Links to cool places or things.
There are 1,530 posts filed in Check It Out (this is page 90 of 153).
The City of Raleigh just created a video encouraging citizens to get involved with the upcoming System Planning project, where the Parks department will be creating a vision for our city’s parks for the next decades. It’s another one of the city’s dazzling videos about our wonderful parks. You can also catch a glimpse of me around the 56 second mark.
Find out more about the System Plan effort at the Your Parks Your Future website.
I signed up for Costco’s emailed specials a while back and decided today that I didn’t need them anymore. Mousing over the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the email didn’t seem to do anything so I decided to look at the message’s HTML to find out why.
It turns out Costco’s unsubscribe link isn’t a link at all, but is just made to look like one. Here is the code:
< p > In the past you provided Costco with your email address=C2=A0 [EMAIL REDACTED]. Occasionally, you will receive brief advertising ann=
ouncements regarding special items and services. If you no longer want to r=
eceive these advertisements, please click < a > < span style=3D"text-decoratio= n:underline;color:#069" >unsubscribe< /span >< /a >.=20
It’s a span, not a link. Here’s how it renders in Thunderbird:
There’s an “update email preferences” choice also in the email but, like the unsubscribe “link,” it isn’t real and doesn’t go anywhere, either.
I think Costco is a great company and I trust them. Still, I’m curious about why Costco felt the need to include fake links in their marketing email.
Sprinkler head cameras from UNC-Charlotte
There’s no telling what these hidden cameras were used for. Were they used to catch employee embezzlement? Damage to property? Academic fraud taking place? Oh, sorry. Wrong UNC.
It’s my opinion that spy stuff like this usually gets sold when something better has been acquired. I wonder what form the newest generation of secret cameras takes at UNC-Charlotte.
This, my friends, is an old-fashioned beatdown. After explaining to my kids tonight about the indefensible shooting of Malala Yousefzai I am feeling more protective than ever of women’s rights.
Don’t ever, ever, tell my daughter she isn’t as good as anyone else. Or my son, for that matter.
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard fearlessly scolded Opposition Leader Tony Abbott on Tuesday as he sat just six feet away over his record of “misogynistic and sexist” attacks on her.
Though Abbott pushed to have House Speaker Peter Slipper resign over crude text messages about female genitalia, Gillard still lashed out at Abbott during question time in the legislature, saying she would “not be lectured on sexism and misogyny by this man. … Not now, not ever.”
“If he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia he doesn’t need a motion in the House of Representatives, he needs a mirror,” the prime minister charged.
via Australian PM’s epic speech calls out opposition leader for ‘misogyny and sexism’ | The Raw Story.
Great article in the NY Times about an effort to get more geeks in Congress.
Ahem.
In American public life, researchers are largely absent. Trained to stick to the purity of the laboratory, they tend to avoid the sometimes irrational hurly-burly of politics.
For example, according to the Congressional Research Service, the technically trained among the 435 members of the House include one physicist, 22 people with medical training (including 2 psychologists and a veterinarian), a chemist, a microbiologist and 6 engineers.
via Groups Call for Scientists to Engage the Body Politic – NYTimes.com.
Here’s a video showing Mitt Romney apparently pulling something out of his pocket that looks for all the world like pre-written notes. Pre-written notes are not allowed by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which means that if this is what it appears Mitt Romney has been caught cheating.
Some have said that what he is pulling out is a handkerchief but if so it’s such a well-starched handkerchief that it bounces when it hits the podium.
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I meant to say something about this yesterday because it’s so chock full of awesomeness. Power grid giant ABB is donating $1 million to Marbles Kids Museum to build an interactive power grid play area for kids. When I told my kids about these plans this morning, their eyes lit up like a solar farm at full sun.
Bravo, ABB, and congratulations Marbles! (Oh, and hey ABB: we’d love to have you in downtown Raleigh, too!)
Global engineering firm ABB, which builds electricity grids and designs utility equipment, is donating $1 million to Marbles Kids Museum in downtown Raleigh to develop an interactive play area that will let tykes pretend they are operating wind farms and power plants and lighting up neighborhoods.
ABB officials said the donation symbolizes the Triangle’s emerging reputation as a national smart-grid hub known for attracting research, startups and federal grants. ABB, which employs 2,000 people in North Carolina, made the initial payment of $100,000 Wednesday. ABB will also contribute equipment, including motors, towers, cables, transformers and control systems.
The exhibit is scheduled to open to the public in 2014 and shows interest in downtown investment by a global conglomerate that does not have a downtown presence.
via ABB lights up Marbles with $1 million donation – Local/State – NewsObserver.com.
Here’s a video from the National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB) showing (in general terms) how thieves are stealing cars protected with high-tech transponder keys.
Incidentally, the NICB is one of the agencies investigating last week’s discovery of a “chop shop” in Durham. Many of these high-end vehicles get shipped to Middle Eastern countries, which makes me wonder if this is what the man arrested in the Durham case, Samer Othman, had in mind.
This N&O article yesterday got my attention. One of my neighbors installed the open-source Prey tracking software, after which his new MacBook Air laptop was stolen. He used the software to successfully recover his laptop:
While still on his honeymoon, Moss got an e-mail from his landlord. It appeared that his house had been burglarized.
That’s when he took matters into his own hands and tracked down his stolen laptop, using his iPad from his hotel on the small island of Aruba.
Prey software, available in both Mac or PC versions, is a web service that’s free for the first three items a user registers.
The software can detect the wireless network closest to the registered device, even if the user is not signed onto that network. Prey also uses webcam technology, if available, to capture images of the device’s location.
I use open-source software every day so I thought I would look into Prey. It seemed like cheap (free!) peace of mind. Then I read one person’s quick security audit of Prey, after which he began steering people away from it:
Prey is able to parse config files over the web and it blindly accepts them with no authentication whatsoever. This means if an attacker used trivial ARP spoofing attacks on a network, a coffee-shop’s wireless for example, s/he could replace your config file with their own. Worse, what is in your config file gets eval’ed by bash with full root privileges. Simply, this means the attacker can run any code s/he wants to. Your hard drive could be deleted, or a reverse SSH session could be set up giving the attacker a command prompt as root.
Granted, his post is over a year old but it does give me pause. I’ve downloaded a copy of Prey myself and will be looking into it myself this weekend. While I’d like to be able to track my laptop if it’s ever stolen, I don’t want my laptop exposed to a giant security hole for 99.99999999% of the rest of the time.
via Raleigh man uses GPS tracker to locate man who stole his laptop – Crime/Safety – NewsObserver.com.
This is a frightening, eye-opening look at the sham taking place with drug trials, where the sponsoring pharmaceutical company often cherry-picks the results.
Because researchers are free to bury any result they please, patients are exposed to harm on a staggering scale throughout the whole of medicine. Doctors can have no idea about the true effects of the treatments they give. Does this drug really work best, or have I simply been deprived of half the data? No one can tell. Is this expensive drug worth the money, or has the data simply been massaged? No one can tell. Will this drug kill patients? Is there any evidence that it’s dangerous? No one can tell. This is a bizarre situation to arise in medicine, a discipline in which everything is supposed to be based on evidence.
via The drugs don't work: a modern medical scandal | Ben Goldacre | Business | The Guardian.
