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Friday, December 19, 2008

Tech The Week in Geek

Posted by Anthony Hecht on Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 2:19 PM

The Week in Geek—The Stranger's semi-regular roundup of tech stories you've already read elsewhere—is back! For now!

Amazon on the Naughty List - Amazon warehouse workers penalized for being sick, made to work seven days a week, and pitted against each other in quota contests that penalize entire groups if any member fails to meet goals.

In other Amazon news, they apparently forgot about Christmas, as the Kindle has been out of stock for weeks and weeks, with no more expected until March or something. Smooth.

Apple/Jobs Abandon MacWorld, Nerds Cry Like Little Babies - Apple announces 2009 will be the last time they participate in MacWorld expo, and that Steve Jobs will not deliver the keynote address in January. Much Twitter-gnashing of teeth ensues, ineffectual protests are planned, and Apple zealots generally get really fucking annoying. IT'S A TRADE SHOW.

Suprise! - Internet Explorer, still the world's most popular browser, is still hopelessly riddled with security flaws. I was going to link to an item about the patch for the latest exploit, but if you're still using IE, you deserve to be hacked.

PWNAGE 3G! - The iPhone 3G is finally, really, probably, definitely unlocked by the official-sounding iPhone Dev Team. Exploit due to be released on Dec 31.

Go With the Flow - Flowcharts about flowcharts are all the rage these days.

RIAA Pretends to Be on Nice List, Actually Still Quite Naughty - After more than 35,000 lawsuits, and absolutely zero effect on decreasing album sales, the RIAA has announced that they will stop filing lawsuits against individual downloaders. Instead, they're going to pressure ISPs to adopt "3 strikes" policies against downloaders, thus eliminating all that pesky and expensive due process bother altogether.

I'm Stupid - And I know this because I've spent far too much time taking these addictive, self-esteem crushing Jaeggi-Buschkuehl n-back tests. I'm aces at 1-back, pretty good at 2-back, wildly inconsistent at 3-back, and a snivveling idiot at 4-back and above. It hurts my brain, my eyes, and my fucking heart. Damn you, Jaeggi-Buschkuehl!

Command of the Week:

ipfw add pipe 1 src-port http
ipfw pipe 1 config delay 200 bw 700kbits/s

Comments (8) RSS

Oldest First Unregistered On Registered On Add a comment

This is Geek circa 2003.

Tell me something new.

Tell me about WebSockets in HTML 5.

Posted by OOOO Geek Out! Geek, Le Chique on December 19, 2008 at 2:31 PM

and damn you, Tone!

Posted by fixo on December 19, 2008 at 2:35 PM

The iPhone 3G thing *is* really exciting. Perhaps that's why Jobs isn't going to Macworld--the exciting developments in Apple products are coming from the iphone dev team and not Apple...

...I did read all of this elsewhere already, however.

Posted by lusk on December 19, 2008 at 2:51 PM

Yeah, I can do 2 n-back really well, but 3 just completely does me in. I still like them, though - I use the musical notes instead of the voice and so I feel like I'm working on my sense of pitch as well.

Posted by wench on December 19, 2008 at 2:56 PM

In two sentences right next to each other, you condemn a popular product for having a security flaw and congratulatory towards a hacker group for finding a security flaw in another popular product.

Posted by StC on December 19, 2008 at 4:11 PM

Speaking of ineffectual protests, hardly a day goes by on Slog without some jackass proposing a boycott of a state or president-elect.

Posted by gillsans on December 19, 2008 at 4:19 PM

"if you're still using IE, you deserve to be hacked" hahahaha! So true - HOWEVER - many consumers of the MS kool-aid are so completely unsophisticated that they aren't even aware that browser alternates exist, let alone how to find and download one.

Posted by MarkyMark on December 19, 2008 at 10:35 PM

Jobs probably isn't delivering any keynotes because he's dying of pancreatic cancer. The company denies this to protect their stock prices because everybody knows from experience that Apple is going to suck without Jobs.

Posted by violet_dagrinder on December 20, 2008 at 9:38 AM