We discourage the use of special characters because hacking softwares can recognize them very easily.

The trick lies in the fact that keyloggers employ very low level OS calls. The keylogger sees everything, but it doesn’t understand what it sees. The browser also sees everything, but it doesn’t use everything that it sees: it does not know what to do with keys that are typed anywhere other than the text entry fields, and lets them fall on the floor. The keylogger has no easy way to determine which keys are used by the browser and which fall on the floor.

Between successive keys of the password we will enter random keys. The string that the keylogger receives will contain the password, but embedded in so much random junk that discovering it is infeasible. We are ex-ploiting the difficulty from the OS layer of determining how the GUI of an an application handles events.

Up until a few months ago I had the same reaction as most tech people on the subject of URL shorteners: they are messing with the Web and I wish they would die. Now I have a very different opinion. But first let me deal with the two common objections:

1. A URL shortener is an added point of failure. I wonder if people had a similar complaint back in the day when DNS started to become popular. When you add one more level of indirection you always add one more point of failure. I think it’s pretty likely that as the technology matures, the probability of failure will essentially vanish. We’ll see.

Linkrot in general used to be a big problem in the early days of the web, but doesn’t happen nearly as much anymore.

2. Short URLs hide information from users. If you’re building a consumer-centric website, the additional effort in expanding all the short urls is tiny, so I don’t see what the problem is here.

Now I get to the real point of this post: the one huge advantage of URL shorteners is that due to the extra layer of redirection, interesting things can happen at that layer, like publicly available click stats. Bit.ly already does this. Instant, public stats are going to be an incredible enabler of the real-time web. The significance seems to have gone more or less unnoticed so far, but I think it will become apparent in the months to come.

This issue has been popping up in different countries all over the world in the last few months. Most notably in China, of course, but also in India, France and Italy, where Google executives are in fact facing the possibility of jail time. See here and here.

The role of Internet middlemen in enforcing copyright was a key legal issue in the last decade. It appears that censorship will be the analogous issue for the next decade. We seem to have reached a relatively happy middle ground with copyright—middlemen have some responsibility, but a strong form of copyright protection has proved unenforceable, forcing many industries to innovate or die. We can hope that a similar thing will happen with censorship, with oppressive governments either collapsing or being forced to allow free speech.

• While the Internet has destroyed some middlemen (e.g., real estate agents), it has in fact created more middlemen.
• One reason there are more middlemen is that these middlemen can be stacked on on top of the other, as in the bit.ly example.
• Although Internet middlemen have haters both in the tech world and in the industries they replaced, I think middlemen are a good thing in general. They are good because they skim relatively little off the top, and because they can interface with each other in an automated way, without humans feeling the pain of dealing with multiple levels of middlemen.
• Needless to say, they also tend to be vastly more efficient and cheaper than the pre-Internet middlemen they replace. In some cases, they might even play a role in fundamentally reshaping society and making it freer.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/fm/bind?hl=en&fmcmd=80&
id=tFMKXV2J2J5xVFq9dRpRrfg.12613261761483303999.1726472472965475770
&VER=6&lsq=1262925136228000&tfe=jc_78&gsessionid=eFoiXLiGEmA&RID=rpc&
SID=D50CBF4594E07F04&CI=0&AID=24&TYPE=xmlhttp&zx=w6yldwukwptv&t=1

• The publisher gives you an advance, which might make it attractive to authors without a financial cushion.
• The publisher has an advertising budget to spend on your book.
• On the other hand, without a publisher, web-savvy authors would be better able to leverage social media to get the word out about their books.
• Amazon will probably start sharing more revenue with authors, making the self-publishing route even more attractive.
• On the other hand, publishers will probably increase royalties for Kindle sales, due to the same pressures.
• I've ignored the fact that you can self-publish on multiple platforms, although none are as yet competitive with the Kindle.

I don't think I'll ever take a print contract for less than $30,000 per book, because I'm confident I could make more money [with ebooks] over the course of six years than I could with a publisher over six years.

Isn't that bizarre?

For the bestselling author, this is all still very trivial. These numbers are chump change compared to the advances they get.

But for the midlist author, I'm beginning to think it's possible to make a living without print contracts.

I've struggled mightily to break into print. And I've made a nice chunk of change on my print novels.

Now I'm hoping those novels go out of print, so I can get my rights back.

I never would have guessed my mindset would change so dramatically in so short a time.

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     "http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&url="
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Anybody who has seen a documentary "knows" that lions hunt cooperatively to bring down prey. Unfortunately, nobody seems to have told the lions this. Indeed, for many years field biologists who study lions have realized that cooperative hunting is an illusion. ... So, how come the Discovery Channel says they are cooperative? Partly it is because these figures are buried in Appendix B of Shaller's book, or in dense academic papers. Mostly it is because the story of cooperative strategy in hunting is so endearing to people. Especially to film editors, which means we are destined to seeing cooperation in every nature documentary. The cases where the hunting fails due to lack of cooperation end up on the cutting room floor.

Watching lions hunt, the trends are quite obvious. The primary reason that groups of lions are no more effective than two by themselves is that typically only two lions do the actual hunting. They all make a show of hunting, but in the cases I watched, in several different prides, there were always a couple females that were the most aggressive and took the lead. The others hang back for the hard part then rush up at the end after the worst danger is over. Their primary goal is to be at the kill early so they can eat, not to actually help. Field studies have confirmed that lions do not seem to keep track of this and punish slackers.

Lions can seem quite inept at hunting, because they have no way to communicate complicated information. The Discovery Channel case happens when one lion flushes prey in past another for a perfect catch. More often, what happens is than one lion blows it and scares the game too early, or flushes it in the opposite direction. After watching hunt after hunt fail, you soon decide that lions are not very coordinated. Indeed their only saving grace is that the buffalo can't communicate very well either.

Lions don't wait to kill the animal before starting the process of eating it—as soon as the buffalo stops thrashing, lions start to eat. This is much harder than it sounds however, because the hide is very thick. The prime spot to start is always claimed by the dominant female, or if the male is there, he takes the prime spot. The prime spot is not what you might think—it is the rectum. Believe it or not, the king of beasts starts his dinner by carefully licking the rectum clean. Since the buffalo defecates while dying this is a bit messy. The lion then works very hard to gnaw through the skin and get an incision open.

Visits / month

Visits by browser: Jun 2009

• Write special-purpose code to import comments from Wordpress blogs. Currently the aggregator imports Blogger comments but not Wordpress, because the latter works in a different way. Blogger and wordpress cover the vast majority of the blogs, so that's all I really care about.
• Polish up the recent comments feature (see the Web 2.0 UI link above for a demo) and implement it on the main site.
• Import TOC-related tweets. I will use a special hash-tag, (#cstheory?) to import. This will be combined with either a blacklist or a whitelist of twitter users, in case anyone tries to abuse it.
• Set up a bunch of other aggregators.

We identified a 47 Kb interval containing an Alu insertion polymorphism (DXS225) and four microsatellites in complete linkage disequilibrium in a low recombination rate region of the long arm of the human X chromosome. This haplotype block was studied in 667 males from the HGDP-CEPH Human Genome Diversity Panel.