Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

Wiretaps in U.S. Jump 19% in 2004

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the num­ber of court-authorized phone taps in the U.S. rose by 19% in 2004.

Authorities made 1710 applic­a­tions for taps, and 1710 applic­a­tions were approved (that’s 100%). And that fig­ure does not include terrorism-related taps, which reached a record 1,754 last year. From the article:

“Between 1994 and 2004, the num­ber of wiretap author­iz­a­tions have increased 48 per­cent, accord­ing to the report. In 2004, New York repor­ted 347 wiretaps, California 180, New Jersey 144, and Florida 72 author­iz­a­tions. While judges author­ized more wiretaps, the aver­age length of time in which a wiretap could occur decreased in 2004 from 44 to 43 days.”

MSN Search Biased Towards IIS Servers

Yesterday’s Slashdot morsel entitled “MSN Search Engine Favors IIS” doesn’t really come as a sur­prise. Ivor Hewitt found that search res­ults on the new MSN Search favour res­ults from sites run­ning on Microsoft’s IIS server.

His research shows as much as a 10% bias in res­ults, using thou­sands of quer­ies made up of ran­dom words, though he admits the bias may be down to MSN developers’ famili­ar­ity with cod­ing applic­a­tions that talk to IIS servers.

Hard Drive Cooling for 10¢ (~5p)

Have prob­lem with inef­fi­cient fan cool­ing for hard drives? No? Well read on any­way. A Slashdot art­icle appeared earlier in the week detail­ing a novel method of hard drive cool­ing for only 10¢ per drive (about 5p).

Instead of using case fans to blow air across the drives, the author uses a stand­ard right-angle bracket to mount a stand­ard 80mm fan to blow air straight at the under­side of the drive, appar­ently achiev­ing 10°-15° drops in tem­per­at­ure. Tricky in tight cases, but a handy trick nonetheless.

BigglesZX Pr0n Aggregator

Yesterday I released my latest cre­ation on the world — a set of PHP scripts that make view­ing large sets of remote images on the web that bit easier. And for all you “Dad, the printer has run out of red ink again” porn addicts, this might just make your web exper­i­ence that bit easier.

The BigglesZX Pr0n Aggregator is a pair of scripts, dubbed “Grabber” and “Grepper”. The “Grepper” part is the sim­pler half — feed it a web site address and it will attempt to extract all image links from the page it finds, and dis­play the images to you. This is par­tic­u­larly use­ful for “open dir” sites — ones that allow the con­tents of dir­ect­or­ies to be lis­ted. Feed the script the address of an open image dir, and behold the images dis­played for your view­ing pleasure.

The “Grabber” part is a little more com­plex. Say you come across an image with a URL like http://www.site.com/images/img1.jpg but the dir­ect­ory does not allow its con­tents to be lis­ted. You know there are other images (help­fully numbered upwards to, say, 20) but you don’t want to go through the effort of typ­ing each address to view them. Well, look no further!

Simply enter the dir­ect­ory address, (using our example) http://www.site.com/images/ in the URL box, a num­ber range of 1 to 20 in the num­ber range boxes, a pre­fix of img and a suf­fix of .jpg . Hit the but­ton, and the images should be dis­played for you, as if by magic.

Let me know how you get on. If you come across any errors, or have sug­ges­tions for improve­ments, let me know.

MPAA Under Investigation Over Illegal Payoffs

The New York Post is report­ing that two NYPD officers from the Staten Island Task Force are being invest­ig­ated for allegedly receiv­ing illegal pay­offs from the MPAA, fol­low­ing suc­cess­ful busts of sellers of pir­ated DVDs.

It is alleged that invest­ig­at­ive agents of the MPAA, the film industry car­tel respons­ible for the recent shut­ting down of sev­eral BitTorrent tracker sites, would tip off the NYPD about loc­a­tions where pir­ated DVDs were being sold, and would then, once the raids had occurred, pay gra­tu­it­ies to the officers involved, amount­ing to some hun­dreds of dol­lars. The MPAA denies the allegations.

“We don’t give cash to police officers,” said Bill Shannon, an MPAA anti-piracy official.