Category: On the Web

Shake, I’m Radioactive

It’s weird how I am more or less ambivalent about Cory Doctorow yet have posted enough of his musings here that I’ve considered adding a Cory Doctorow tag and re-tagging all the Cory-based posts.

If you haven’t read his latest musings on the Guardian on the topic of personal information gathering and unintended consequences, well, I think you might like it. Hence the link.

I Can Has Rezearch Papar?

There was a time back in the early 90’s when I’d sneak over to ESPN’s chat forum while I should have been typing a paper at the computer lab. The pure, unadulterated crapflood that I experienced there was fun because it was so diametrically opposed to the task before me. I never thought much about what was essentially a diversion. It certainly never felt like the beginnings of a cultural paradigm shift.

Yet the Web, and by extension the Internet, have become the subject of authentic and semi-authentic academic research. This is an example of the latter. Good in parts but overly simplistic (whether by virtue of expedience or experience is unclear) when taken as a whole. It does a nice job of relating what a meme is and how it describes vast swaths of Internet culture.

As for myself, I never really enjoyed LOLCATZ. In fact I still have no great appreciated of it. Yet ever since the LOLCATZ invasion of Metafilter I have occasionally dropped a “I CAN HAZ” in conversation. That isn’t to say that I find memes vulgar or puerile. As anyone who has been around me will attest, I plumbed the depths of All Your Base and O RLY.

Anyway, I digress. Enjoy the essay.

Public Service Announcement

I was a bit intrigued by a certain referrer in my log file who has been drifting at the bottom for the past week+ but suddenly shot up into the top 5 yesterday. The link ostensibly goes to http://tvsetmp3.com/ but gets redirected to http://ismymovies.com/. The page is constructed to look like it throws a system dialog box—if one were running XP in the default blue theme.

The dialog box asks you to download a codec to view the movie. The image is dressed up like a dialog box even going so far as to enabling you to drag it around. The ultimate clue being you cannot drag it outside the browser window’s boundaries. Clicking the “Cancel” area on the image map throws a Javascript dialog asking you to click “OK” to download the exe file. Clicking “Cancel” here throws another dialog that insists you click “OK” to download the exe file. Clicking “OK” brings you back to the previous “Click OK to download the codec” pop-up.

Clever. I never did go so far as to try to view the embedded Flash Video file underneath. I mean, it’s likely that there has to be a video file to cover the social engineering that just occurred if they did manage to get the fake codec installed on you machine. Still, they steer really hard to get you to the place where you download that putative codec.

Like I said. Clever. The social engineering continues to get better.