Makes me want a Rolo…

kiwitobes has a great video timeline of the spread of Wal-Marts through out the United States. It almost reminds me, as many of the commenter have pointed out, of a virus spreading through out a population. Poetic justice I suppose.

Watch the little year in the corner to see just how crazy things get after 1990 or so (thanks China!).

kiwitobes

Todd gonna give it to ya.

/Film has a great collection of movie-related graffiti featured in their ‘Cool Stuff’ section today. Maybe 40% of the Flickr photos that were submitted had some tie to Star Wars, including one Yoda spray from Ithaca, but I ran across a couple of unexpected one too (Serpico and Sin City included). The Big Lebowski was also a favorite.

/Film 

Australian comedy duo Clark and Dawe tackle the current recession in the United States, explaining to the audience how the crisis began, how much damage it might actually do, and what these developments mean for international markets. Ironically, these guys have done a better job summing up the situation than I believe most American news analysts.

Australia Wide

Well no, I’ve never met the guy in person, but something doesn’t rub me the right way about Cory Doctorow. As a frequent reader of boingboing.net I encounter Doctorow’s words and pictures almost daily, which many times I enjoy viewing and feel better informed for having seen, but I can’t help but detect an air of pretension in a lot of what Cory has to say. Also, I don’t think he takes very good pictures. Ongoing series my butt.

To better confirm my theory I googled “Cory Doctorow” and “jackass” and got about 3,000 odd results. One of them was a blog entry I feel like linking for posterity’s sake that concerns Doctorow, a well known copyright reformer, duplicating other writer’s work without permission on his and other websites and essentially profiting off of it through site ad revenue.

Googling “Cory Doctorow” and “suck” also returned almost 55,000 hits, one of which is a website dedicated to the suckiest Cory Doctorow posts on boingboing. How does one measure suck? A better summation of corysucks.com can be found here.

Finally, a small bit of TWiT (ep 135) revealed to me that as a guest on said podcast Doctorow hassled the show’s sponsor, Audible.com, while the hosts plugged the site (Cory doesn’t like DRM). I assume this happened on TWiT 124 which I haven’t listened to it yet and can’t say for sure, but still, that’s a pretty jackass thing to do Cory!

If anything the tech industry, and especially the blog-o-sphere, breeds it’s fair share of characters. I believe Cory has been in the limelight long enough and has made the rounds at all of the appropriate geek events to be considered a public figure, at least among us in the know, so I feel that airing my grievances about him, especially on my own chunk of the world wide web, is fair.

This ongoing series will probably be updated as I see fit. If you or anyone you know has fallen victim to Cory Doctorow’s brand of writing/picturing taking hackery feel free to comment and add your two cents.

UPDATE: It seems that Cory’s reputation precedes him on livejournal. (Thanks for the tip, k!)

Well, the US housing market is currently collapsing faster than Gov. Eliott Spitzer’s career, but apparently there is a thin silver lining amidst all this lending turmoil in the form of historic architecture suddenly becoming affordable to all us five-figure making schlubs. With the banks scrambling to save their butts and low-interest rates in the air many previous unfordable architecturally-significant properties have now hit rock bottom (California and Nevada especially) and are waiting to be snatched up.

This small Keck & Keck house in Chicago Heights, a property that would easily fetch over $1 million, was recently purchased for a mere $213,000 thanks to the tumbling markets and some keen craigslisting. An even more impressive Frank Lloyd Wright (well, Wright himself didn’t design it, but it’s still impressive) “Prarie” style house just went for $585,000 in Los Angeles, an already ultra-inflated housing market. This trend is probably going to get worse before it gets any better but consider this economic downturn as a time to make some wise investments.

Portfolio.com

One of my favorite things about living in London was the quick and easy (abet expensive) transit system otherwise known as the Tube. What made using the Tube such a pleasure was the Oyster card system, a piece of plastic with an embedded RFID chip inside, that allows riders to pass through the station’s turnstiles with a simple wave of said card. Turns out however, according to The Register, that the Oyster card system is about to get a lot more inexpensive:

Security researchers say they’ve found a way to crack the encryption used to protect a widely-used smartcard in a matter of minutes, making it possible for them to quickly and cheaply clone the cards that are used to secure office buildings and automate the collection of mass transportation fares.

The attack works against the Mifare Classic, a wireless card made by Netherlands-based NXP Semiconductors. It is used by transit operators in London, Boston and the Netherlands and by organizations in the public and private sectors to control access to sensitive areas, according to Karsten Nohl, a PhD candidate at the University of Virginia and one of the cryptographers who discovered the weakness. NXP says it’s sold 1 billion to 2 billion of the cards.

…

“It only takes a few minutes to break any card in particular,” Nohl said in an interview. He said the modest amount of time and equipment required to crack any Mifare Classic card – in many cases less than 10 minutes on a typical PC – makes the attack ripe for criminals to carry out in the real-world attacks.

“If you want to get into a high-security building, spending a matter of days is OK,” he said. “Now, it doesn’t take days; it takes minutes for subways and military installations alike.”

If there hasn’t been a strong enough argument against the mass proliferation of RFID chips yet this turn of events seems like a damn good one. The insecurities of these chips have been known for quite a while now, but that doesn’t seem to stop businesses from buying up these cheap little chips by the millions. For those who are interested in the actually cryptanalysis of the Mifare RFID tags the original UVA research can be found here. Bruce Schneier also has some great info about the whole situation on his blog.

And now for another exciting installment of: “I’m too lazy to post today so instead I’ll just put this comic up here”.

Here are some snaps of an old ornate wooden house out in the snowy forests of Russia. The architecture dates back hundreds of years and the structure has remained virtually untouched since then. Brought to you by the place for all things Russian in English, English Russia.

English Russia