web-culture

Today a friend and I decided to do some digging and see how far back we could find references to ourselves on the Internet

I found a few good ones:

• 1997 - Posting to a Laser class mailing list (Google cache) - an archive of a mailing list I used to be on.
• 1998 - floach.pimpin.net - a WayBackMachine snapshot of a Windows “shell replacement” news site I was a co-maintainer of for a few years.

I only wish I could remember the URL’s of my old webpages so I could look them up.

Well, my trip to Las Vegas was successful. Although I didn’t cover the cost of my trip with my gambling winnings (the only gambling I did was playing slots for free beer), I did have a kick ass time.

Instead of doing the tourist thing with the girls, a few of us snuck off to Defcon 12, the annual (and controversial) computer security convention. Some of the highlights included:

• Vendor ads via 802.11b
• The Shmoo Group’s Sniper Yagi and WiFi Bug
• BlueSnarfing and BlueBugging
• Dan Kaminsky doing shots during his TCP/IP Black Ops talk (and unveiling Voice over DNS)

Amazingly, both my laptop and I survived the whole affair. I connected to the warzone that is the Defcon network without being cracked or landing on the Wall of Sheep. However, I did get portscanned at least 4 times and somebody even attempted to crack me via Bluetooth. I’d like to thank SSH and iptables for keeping me safely encrypted and happily firewalled.

I’ve got a whole bunch of notes I took down in a wiki while I was at the convention. I’ll get them up as soon as possible.

James Byers, a sailing friend of mine who also happens to be quite the successful techie, tipped me off to his new startup project: WhoAt.

Yes… it is in fact YASNP (Yet-Another-Social-Networking-Project). But this one has an interesting twist that might make it pretty cool… it’s location aware.

So the theory is that when you hit the coffee shop with your PowerBook (or ThinkPad), you can let the network know where you are and it will alert you to possible new friends in your vicinity. You can then learn more about them or send them messages. You can also use the service from your mobile phone using SMS or a WAP browser (the phone interface is very simple, I was impressed).

Right now the service only covers NYC and San Francisco, but James said he’d be adding San Jose to the list within a week or so.

Update: Be sure to check out my profile, and if you for some reason want an invite (instead of signing up on your own), leave a comment.

If you’ve been watching Blogdex over the last few months, you’ve probably noticed that one person always seems to be ranked very highly. “Hot Abercrombie Chick”, aka Amanda Doerty.

However, according to overstated.net:

Just received an inside tip that the recently famous Hot Abercrombie Chick is really a male college student capitalizing on cute pictures of his girlfriend (previously unbeknownst to her) in a rush of “beggars” trackbacks. In retrospect, it’s pretty obvious that he is quite the player. Over the course of the last couple of months, “Mr. Abercrombie” has played every text-book trick for raising his popularity on the blogosphere.

Hah! I knew it. She was too good to be true. And nobody that hot sits in front of a computer doing nothing but commenting (often tastefully and correctly) on other peoples blogs.

And some people seem to be trying to fight back…

Update: Aw, what the hell. I’ll join the blogdex slam campaign against her: Comment Spamming Bitch Riding High On Blogdex!

Clay Wood, an alumni from Eta Kappa Nu, was cool enough to hook me (and a bunch of other Michigan EECS kids) up with invitations to Google’s new (and controversial) “GMail” service.

As an experiment, I’ll be forwarding all my mail there and be using it as my primary email client. I’ll blog about my experience for those people that haven’t been lucky enough to get an account. Note the new “GMail” category on the right.

So far, it looks very cool.