Monkey Pwnz Dog

Monkey owning a dog

Further proof that the revolution is coming along nicely (YouTube link). First man’s-best-friend, then his ideology, we’ll get there eventually.

(seriously, it’s a sweet little video. via the best site on the internet)

Also, while you’re at it, you might as well watch this. It’s not part of the uprising but kittens pwn in their own little way.

Dude gets public urination ticket because police are hip to FaceBook.com

a cop checking out his myspace profileWoah

… Then the officer went to Facebook.com, a Web site where students can post profiles and leave messages for one another. Not only did Facebook help him identify Chiles, it also showed that Chiles and Gartner listed each other as friends, suggesting Gartner had lied to police.

There’s something pretty terrifying about police using sites like Facebook (which is like MySpace but focussed on specific educational institutions) to track down criminals, especially when it’s stuff on the scale of peeing in a bush on campus or telling some cops that you don’t know the name of that guy who was just peeing (they gave the urinators buddy a ticket for lying after they verified the friendship on FaceBook). Also, as the article points out, it’s kind of ridiculous that they’d expend so much effort just to give people tickets, which more than anything indicates that there were personal rather than legal motivations for all the background checking on such a stupidly lo-fi crime.

It also reminds me of the reason I never joined Facebook, they are exclusive enough that they only let you join if you have an email from your university (in my case it would be @alcor.concordia.ca) but that means that jerks like these cops or security guards from the school can log in using their work accounts and wreck everyone’s fun, while people like me (who never signed up for a university email account) just leave because it’s not worth the hassle. (Of course MySpace is no better, I’d imagine, as nothing could possibly be worse.)

As a fun bonus to this bit of Kafkaesque news you should probably check out this Daily Show piece (YouTube link) about MySpace which, if nothing else, points out the silliness of putting a lot of weight on the “friendships” exhibited in places like MySpace.

Defective by Design

Defective by design - photo by jeremy clarke

Apple products will always be second-best, not because anyone else is more creative or stylish, but because the best product is the one Apple developed before it was broken on purpose to stop you from doing things with it that Apple or its friends (i.e. RIAA, MPAA, BSA etc.) don’t want you to do. Whether it’s stopping you from using your iPod Shuffle with more than one computer ever (something I deal with constantly) or giving you “updates” to iTunes whose only purpose is to block useful plugins deemed innapropriate, Apple consistently chooses the imaginary needs of content producers over those of their own customers. They put blocks in your path on purpose, effectively rendering their products “defective by design” (the expression comes from an activist group fighting this and similar Digital Rights Management (DRM) mostrosities).

When it came time to choose a free engraving for the free Nano that came with my new laptop (I would never pay dollars for something so obviously broken on purpose) nothing else seemed appropriate. My favorite part is how natural the slogan looks printed on the back and how, if you stretch your imagination a bit, “Defective by Design” almost sounds like a legit Apple slogan (I mean, it’s at least as good as “Life is Random” right?)