Here are a few more pics of me with Tinariwen musicians. I still have trouble believing I actually got to meet these musicians without traveling to the other side of the world to do it.
Tinariwen’s Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni and me
Bashing science has become popular with politicians lately. Yesterday I read Scientific American’s story bemoaning the beating that science has taken from some American politicians, many of whom have staked “anti-science” stances:
Yet despite its history and today’s unprecedented riches from science, the U.S. has begun to slip off of its science foundation. Indeed, in this election cycle, some 236 years after Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, several major party contenders for political office took positions that can only be described as “antiscience”: against evolution, human-induced climate change, vaccines, stem cell research, and more. A former Republican governor even warned that his own political party was in danger of becoming “the antiscience party.”
Americans are not the only ones science-bashing. Yesterday, an Italian court convicted seismic scientists of manslaughter for failing to predict an earthquake:
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I decided to delve a bit into the hacking underworld yesterday, wanting to learn more about how Facebook users could be signed up for pages they didn’t like. It turns out that a Google search for “facebook clickjacking” returns a lot of results.
I downloaded one clickjacking kit from a site called zarabyte.com and took a look. It includes this line in a file called like.js:
var thehairs = “< iframe id='theiframe' scrolling='no' frameBorder='0' allowTransparency='true' src='http://www.facebook.com/widgets/like.php?href=" + encodeURIComponent(fan_page_url) + "&layout=standard&show_faces=true&width=53&action=like&colorscheme=light&height=80' style='position:absolute;width:53px;height:23px;overflow:hidden;border:0;opacity:" + opacity +";filter:alpha(opacity=" + opacity * 100+ ");' >< /iframe >“;
Basically, it sneaks in an iframe on the page and kicks off the like.php script to “like” the desired page. There doesn’t appear to be anything magic about what this does. If the user is logged into Facebook (in another browser window, for instance), this script should register a like. Futhermore, that like should be logged in the Activity Log as any other like would be.
Based on this behavior, I’m pretty confident that these mysterious Romney Facebook likes aren’t being generated through clickjacking.
