The Number

Wow! The Internet is going crazy about some random number (and it's not 23). Apparently, typing out an hexadecimal value will get you killed / deleted / censored / jailed / destroyed / raped / ignored / access to HD-DVD content. It goes something like: 09 F9 11 02. But it also has 9D 74 E3 5B in it. Maybe D8 41 56 somewhere too. C5 63 56 may or may not have something to do with it. I will give away that it ends with 88 C0 tho. Digg is going nuts. Moderators are constantly deleting any article about this number. They are even deleting irrelevant posts to cover up their censoring tracks. However, they seem to forget that this is the Internet.

Articles about The Number (growing):

• Spread this number now. Article is deleted!
  Mirror here. Picture here and here.
  
• Slashdot does not censor the number. Thank you!
• Censorship 5. 70 diggs in 7 minutes!
• Wikipedia censors the number. You cannot create the page anymore.
• Free binary translation.
• May 1st: the day Digg died. (User got deleted.) lnxaddct made a nice remark:
  

  Is this a violation of the DMCA too?
  
  MDkgRjkgMTEgMDIgOUQgNzQgRTMgNUIgRDggNDEgNTYgQzUgNjMgNTYgODggQzA=n
  
  hint: In python, "text".decode("base64")

• Digg losing control of their site. With article.
• The number.
• Cowards.
• Freedom of speech.
• Digg is dugg.
  
• And it's growing every second...

Another article on rudd-o.

Also: Google is full with the stuff.

February 13th! Wired blog posts the key.

Reddit also seems to have no problem with the key.

Explanation about the key at Doom9.

igul222 also has a nice list about the number.

Let's see how this ends. I wonder how Mr. Rose will talk his way out of this. He'll probably will.

Update: this just in. Told ya :).

A Linkdump

Here are some links I found to be interesting the past few days:

• Google acquires YouTube. This didn't exactly came as a surprise.
• "Insults - they just don't make them as they used to" - via Reluctant Nomad, a great post with - indeed - some great "insults". For example:
  "He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts...for support rather than illumination." -- Andrew Lang
• "How to create professional HDR images" - via Backing Winds.
• No silver bullet, by Brooks. I had to read this last year in an "informatics" class and saw it mentioned on Delicious. It still is a good read.
• 10 Windows Explorer alternatives compared and reviewed. I know that a lot of people I know love Total Commander.
• Hacking Web 2.0 applications with Firefox.
• Lifehacker special: Practice your personal Kaizen.
• The 7 worst fonts. I fully agree. Especially with number one.
• Kevin Tiell photographs pinball games.
• Social bookmarking icons. So that's where you found them! A great list.
• Have some fun with these Unicode block elements. Or even better: use this.
• A Javascript web spider...
• 3 easy steps to avoid Javascript memory leaks.
• Adventures in Javascript testing.
• Lazarus review. (Also: an Ubuntu .deb of Lazarus in multi/uni-verse would be really nice... pretty please?)
• How the immune system avoids attacking itself.
• Software startup myths debunked.
• Samsung is doing very well these days and is about to release a 10 Megapixel phone.
• Free classical music.
• The top 100 NES games - ever.
• A woman drawn from inside out. A well-done animation.
• 10 techniques to get more comments on your blog.
• What happens if you stop smoking now?
• Warhammer RPG article (in German).
• Original Transformers movie, with original adverts too.
• Google Docs & Spreadsheets launches, completing the integration between Writely and Spreadsheets. A few days before, I was wondering when this would happen.

Enjoy, I'm out. Stay tuned for more posts.

Via Digg: Cool Spyware Video

This just made the frontpage and is just too 'awesome' to miss. A video of a Windows installation becoming infected with spyware. Remember: update often, update early, or/and use Firefox/Opera.

Grinding Windows (To A Halt?)

Some of you have probably read this post on Digg. Someone apperantly made a video about Edgy Eft running 40 processes without crashing.

Some people basically replied "Windows [and Linux] can do this for ages!" or like "This is really neat!".

It is really cool though that the Ubuntu team has managed to quickly open Openoffice (around 3 seconds now), I am really looking forward to see that running on my laptop.

However, I wanted to prove that Windows will also not crash when doing this (not a recent version that is). So here it is: my video response, using the following amazing batch script:

:loopit
start sol
start mspaint
start calc
start notepad
goto loopit

It's the loop of doom! Sorry for the bad quality, but it's better than YouTube. When I close the command line window, Windows was running around 140 instances of Notepad
, Paint, Solitaire and Calculator each (screenshots maybe later). However: during all this, it did slow down, but is was still quite manageable afterwards. I had to stop the loop because Paint was starting to spit out error messages (as you can see in the video).

Then, I closed the four groups from the taskbar. Windows seems to have a bug here: it doesn't close all programs and some had to be closed manually (ah the fun!).

On which system was all this done: on my main Desktop/beast machine: two Opterons and 4GB of RAM, so I agree that this is in fact not really fair towards that first Linux-video, but it was a fun thing to do (I was surprised that Camtasia could survive the heavy load).

In conclusion: I do not want to flame Ubuntu or Linux in general (I am running it myself so...), but running 40 processes at once is not such a formidable feat. Also: Windows is more stable than Mac/Linux/Whatever-zealots tend to believe[1].

A, those lazy Sundays...

[1]: Except for Windows 3.1. And 95. And 98. 98SE too, a little. And ME. Especially ME. Stay away from ME... 2000 might work I think. Windows XP 32 bit too (I was running 64bit). And 2003 probably too.