Linkfest

There's a book, whose title/author lamentably escape me at the moment, which is full of photographs of miniature people/figurines in urban settings. Clearly inspired by that, here's some more photos of tiny people, and here's a video.

I'm a bit late with the giant squid swarming off the coast of San Diego, but rather squid than flesh-eating robots, if you ask me (although, to be fair, the inventors do state that the machines are vegetarian. Honest).

Wired picked up on the general 40th Anniversary of the Moon Landings vibe with an article on how Bush-era plans for manned space flights to the moon and beyond are still active under the Obama administration. Personally I think we should forget about the moon, and move on to Mars - getting to the former doesn't really help us, logistically, in reaching the latter (although obviously it does contribute on the technology side).

The Register noted that Amazon came in for a lot of flak for deleting George Orwell's 1984 from people's Kindles. Whilst it was exceedingly shoddy to sell material that they didn't hold the rights to, to then just dive into people's machines and remove the offending material (albeit crediting people's accounts with a refund) is a little... Big Brother-ish, if you ask me. Which is all somewhat ironic, given the particular book concerned.

Rather frustratingly with eReaders and eBooks, VAT is chargeable on eBooks, but not on their physical manifestation. Which means you get the rather crazy situation that you pay more to buy a (current) novel in eBook format than the old-tech dead-tree incarnation - £12 for Robin Hobb's Dragon Keeper in hardback vs £16 for the same thing in virtual format.

Local news, now, from The Register, and I read that our local ISP, who, uniquely in the UK, hold a monopoly in telecommunications within the city, are cutting off P2P users. This is an issue for us users in Hull because Karoo have an effective monopoly on connectivity, but it's also worryingly precedent setting... (am tempted to download some Linux distros via P2P now, just to pick a fight...)

The Times had a story about how a teenager convinced airport authorities that he owned his own airline. It sounds like it was quite an involved scheme, with the kid concerned playing three different roles (via telephone), and entering into contract negotiations with Jersey airport. Bizarre.

The Grauniad had a rather curious story about a speeding nun in Italy. She was caught at 112mph, apparently en route to The Pope's side following a fall (on his part)... What's most amusing about the story is that the Italians have a lawyer who specialises in minimising the consequences of ecclesiastical mis-steps...

Moving at a slightly gentler pace, watch this cloud video. If that's too genteel, here's the Eiffel tower in a thunderstorm.

Awesome photo-style portraits, massive in scale, drawn using biros. And whilst we're on huge-scale works of art, here's a matchstick model of an oil rig, comprising 4 million matchsticks...

Blogger mdelsaur posted about Apple's escalating lock-down of iPods and iTunes, trying to prevent 3rd party applications syncing with iPods, and 3rd party devices syncing with iTunes (most notably the Palm Pre). I sync my Shuffle under Ubuntu using Banshee, and it works fine, but had it been a more significant investment than £31, I might not have risked an iPod, given that I wasn't certain that it'd work with Linux...

According to The Torygraph, Top Gear are planning to recreate the Mini car-chase through the sewer from The Italian Job... in Belfast. Could be awesome, although I do wonder if the current Minis aren't too big for this kind of thing.

The Telegraph also has this list of the top 1,000 polluting postcodes. A friend of mine used to live at the 39th in the list, and I am not surprised...

Here's a Telegraph photo gallery of Mexican drug lords' ill-gotten (and subsequently confiscated) gains. The same paper continues on its crop circle kick with news about how a farm hand was arrested for shooting at crop circle fans... So y'all have been warned, ya hear?

Finally, TechCrunch posted their anatomy of the Twitter Hack. It's a rather long article, but the crucial weak link in the chain was this: one of Twitter's employees had set up a no-longer used hotmail address as their secondary email for GMail. This is the address that GMail send your password to if you forget it. However, in this case, the Hotmail email hadn't been used for however long, which meant that the address got recycled. The hacker, then, set up a new hotmail account (guessing that they'd have used the same username for both) with the target email address, then went to the target GMail account to request a password reminder be sent. This duly arrived, and then it was a simple matter of scanning through all the Bulletin Board and website registration details in the GMail account to find the user's 'standard set of passwords'. Interesting stuff, and definitely worth a read if you have a (longish) moment.