UMaine NMDNet

“It’s not a focus on opening up restaurants… it’s re-purposing land, arable land.”  Not something you hear everyday from a restaurant proprietor.  

When the rich get richer in the digital sphere, there’s no real consequences… right?

Anil Dash of dashes.com offers up this provocative companion to NMDNet’s subheading,

Admittedly, it’s the “Steven King” in this story that caught my eye, this being a UMaine blog and all.  But beyond the fake name that isn’t the same spelling as Maine’s prolific author, this is a good resource for those interested in Internet non-security, On the off chance someone might defeat that first bastion of security, Cavion® employs another fool-proof barrier: JavaScript. Full text at http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Classic-WTF-Banking-So-Advanced.aspx.

I’m a big fan of the John Cage | Fluxus Happening | guerilla urban architecture mashup Frozen Grand Central. I’m also a fan of public transportation. So you can imagine my delight when I stepped off the metro at UCLA’s Westwood & La Conte and stumbled upon this:

Viewers from a range of disciplines will get a lot out of this 30-minute interview with writer and digital humanist Cheryl Ball.   Describing issues and concerns for new media education, Cheryl offers concrete solutions and examples from her work at Illinois State University and beyond. Writers Talk: Cheryl Ball (The UMaine community will recognize Cheryl; interview segments with her  were featured preminantly in Magic, a Without Borders installation put together by Still Water‘s John Bell, Vanessa Vobis, and Craig Dietrich.)

For the last year, when I log into FirstClass1, I get a box prompting me to change my password. Unfortunately, the application doesn’t accept my old password. The fix? Ignore it; hitting cancel closes the box and I’m on my way. Turns out this chagrin to system admins might not be so bad afterall. From a recent Microsoft Research2 study described by the Boston Globe: … redoing [passwords] is not an effective preventive step against online infiltration unless the cyber attacker (or evil colleague) who steals your sign-in sequence waits to employ it until after you’ve switched to a new one, Herley wrote. That’s about as likely as a crook lifting a house key and then waiting until the lock is changed before sticking it in the door. Important to note, the study’s primary consideration is the collective amount of time it takes employees to routinely change their passwords: “A lot of advice makes sense only if we think user time has no value,” [Cormac Herley] said. I’ll continue clicking cancel more than I type in a new password, though I would recommend staying on the course of having different passwords across multiple sites. Footnotes: 1 It would be semantically incorrect to link the FirstClass text above to Dear FirstClass, so I’ll do it here: Dear FirstClass. 2 Resisting the obvious pun…

For those that golf at Sunnyvale Municipal Golf Course in Silicon Valley this is old news, but an interesting discovery for the rest of us:  in the middle of the course are runway approach lights for the adjacent Moffett Field.

A high level programming language is one where a programmer doesn’t need to concern themselves with system-level operations such as memory management and code is generally re-usable across platforms.

Intermedia meets new media; performance meets documentation; from the archive: When Idols Die: An Ode to Robert Wilson http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0Nos8tDCPc

Maybe Chris Dodd will look into these fraud cases.  Or maybe he’ll blame the insurance companies. Or maybe he has other things on his mind. An iPhone insurance carrier says that four in six claims are suspicious, and is worse when a new model appears on the market. Full text at http://www.tomsguide.com/us/iPhone-Upgrade-Insurance-Hammer-Car,news-5845.html

This isn’t the first we’ve heard of this, but a very public instance: UCLA professors can no longer post videos on their educational media server.  Copyright refugees can find a home at Critical Commons, a resource developed by Steve Anderson and Holly Willis from cross-town USC for media-based teaching and research. The site promotes media uploads under fair-use with scholarly examinations of each work.

I’m not a Microsoft sympathiser, but I do think they’ve made a number of gains in the last year. Windows 7 has caught up with OS X (and even passed it: it’s fast and 64-bit, you can rotate images without attaching folder actions, and the taskbar now combines both the old Windows taskbar with behviors from OS X’s dock). And, Windows Live is an intruiging—if not yet completely useful—set of lightweight cloudware software, include Live Sync which can pass files between Windows to OS X computers.

Good Magazine’s GOOD.is alerts us to a grocer in London featuring no packaging — at all: “Within the beautifully designed shop, organic whole foods, dried fruit, nuts and seeds, herbs and spices, even refillable oils, vinegars and wines are all available to place straight into your own containers, that you will have brought along with you … if you haven’t then reusable bags are available.” More at http://www.good.is/post/london-s-unpackaged-grocery-shop-no-packaging-whatsoever

Thanks to J.S. in Los Angeles (by way of Maine) for the heads up on this fantastic addition to the XML family.  Tags include <brush>, <color>, and <dripVecRelativeToUp>

From VentureBeat, a reminder that TV’s trend towards the Internet goes both ways:

HASTAC.org is a wonderful resource for digital humanities. Including a number announcements and opportunities, the site features a vibrant community of scholars discussing critical and timely issues.

A recent announcement from HASTAC’s Fiona Barnett:

I’m writing with news of another amazing Scholar forum that just went live this morning. The focus for this forum is “Digital Storytelling.” Depending on the context in which it is invoked, the term “digital storytelling” can refer to a disparate range of practices, theories, and issues — from performance works staged in Second Life to questions about the implications of undocumented immigrants sharing their stories via cell phones. In this forum, Scholars reclaim digital storytelling’s richness of meaning via the work of a diverse group of scholars…