replacing them with compact fluorescent bulbs are expected to save $30 per year, while Australia reduces its per annum CO2 emissions by up 4 million tonnes.

Which got this comment (replying to another comment (sorry but I gotta keep the language)):

“there are plenty of ways to generate those same lighting contidtions/effects without destroying the world”

Yeah, ’cause every time you use a incadescent light bulb, you’re literally destroying the fucking world. Also, it causes the deaths of five puppies.

The Guardian - Polio cases jump in Pakistan as clerics declare vaccination an American plot

It is. Our plot to get rid of the nutters.

Aww!

Fiendish Glee Club - Customer service gone shockingly right

What a great story!

I especially like the line:

She wasn’t Japanese, but clearly Nintendo is a Japanese company. Only a Japanese service center would apologize for taking 30 minutes to repair a piece of electronics when my expectation going in was that I’d be without it for two weeks.

So, Barack Obama has a webpage. The webpage has a social network. To find a group within this social network to join, there’s a group search page. The search fields on the group search page include “search group descriptions” with the following helpful example:

Example: Gay Nigger Association of America -#@ for Obama, 16892

It can be seen here:

Tech Crunch - Very Ugly Bug at BarackObama.com

It turns out it wasn’t a hard coded thing, but only a feature that uses the most recently created group as the example text. There was some discussion of this at the Tech Crunch blog. Then, scroll down and find the comment from the Obama people, Peter’s quotes:

It’s up to folks who support this kind of open approach to politics online to push back on the kind of knee-jerk “look! look! look!” that more traditional or tech-phobic writers are inclined to engage in. …

In general I would hope that folks concerned about questionable content on the site will turn to the system of flags or some other means of contacting the campaign directly rather than playing “gotcha”. If we want to play that game, there plenty of content in the comments on the blogs of both the Republican and Democratic Party’s web sites to keep us all distracted from the real task of building better technology, engaging more people, and opening up the process.

He just called Mike Arrington, THE web 2.0 writer, a tech-phobic “traditional” writer! Bwahahaha! And Mike’s reply!

Joe - way to reach out to the community. When you fuck up, the best thing to do is not attack the people who alerted you to it. Why in the world you allowed something like this to happen is beyond me. Why didn’t you just hard code the example into the page? It would have been easier and this wouldn’t have happened.

This isn’t Washington DC politics, and you shouldn’t assume I have some racist or other bias against your campaign. We’re a tech blog and I pointed out what looks like a rookie mistake on your site that caused some embarrassment. Most of our readers (me included) are going to be inclined to be on your side. But Obama just lost my vote, because of you.

Hahahahaha

Ah, this will be fun.

Update:

So a lot of the later comments (word seems to have spread) run along the lines of:

Saying that you’re not going to vote for a candidate because of the response of one of his staffers is a juvenile response. You’ve just pigeon-holed the entire Obama campaign based on a response that offended you, and not even from the candidate himself.

So he points out something and a staffer lashes back in a not very reaching-out-to-allies sort of way, but we shouldn’t judge the candidate on that. But then the Prime Minister of a large country in a sensitive area and a key military ally and trading partner points out something and the candidate calls him a chicken hawk, and generally lashes back in a not very reaching-out-to-allies sort of way. Can we judge the candidate yet?

This isn’t really a Peter Recommends, but he was telling me this morning, “not that anyone in the MSM would have noticed” (he’s turning into such an AWM, is Peter) that apparently there was a huge attack on the root servers that took out like two of them.

The interweb, being what it is, plugged along just fine despite it, as it should have, so no one really noticed until a couple of groups who monitor these sorts of things noticed and were all, “Uh, guys…?” Apparently it came out of Korea. South Korea, though, which means it was probably a bunch of kids (North Korea not having enough power to keep their computers on long enough for something like this). And, uh, I haven’t seen anything mentioned anywhere. Of course root servers, that’s much too hard for the MSM. The internet’s supposed to be just… [waves arms] out there.

(Before I save this…)

Ah! Wiki:

DNS Backbone DDoS Attacks

February 6, 2007

A second attack occurred on February 6, 2007. The attack began at 10:30 UTC, and lasted about five hours. Although none of the servers crashed, two of the root servers reportedly “suffered badly”, while others saw “heavy traffic”. The botnet responsible for the attack has reportedly been traced to South Korea.

One Free Korea - Mass Escape at N. Korean Concentration Camp; 120 Escape

The Daily NK reports:

Sources residing in the district of Chongjin, North Hamkyung informed on the 1st and 5th “On December 20th, a mass group of 120 prisoners from the camp in Hwasung escaped and so the National Safety Agency and the People’s Protection Agency are in a state of emergency” and said “Lately, additional checkpoints have been established at various locations in North Hamkyung inspecting permits for both vehicle and personal travel.”

In the history of North Korea, there has only been one known incident like this one — the mass uprising at Onsong, Camp Number 12, in 1987, when 5,000 people were killed. The punishment for escape is death, and former guards claim that they were offered generous bounties for killing escaping prisoners. …

The significance of this, if true, is proof of the existence of an organized underground inside North Korea. As you will see below, Hwasong is a very long walk from China. Without help from an underground, these people would have had nowhere to go; they would all have been recaptured or killed almost immediately. If around 100 prisoners were still at large weeks after the fact, or made it at least as far as China, someone must have helped, hidden, and fed them. …

I discovered Camp 16 accidentally, while google-earthing North Korea recently. I stumbled upon it because it’s not far from Musudan-ri, the place from which North Korea did its missile tests last July.

Click for pics, do.

According to the story, the camp [a quarter the size of Rhode Island and four times as big as DC] holds 10,000 prisoners. They could be there for anything from the expression of dissent, to finding themselves on the wrong side of a factional dispute, to being the wife or child of someone who said the wrong thing one day.

Survivors of these camps report that each year, about 20 to 25% of the prisoners die.

Men. Women. Kids.

Fogonazos - Sea Giants

Semi-submersible ships are the only vessels in the world which provide the capability to load, transport and offload extremely heavy cargo, such as oil drilling rigs, gas refineries or even warships.

With pictures! Even of submarines! (Won’t Bubblehead be jealous of my subblogging prowess?)