Today is a better day than most to be Tor. Today’s Slashdot article about Tor, an onion anonymizing Internet protocol, made me giggle. The headline reads, “Tor - The Yin or the Yang?”
“Although Tor claims to improve safety and security, the article goes into detail on how Tor can be used as a anonymous attack platform.”
It’s all true, every last word.
Columbine survivor and friend of the killers and the killed gives his opinion on why violence in games is GOOD thing..
Well, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the fact that iTunes now supports multimedia annotation and playback of audio files. On one hand, it’s great to see excellent support for this kind of feature in a prime-time application. On the other hand they’ve gone and implemented something which is pretty much in the same space as the w3 spec, SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language). Why re-invent the wheel? Initial signs point to market protection of iTunes, AAC, iPods, and Garageband software. While this new format isn’t proprietary, it seems like big companies like Apple or MS are supporting alternative niche “open” formats, to create market protection. Sure it’s open, but did they really need to make another competing format? In this case, Apple just gave the middle finger to all current SMIL supporting media players.
If it weren’t bad enough that they created a competing format, they only allow the spec to work with their proprietary format, AAC. The Voxmedia Wiki, the most comprehensive source for how to implement AAC multimedia markup, states that Garageband/Podcast Chapter Tool is only compatible with AAC files. Apple’s decision to only support this markup in their player for AAC files fucking sucks. I’m really, really mad about this. I see no reason why the annotations can’t be applied to other file formats, as it should be the player’s job to associate the timestamp in the XML file with the position of audio playback.
Maybe I don’t get this. I hope I don’t, and if I don’t, someone please set me straight. But from where I’m sitting, this new development is a mixed blessing. It’s too bad that the functionality that podcasters have been desiring is caught up in this GarageBand/iTunes/AAC quasi-open format bullshit.
Found by way of Scoble.
Update: It looks like Simon is a bit miffed too.
This is probably the best application of Google Maps I’ve seen yet. Easily find and plot routes, complete with distances. Found by way of LifeHacker.
For example, this was my old running route.