The Good Life The Americans had a sitcom called The Good Life years before the one with Richard Briers and Felicity Kendall—though with a very different premise. Note that the theme tune is adapted from the English lyrics of Sacha Distel’s ‘La belle vie’, made popular by Tony Bennett as ‘The Good Life’.
Clean since April 7 More evidence of the Google bot being wrong. This is the site that hosted the malware that our ad server was accused of distributing. It’s been clean since April 7. However, Google still provides a warning with its search-engine result, and there’s still a warning page when you click through. Google acknowledges this site is clean, yet still continues to block it. I would say the webmaster has a prima facie case against Google for misrepresentation.
Another false positive from the Google malware bot Following from my blog post yesterday, here’s the usual bollocks from Google. So Webmaster Tools sends me an email accusing Autocade of malware. Webmaster Tools itself says there’s nothing wrong. Clicking on the link Google provides results in a 403. The malware bot is very, very broken. We know this, the guys at Isocket know this, as do others around the internet.
[W]hen it came to Google, it’s important to know that it has it in for the little guy. It’s less responsive, and it will fence with you until you can bring a bigger party to the table who might risk damaging its informal, well maintained and largely illusionary corporate motto.
The Connected States of America
Are our borders really the edges of our communities? The “internet guy” in me says “of course not” but that doesn’t really take into account how much of our day-to-day interaction takes place in geographical meatspace. But on the other hand, many of America’s state borders are very arbitrary delineations of latitude or since-bridged rivers, so how meaningful are they in 2013, really?
What would our borders and communities look like if we looked at other data, like phone calls? At Krulwich Wonders…, Robert Krulwich has taken a look at a couple of alternate “neighborhoods”.
The photo above was assembled from anonymous mobile phone data by MIT’s Xiaoji Chen, and it which regions call each other the most often. Anyone who’s been to my neck of the woods in Austin knows that Texans don’t call people in Oklahoma much (or College Station, for that matter), and the NorCal/SoCal split shows that the differences there go beyond suntans and dotcoms. And people in the Plains apparently just want to call anyone they can that doesn’t live in the Plains.
“What’s it like out there? Just grass here.”
Check out the rest of Robert’s post for more phone fun, plus a little look at how (not) far our money travels (and what that says about us).
(via NPR)
The cellphone map I wonder how a similar map of New Zealand might look, and whether we reach beyond our borders often.
(via reckon)
Source: NPR
What Bill of Rights? CISPA explained. The American politicians’ thinking appears to be: stuff the Fourth Amendment.
YouTube history, 2013 I remain absolutely astonished by YouTube’s lack of privacy. I turned the history off on this site, and blocked the YouTube cookie. Yet it still claims I have watched certain videos. Some I do recognize but the top half-dozen, I have never seen. Not only should I not have a viewing history, the one that YouTube claims I have is total bollocks. But, it is Google, and privacy breaches, false accusations and inexplicable technical behaviour are par for the course at that company.
CISPA is a nightmare.
CISPA A nice summary of CISPA and how it violates the Fourth Amendment.
(via prayingforlove)
Source: thinksquad
Vader’s Little Princess by Jeffrey Brown [amazon]
[h/t: thephobia]
Vader’s Little Princess Even 36 years on, it’s still Star Wars, nothing but Star Wars.
(via ilaeria)
Source: brain-food
Ford mustang 1969
1969 Mustang I don’t care if it’s longer than the old one—it still looks great.
Quick and mostly irrelevant thoughts from a 
