Nelson's Linkblog 2013-08

about • archive • mastodon • feed

Riot on player toxicity

Summary of a talk at GDC

2013-08-31 games • community • riotgames • lol • leagueoflegends

Klout are monsters

Digusting social media company tries to be flippant with MLK

2013-08-31 stupid • civilrights • klout • mlk

Dark Pattern examples

Screenshots of ways horrible sites try to trick users

2013-08-31 darkpatterns • ui • badtech • scam

Tim Bray on Persona

A thoughtful examination of Mozilla's login protocol by an expert Google employee

2013-08-31 google • microsoft • persona • login • identity

Catch up on Syria

Useful overview of the current situation

2013-08-30 politics • syria • tldr

2013 Black Budget

Snowden leaked the secret intelligence budget. That's a big one.

2013-08-29 snowden • nsa • surveillance • budget

Kim Jong-un's ex executed

insane story of North Korean drama, unchecked power

2013-08-29 northkorea • dprk • totalitarianism

Options to RSUs

A shift in equity compensation

2013-08-29 stock • options • startups

Culture clash between Internet generation and government service

2013-08-29 culture • demographics • via:metafilter • nsa • grimmeathookfuture

Deanonymizing BitCoin

Another way to analyze transaction records to discover identity

2013-08-28 bitcoin • anonymity • payments

Someone keeps hacking personal media for high profile government figures

2013-08-28 hacking • badtech

Earth's artificial ring

Insane 60s experiment; launch a bunch of chaff in orbit for communications

2013-08-27 via:metafilter • space • communications • satellites

Responsive maps With D3

Straightforward resizing SVG elements

2013-08-27 maps • d3 • responsive • resize • javascript • d3js

Stellar Fun Pass

Jason announces plans for his favorite-catching app

2013-08-27 kottke • favorites • web • twitter

An Emscripten port of the 2d physics library

2013-08-27 games • javascript • 2d • emscripten

Box2D for Javascript

Series of blog posts describing the physics engine for Javascript

2013-08-27 games • javascript • html5 • physics • box2d

History of Null Island

Details of the digital cartographer's favorite tropical vacation spot

2013-08-27 nullisland • geo • maps • funny

4k of Soviet RAM

For sale; a cube of ferrite core memory

2013-08-27 memory • russia • ussr • history • computers • core

Is ChromeCast open?

Bad news from early hackers

2013-08-26 google • open • chromecast • media • tv • via:hackernews

Collection of the Snowden leaks and related documents

2013-08-26 nsa • surveillance • snowden

Share beautiful aerial photos taken from UAVs

2013-08-25 drones • photography • aerial

Glen Park history

Nice details of one of San Francisco's oddest neighborhoods

2013-08-25 sanfrancisco • history • glenpark

My Little Resume

Awesome resume channels Brony culture

2013-08-24 mylittlepony • resume • via:reddit • bronies

The Pitcairn Miscellany

Newsletter of the tiny island community

2013-08-24 pitcairn • newspaper • journalism

Corey Feldman's birthday party

Crazy candid photos

2013-08-23 coreyfeldman • birthday • party

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Reddit user posts random numbers; crypto? mental illness?

2013-08-23 strange • weird • reddit • crypto

Strange Snowden twist

Are US/UK counterleaking?

2013-08-23 surveillance • snowden • nsa

More on SourceForge sleaze

Details of the sideloading

2013-08-23 sourceforge • badtech • malware • opensource • via:hackernews

SourceForge drive-by installs

Former open source company stoops to the worst of sleaze. Time to leave.

2013-08-23 sourceforge • malware • badtech • opensource • via:hackernews

US rivers by flow

Line widths vary based on how much water there is

2013-08-22 maps • rivers • america • water • hydropgraphy

Gigapixel photo crops

How do you appreciate a giant photo? Look at little bits of it.

2013-08-22 photography • tokyo • gigapixel • art

NSA's illegal spying activity is the newest hot startup!

2013-08-22 internet • nsa • privacy • surveillance • funny

TopoJSON implementation in python

2013-08-21 python • topojson • geojson • maps • gis

Saints Row IV characters

Community-created avatars using the great in game customization system

2013-08-21 games • saintsrowiv • saintsrow • avatar

Visual artist, interesting abstract geometrics

2013-08-21 art • design

Stalin's Rope Roads

Rusting Soviet tramways in a manganese mining town

2013-08-21 russia • sovietunion • tramway • transportation

League of Legends hacked

They have some 30M accounts, many paying customers

2013-08-20 hacks • passwords • badtech

SOMA StrEat Food Park

SF tries to do food pods a la Portland

2013-08-20 food • foodtrucks • restaurants • sanfrancisco

Bob Marley (metal)

Amazing mashup of metal guitar and Marley vocals

2013-08-20 via:Waxy • music • bobmarley • mashup

A global dataset of rivers and watersheds

2013-08-19 maps • rivers • nhd • hydrology • geo

Double Robotics

Stick an iPad on top of a Segway = telepresence

2013-08-19 robotics • telepresence • robot • ipad • ssegway

About Flowers in the Attic

Fantastic story from the editor who discovered the great, trashy VC Andrews novel

2013-08-19 books • vcandrews • via:metafilter

Greenwald's partner harassed

The partner of the journalist covering NSA for the Guardian got detained in London

2013-08-18 civilrights • nsa • snowden • greenwald

History of Cesar Chavez St

Details of one of San Francisco's ugliest streets

2013-08-18 streets • transportation • sanfrancisco • history • roads • armystreet

507 Mechanical Movements

Nice illustrations of machines

2013-08-17 via:hackernews • machines • engineering • work

Marissa Meyer profile

Interesting mix of femininity and hard core tech leadership

2013-08-17 feminism • women • yahoo • google

Twitter scaling

Details on how they've built to handle so much real time traffic

2013-08-17 twitter • performance • scalability • raffi

Mary Worth’s Howl

Amazing 50s comic/poem mashup

2013-08-16 funny • ginsburg • howl • maryworth • comics

Unusual photography museum

2013-08-16 sanfrancisco • pier24 • museum • art

Making Missile Command

Excellent article on one of the arcade classics

2013-08-15 games • atari • theurer

The Modern Moloch

Great podcast on how cars took over the streets from pedestrians in the 20s @enf @karlanderson

2013-08-14 cars • jaywalking • pedestrians • streets • history • 1920s

Silk Road operator

Great interview with Dread Pirate Roberts, leader of the Internet's black market

2013-08-14 drugs • bitcoin • silkroad • tor • privacy

DoD marriage benefits

Completely decent policy, including right to go to a state that reecognizes gay marriage

2013-08-14 civilrights • gaymarriage • military • dod • marriage • gay

New workplace tool from @stewart, evolution of the Tiny Speck company

2013-08-14 glitch • flickr • stewartbutterfield • productivity • collaboration

Amazing fossil web site design, but still updated with new content!

2013-08-14 web • design • funny • superballs

Geocoding and ODBL

Legal issues of a viral database licene

2013-08-13 osm • openstreetmap • gpl • licensing • odbl • mapbox

Juno trajectory design

How NASA designed the spaceflight to Jupiter

2013-08-13 juno • jupiter • space • kerbalspaceprogram

Juno trajectory

Crazy orbital slingshot

2013-08-13 space • juno • kerbalspaceprogram • jupiter

Phone batteries measure the weather

Wouldn't have guessed this would work without seeing the data

2013-08-13 mobile • batteries • temperature • via:hackernews

Android is better

A detailed, thoughtul, only mildly-flamebait review

2013-08-13 android • google • apple

Reporting Snowden

Detailed profile of Laura Poitras, one of the reporters Snowden contacted

2013-08-13 snowden • nsa • prism • poitras • journalism

crazy little subgenre of spam

2013-08-12 spam • whois • badtech • via:stevej

Etsy's ops folks answer questions on Reddit. It's good

2013-08-12 reddit • etsy • ops • devops • engineering

Extinct breed of work dog

2013-08-12 via:metafilter • dogs • breeding • history • work

Take a picture of the programmer with every git commit

2013-08-12 funny • git • via:hackernews

Chromecast Teardown

Not much inside, but it seems to work

2013-08-11 chromecast • hardware • video • google

Broken mobile sites

Great screenshot examples of how broken the Financial Times is

2013-08-11 newspaper • journalism • iphone • mobile • badtech • stupid

FISA vs Lavabit

Details on how the US government can shut down privacy services on the Internet

2013-08-11 privacy • surveillance • snowden • nsa • lavabit • encryption • email

Paul Ford on Facebook

Indictment of the social media company masquerading as a review of Facebook Home

2013-08-10 facebook • socialmedia • computers • culture

Bubb Rubb [facebook]

Famous whistle tip guy is on Facebook

2013-08-10 facebook • meme • whistletip • bubbrubb

Horse e-Posters

Lovely posters of bizarro Twitter account @horse_ebooks

2013-08-10 horseebooks • twitter • design • poster

Apple E-Book Price Fixing

roundup of articles describing Apple's illegal market manipulation

2013-08-10 ebooks • kindle • apple • antitrust • law

109P/Swift-Tuttle orbit

Parent of the Perseid meteor shower. Nice simple use of WebGL

2013-08-10 astronomy • comets • perseids • webgl

Store map tiles in local browser storage

2013-08-09 maps • leaflet • offline • via:bobws

Unused CA certs

Etsy's office looks at what SSL certificates they really need

2013-08-09 ssl • security

XKeyscore details

Some information on NSA's illegal Internet surveillance

2013-08-09 snowden • nsa • surveillance • xkeyscore

Portland: Age of a City

Lovely map of all the buildings in Portland Oregon, colored by age

2013-08-09 pdx • portland • maps • buildings • mapbox • tilemill

NSA spies on US emails

Yet more evidence of illegal surveillance

2013-08-09 civilrights • nsa • snowden • fourthamendment

Myhrvold answers questions

Interview with the notorious patent troll

2013-08-08 patents • myhrvold • intellectualventures • lodsys

On the Lodsys settlement

Marco calls out Nathan Myhrvold and the patent troll firm Intellectual Ventures

2013-08-08 intellectualventures • iv • patents • lodsys • law

Mozilla Persona supports Gmail

Use Persona to log in with your Google credentials

2013-08-08 login • openid • persona • passwords

Origins of MOBA games

History of how we got to DotA 2, League of Legends, etc

2013-08-08 games • mobas • dota • lol

Staying friends with parents with kids

Sensible tips on staying friends with folks when they have kids

2013-08-08 friends • social • children

David Byrne tours kink.com

Interesting little report from a porn studio

2013-08-07 kink • porn • sex • davidbyrne • via:timbray

Research group approaching urban design from a quantitative approach /cc @enf

2013-08-07 urbanplanning • design • gis • maps

Hausmann's effect on Paris

Interesting road network analysis /cc @enf

2013-08-07 roads • paris • urbanplanning • hausmann

Stephen Fry on Russian facism

Excellent editorial about why the Sochi Olympics are a mistake

2013-08-07 gays • civilrights • russia • olympics

Against federated login

@timbray collects objections to OpenID, etc for logins

2013-08-07 openid • personal • login • passwords • google

reddit myth busters

Overview of the corporate structure, goals, profitability

2013-08-07 startups • reddit • finances

Readable overview of a fundamental design problem in the Internet

2013-08-07 internet • routing • badtech • bgp

Solar system cartography

Conventions for defining latitude and longitude on various planets, moons, etc

2013-08-06 maps • space • astronomy • cartography • geodesy

Nice explanation of the ad program

2013-08-05 twitter • ads

The World as Free-Fire Zone

Excellent overview of the state of drone warfare by the US

2013-08-05 drones • assassination • war • warcrimes

A simple "find my device" tag

2013-08-05 via:iamcal • bluetooth • rfid • internetofthings

New OSM render stack

Major milestone for OpenStreetMap; clears the way for better design

2013-08-05 maps • cartography • design • mapnik • carto • cartocss • osm • openstreetmap

Flintstones / Virginia Woolf

An alternate reading of Albee's play

2013-08-04 funny • cartoons • flintstones

The fall of World of Warcraft

Latest MMOData update shows Blizzard's game has fallen from 12M to 7M subscriptions

2013-08-04 games • warcraft • wow • blizzard • mmos

Tor site zero day

Site busted for alleged child porn; a Firefox exploit shows up on it same day

2013-08-04 security • fbi • badtech • firefox • javascript

China hacking US water plants

Notorious Chinese hacking group, probably Army, caught in a honeypot and counter-hacked

2013-08-03 espionage • china • cyberwar • security • via:hackernews

Michele Catalano is my friend

Lovely musings from @mat about the news cycle of an online story

2013-08-02 news • journalism • culture

We Think He Might Be a Boy

Lovely story of a family's transgender child

2013-08-01 gender • children • queer • via:metafilter

Floatsam floating point serialization

Base 94 encoding of floating point numbers in binary

2013-08-01 numbers • serialization • efficiency • javascript • via:hackernews

FBI visit for Googling

Insane story of surveillance culture

2013-08-01 fbi • google • civilrights