Jason Kottke has a great list of unusual, funny and/or potentially embarrassing things that can be uncovered using the new Google Code search.
This reminds me of my old list of technically incriminating Google searches, which has proven to be surprisingly evergreen.
LZW – that is, the formerly patented Lempel-Ziv Welch compression algorithm – is free today. The footnote on the Free Software Foundation’s GIF history page says:
The Unisys patent expired on 20 June 2003 in the USA, in Europe it expired on 18 June 2004, in Japan the patent expired on 20 June 2004 and in Canada it expired on 7 July 2004. The U.S. IBM patent expired 11 August 2006, The Software Freedom Law Center says that after 1 October 2006, there will be no significant patent claims interfering with employment of the GIF format.
Like every other web site/service/app/community/thingy that allows individual user contributions, there’s spam on Delicious too. The perp I came across today was “mcloan” – check the page out for yourself – and there are many more. Fred Stutzman has a good post on the subject, and I came across an exchange with naive Delicious spammers on Brian Dear’s weblog from last year.
But what’s Delicious/Yahoo doing about this? Where’s the Craigslist-style “flag this user as a spammer” button?
Feedback sent to Technorati today:
Please, I beg you, kill those talking “SitePal” ads. I keep my PowerBook plugged into an amplified speaker setup all day, and when the “Pal” begins talking after having been displayed for X seconds (without me so much as mousing over it, I’m pretty sure), it’s heinous. And embarrassing if anyone is within earshot.
In case you haven’t been following this mini-saga – about two security researchers, an alleged MacBook wireless security vulnerability, and a writer from the Washington Post – here’s your study guide.
The original story at blog.washingtonpost.com (does the “blog” part mean we should lower our journalistic expectations?) has the unassuming title of “Hijacking a MacBook in 60 Seconds.” An alternate, more descriptive title is “Hijacking a MacBook via a Third-Party Wireless Card that Nobody Would Ever Use, in 60 Seconds, and Also Allegedly Hijacking it via the Built-In Card that Everybody Uses, But Wait, Maybe Not, Sorry, We Can’t Talk About That.” You can see why they went with the shorter title.