Friday 28 January 2011

closing tabs

1. William Gibson has a great op piece at the NYT discussing digital vandalism. He says he regrets having missed the way hackers were going to be bored kids, not criminals. They don't want money, it's 'simply vandalism, as dull as someone smashing out the light fixtures in a bus shelter.' He timelines malicious programs from 1986 to Stuxnet, and points out that the next generation of vandals can nick expertise from that incredibly effective program...

2. Nate Silver does a stats-breakdown on who will win the Best Movie Oscar under the Instant Runoff voting scheme the Academy instituted last year.

3. I am re-posting something that would have originally come from Light Reading or Marbury, but it's so good that I'm putting it here in case you don't slavishly click onto everyone I follow. Until 1969 (!!!), Cornell University used orphan babies to study and practise mothering skills. This piece is about a novelist who learnt about this and has made it the premise for her book: what happens to one of these babies when he grows up?

4. This is my favourite of the confused, first-generation 'Egypt Disappears From Internet' stories. It will be outdated in five minutes, I suppose.

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