• Punk rock … alive and kicking in a repressive state near you
  On the state of punk music in Iraq, Russia, Burma and Indonesia.
• Where’s _why?
  An article on _why and Ruby in Slate. Hello, mainstream. :-)
• Dangerous ignorance: The hysteria of Kony 2012
  More negative feedback on the Kony 2012 campaign.
• The Truly Staggering Cost Of Inventing New Drugs
  Make sure to also read the comments, some good stuff in there.
• Russian Prison Tattoos - Implied In Ink
  I first read this a couple of years ago, but it came up in conversation today, so I decided to include it.
• ‘Bout to explode: a day in the life of a precarious worker
  What precarious working conditions do to people…
• You’re crap and paid too much for the little work you actually do
  I don’t really like this article and the author doesn’t sound like someone I’d want to have a beer with, but maybe some of you find this interesting.
• Lighten Up
  About the subtle sexism female programmers have to endure, although I’m sure that’s true in most professions.
• And the microbes shall inherit the Earth
  Looking at the past to predict what consequences global warming could have in the future.
• Wie Pressefotos die Wirklichkeit manipulieren
  Italian photographer Ruben Salvadori shows the truth behind press photos (in German).

Nor are introverts necessarily shy. Shyness is the fear of social disapproval or humiliation, while introversion is a preference for environments that are not overstimulating. Shyness is inherently painful; introversion is not.

• The Cold Reading Technique
  A long and very informative article on cold reading.
• How Engineering the Human Body Could Combat Climate Change
  Interesting ideas that could spark very controversial ethical debates.
• Kit Kat!
  On the role of Kit Kat in the Japanse education system and why there are over 45 different versions of it in Japan.
• Cyborg snails power up
  I guess implanted biofuel cells could lead to controversial debates too.
• Kony 2012: the reaction
  The Guardian summarizes the various reactions to the Kony 2012 campaign.
• The Tau Manifesto
  Since Pi Day was celebrated during this week, it’s time for me to post the Tau Manifesto again. All hail the superior circle constant! ;-)
• Why the world needs introverts
  Articles like this one are important to us introverts (I’m an INTJ according to the Myers-Briggs personality test). It’s getting kinda tiring to explain that one can be open and sociable and still an introvert at the same time.
• Scientist creates lifelike cells out of metal
  This article on abiogenesis is a little older, but I finally got around to read it.
• Phänomen „Fakenger“
  Interesting article about the bike messenger subculture and copycats (in German).
• Australia’s ‘child labour camp’
  Run by Scientology.

To us, the Web is a sort of shared external memory. We do not have to remember unnecessary details: dates, sums, formulas, clauses, street names, detailed definitions. It is enough for us to have an abstract, the essence that is needed to process the information and relate it to others.

• We, the Web Kids
  While I’m probably a bit too old to qualify as a “web kid”, I agree with most of this post.
• The Unfinished
  This very long article on David Foster Wallace is not only interesting, but also serves as a reminder to myself to finally read Infinite Jest (affiliate link).
• Life With and Without Animated Ducks: The Future Is Gender Distributed
  Sexism shows in many ways, I hadn’t really considered this angle before.
• Craig Silverstein, Google’s first employee
  An interview with Google’s first employee. This is a bit older, but still interesting.
• Why Do Some People Learn Faster?
  Articles about the brain and/or learning make a regular appearance in this blog series, here we go for another one.
• Don’t hate the player: How fun and games can encourage sustainable choices
  I like the example encouragements shown in this article.
• Essen 2032: Da sagt der Kühlschrank etwas anderes
  One thing I like about articles trying to predict the future is imagining how naive they will look later (in German).
• BitTorrent Live: Cheap, Real-Time P2P Video Streaming That Will Kill TV
  In case you missed this last week.
• Leonard Cohen — Beautiful Loser
  A timeline of Leonard Cohen’s life.
• What Happens to the Coke in Coca-Cola?
  Coca-Cola is still made with coca leaves, but happens to the cocaine in them? Read this article to find out.

The future is not evenly distributed. Not along cultural lines, along language lines, along political, economic, class, or generational lines. And most certainly not along gender lines.

You could run an entire campaign if you’re Barack Obama with ads using nothing but Republicans saying things about finance that you’d never hear two months ago. It’s an amazing thing.

• Instinctive sleeping and resting postures
  Is it just me, or is there something weird about this article? It’s rather interesting either way…
• Meetings: Where Work Goes to Die
  I couldn’t agree more. Sometimes meetings are necessary, but please keep them short, to the point and clearly scoped.
• Groupthink — The brainstorming myth
  Several studies show that brainstorming doesn’t work, but there are other ways to unlock people’s creative potential.
• The End of Wall Street As They Knew It
  A very long article on post-crisis Wall Street.
• Google as Benevolent Dictator Yanks Apps
  A good summary of remote kill switches on smart phones and computers.
• How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did
  This is how much some companies track their customers. But don’t pay cash instead, you could be suspected of being a terrorist.
• The man who hears colour
  A British artist with a rare vision disorder wears a device that allows him to hear colors.
• Where The Buffalo Roamed
  How far can you get from a McDonald’s in the contiguous United States?
• How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy
  Are bacteria transmitted by cats messing with our brains? This one is a fascinating read.
• How Habits Hold Us
  On the importance of habits for humans.

As he pointed out, the intelligence of humans is inseparable from our reliance on habits, the most mindless of behaviors. That’s because they let us reserve brainpower for those things that can’t be predicted in advance, those situations without relevant cues.

In a nation that celebrates freedom of religion like no other, freedom not to be religious at all can be as hard to exercise as the right to swim the Atlantic.

• The magic number
  While I don’t share some of the author’s opinions, the new Indian identity scheme certainly could have a positive influence on many people’s lives.
• Atheism in America
  Interesting article about the lives of atheists in the United States. I’m afraid there are parts of Austria where it wouldn’t be too different.
• I can still see your actions on Google Maps over SSL
  A proof of concept for SSL traffic analyses/side channel-attacks, with an easy to understand video for your less security-aware friends.
• Government ‘may sanction nerve-agent use on rioters’, scientists fear
  Brave new world, UK style.
• The Man Who
  An article about Steven Moffat, writer of some of my favorite TV shows.
• Stalin’s Human-Ape Hybrids
  Skeptoid debunks the myth that Stalin tried to create an army of human-ape hybrids.
• A Happy, Flourishing City With No Advertising
  In 2006, the mayor of São Paulo banned all billboards and similar forms of advertising, in order to reduce “visual pollution”.
• The Gentle Art of Poverty
  This article from 1977 tells the story of an old man dealing with poverty in Southern California. An intense read, despite the bad copy editing.
• Wired Opinion: The Perpetual, Invisible Window Into Your Gmail Inbox
  Personally I regularly check all app permissions. I also have a Gmail label “Registrations” where I store signup mails and occasionally work through that and close/delete all accounts I don’t use regularly.
• “Ich empfand eine unbändige Wut”
  Interview with a former member of El Salvador’s guerilla movement, who was part of the first unit to discover the El Mozote massacre.

Doctor Who, for the uninitiated, is a show featuring an “eleven-hundred-and-three-year-old” alien who travels through space and time in a police box (called the TARDIS – Time and Relative Dimension in Space), fighting monsters and finding friends to take along with him, only ninety per cent of which have been very attractive women.

[T]oday’s strangeness, while only a few mouse-clicks away from anyone, becomes difficult to find because it has to occur to you to Google it. You may be able to Google everything, but the trick is figuring what you need to Google.

• Everything You Thought You Knew About Learning Is Wrong
  I like articles on learning, this one has a few good tips.
• An interview with William Gibson
  Title says it all.
• Netherlands makes net neutrality a law
  This is not the first sensible law the Netherlands pass.
• As Anonymous protests, Internet drowns in inaccurate anti-ACTA arguments
  If you are following the current ACTA debate (and you should be), this one is a must read.
• #Riot: Self-Organized, Hyper-Networked Revolts—Coming to a City Near You
  The second Wired article in this week’s issue, a very interesting piece on crowds, flash mobs and riots in connection with Social Media.
• Interview With A Ketamine Chemist
  Fascinating interview with the creator of some dissociative drugs.
• The Myth of Europe
  A very thorough and interesting take on the EU and European identity. I for one would be sad if the Union failed, because I really enjoy a Europe with almost no borders, the right to work and live in any of the 27 member states and so on. I don’t think that the level of centralization this has reached is the way to go though…
• To My Old Master
  A letter from a former slave to his old “master”.
• Four Difficult Questions Regarding Bullying and Youth Suicide
  Interesting questions for a necessary debate.
• You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You
  Despite the headline, this has been published by Forbes. BTW: I think the proposed “Movie Steam” is a fantastic idea and I’d love to use something like that.

The only other thing you could get the internet to agree on was if they tried to institute a ban on cat pictures.

This was a very good read! In each chapter the author introduces one bug he found in a popular software package, always following the same structure: discovery, exploitation, remediation, lessons learned from the bug and a timeline of the bug’s lifetime (disclosure, fix, etc).

The writing is engaging and to the point, but still contains a lot of technical detail. Be warned though, if reading C and disassembly is not your type of thing, you probably won’t enjoy this too much. The author tries hard to make everything as easy to understand as possible, but there’s only so much you can do with limited space.

If there’s anything to criticize about this book, it’s that the chapters are fairly repetitive, so I never really felt like reading more than one in a single sitting. But then it’s also not the type of book that needs to be read cover to cover as fast as possible.

Link: Tobias Klein: A Bug Hunter’s Diary (Amazon affiliate link)

• Die, Hollywood, die!
  A voice of reason in the “Kill Hollywood” discussion.
• The New French Hacker-Artist Underground
  The French group UX sneaks into places to restore them (or the art inside them). A fascinating read.
• Die Opfer von Niklaas und Perrine
  Granted, this article makes most sense if you were born in the 1970s (or early 1980s) and grew up in Austria, but I still wanted to include it here (in German).
• A tale of new censors - Vodafone UK, T-Mobile UK, O2 UK, and T-Mobile USA
  If you think only China and dictatorships in the Middle East censor the internet, think again.
• Public speaking for normal people
  Public speaking is a difficult topic for me. I like doing it, but tend to be rather nervous. Once I’m done I always feel like my talks were horrible, but feedback usually suggests they weren’t. This post has some interesting ideas which I’m eager to try out.
• An Investment Manager’s View on the Top 1%
  Seems like the “Occupy” movement should have adopted we are the 99.9% as a slogan.
• Information Security Interview Questions
  If you want to get into information security, you should read this article for a little self assessment.
• Mega-man: The fast, fabulous, fraudulent life of Megaupload’s Kim Dotcom
  Interesting portrait of Kim Dotcom, the man who’s all over the news again.
• Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split
  This mailing list post is an interesting bit of Unix trivia.
• How Much Is an Astronaut’s Life Worth?
  Some interesting points on a controversial topic.

We defeat SOPA today, only to face it again tomorrow. It’s like trying to stop a cold by blowing your nose. It’s time we go after the virus.

• Blue cabinet
  A project that wants “to name, shame and expose those who profit on selling the surveillance equipment that enables the intimidation, harassment and killing of innocent people”.
• Making Love To WebKit
  Acko.net always had awesome design, but his newest one is absolutely mindblowing.
• said the pot to the kettle
  This PDf subtitled “feminist theory for anarchist men” is a good read for everyone who’s interested in overcoming antiquated gender stereotypes, be they male or female.
• I hope SOPA passes
  Typical Maddox style.
• Behavioral economics and facebook conspiracy theories
  While the author talks about a conspiracy theory, I think it’s fair to assume that the big web companies do use behavioral psychology when trying to get us to click on ads.
• An Iran war is brewing from mutual ignorance and chronic miscalculation
  I still have the naive hope that war is evitable.
• US-Copyright-Cops greifen weltweit zu
  If you have German speaking friends who you want to educate about SOPA/PIPA, point them to this article by “Der Spiegel”.
• Paredit - emacs minor mode
  A neat presentation on Paredit, a great Emacs minor mode for Lisp hackers.
• In Which I Fix My Girlfriend’s Grandparents’ WIFI And Am Hailed As A Conquering Hero.
  We’ve all been there, but this is brilliantly told.
• People Are Awesome: The Coffee Shop Where Everyone Pays for Everyone Else’s Drinks
  It’s not often enough that I get to post something nice here.

As Reuters points out, diplomats are particularly upset by assassination plots against … diplomats.

• Twitter: The New Frontline In Global Cyber Jihad”
  I despise terminology like “cyber war” and “cyber jihad”, but the article is still rather interesting.
• Your body wasn’t built to last: a lesson from human mortality rates
  I’ve never heard of Gompertz’ law before, but it’s rather intriguing.
• A Murder in Tehran
  Being a scientist in Iran can be dangerous if you work in the “wrong” field.
• The Google-Kenya ripoff
  I can’t believe that Google would be this stupid, but I’ll keep an eye on this. Here’s the blog post by the company that raised the allegations.
• “The Zambezi Valley: China’s First Agricultural Colony?” Fiction or Fact?
  I don’t know all the research, but this seems like an interesting topic to investigate.
• Nicht Fisch! Nicht Fleisch!
  This article about the various problems related to meat consumption is 2 years old and at least as relevant today as it was back then (in German).
• Secrets from the city under siege
  Smuggled pictures from the Syrian city of Homs and an interesting article to go with them.
• TVShack’s student founder can be extradited to US, court rules
  Whatever became of protecting your citizens? If he broke UK law try him there.
• Why Did TSA Pat Down Kids, Adults Getting Off Train?
  Welcome to the police state. Terrorists win.
• The Rise of the New Groupthink
  I’m always in favor of pro-introvert artciles.

[I]ntroverts are comfortable working alone — and solitude is a catalyst to innovation.