Mr. Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired, who gives 50 speeches a year for an estimated $35,000 to $50,000 apiece (up to 2 and a half million dollars just for speeches) promoting big ideas, writes best-selling books such as “The Long Tail” has yet to come up with one big enough to save Wired's business. According to today's NYT article:

The magazine has lost 50 percent of its ad pages so far this year, ranking among the worst off of the more than 150 monthly magazines measured by Media Industry Newsletter.

Mr. Anderson seems to believe that by redesigning the Wired magazine three times and winning National Magazine Award design category two years running he would reinvegorate the struggling print business model.

But it is still one of the least popular magazines at Condé Nast, with a circulation of only 704,000. Its Web site, meanwhile, is the most popular of Condé Nast’s magazine sites, with about 11 million unique visitors a month, according to the company’s internal figures. That suggests that technology-forward readers prefer to read articles in a technology-forward way.

And yet, when publication had to downsize it eliminated a quarter of its Web employees and only four print employees.

Mr. Anderson belives in Free. He even wrote a book about it “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” which comes out in July and is guaranteed to be another best-seller. Another thing Mr. Anderson belives is the buzz. It takes a lot of it to be a tech guru and get paid for it.

“The problems are obvious, the range of solutions are obvious,” he said.

Will social networks increase in size is not an obvious hypothesis. There could be more networks and more groups but cognitive power of the brain is limited to the number of friends one can develop. "Extrapolating from the brain sizes and social networks of apes, Dr Dunbar suggested that the size of the human brain allows stable networks of about 148," quoting the related article by The Economist. Even more worrisome is the fact that with the rise of social networks, the number of "core" friends is on downward trend.

By statutory definition, the term “digital property” does not include:

1. video programming services, including video on demand television services; and
2. broadcasting services, including content to provide such services

Read more on what qualifies as Digital Property and is taxable in the State of New Jersey.

"There are many tools available for working with Amazon S3 without having to write a software application. For this article, we’ll be using a plug-in for the Firefox browser, called S3Fox. You can also use one of the many code samples and tools available through the Amazon S3 Resource Center, or use a product built on Amazon S3 in the Solutions Catalog.

First, create a bucket in your Amazon S3 account that corresponds to the domain you’ll use to host your media files. For our web site, we’ll create a bucket called “media.webscalecomputing.info”.

Important: Use lower-case letters only to name buckets that will be used in DNS redirects. This requirement is a function of the way that DNS handles names (always lower case).

Why use this specific bucket name? Amazon S3 has a virtual hosting feature that allows inbound requests from a web site, so it will serve up content from the bucket by the same name. We’ll talk more about this feature in the next section when we configure our domain.

Next, add your media files to the new bucket in Amazon S3. Using the Firefox plug-in, it’s as simple as selecting the files on your local system, then clicking the transfer button."

Read full article for instructions

One of the typical ways to improve scalability of high traffic website is to serve it contents from several web servers. This way all request for html pages will go to first sever and requests for media content will go to the second one allowing each server to perform better under high load. Amazon S3 offers you unlimited scalability and pay as you go model. You pay only for what actually is stored on your S3 account and pay only for the actual traffic.

Read more on how to set up Amazon S3 account

If Time Warner is concerned about cable and VOD sales, one can only imagine the impact on the DVD sales.

Cable companies are getting worried that more people are watching TV over the Internet. Glenn Britt, chief executive of Time Warner Cable, voiced his concern in February during a quarterly earnings discussion with analysts.

"We are starting to see the beginning of cord cutting," he said. "People will choose not to buy subscription video if they can get the same stuff for free."

More and more television programming and movies are available online, through sites including Hulu, Netflix Watch Instantly, YouTube and Amazon.com's Video on Demand. "This time there is a real, viable alternative" to cable, said Bobby Tulsiani, a senior analyst at Forrester Research.

Time Warner Cable, which operates under the Road Runner brand, said it has been offering tiered, capped service in Beaumont, Texas for some time and in March began testing that pricing in four new markets: Austin and San Antonio, Texas; Rochester, New York; and Greensboro, N.C. Still unpriced is Time Warner's maximum available offering: 100 GB per month, said Time Warner Cable spokesman Alex Dudley. Usage exceeding those caps is charged at $1 per gigabyte.

Others among the nation's largest ISPs are also experimenting with caps and tiers.

Source

Internet Service Provideers (ISPs) will start storing details of user e-mails and net phone calls under an EU directive.

The plans were drawn up in the wake of the London bombings in 2005.

ISPs and telecoms firms have resisted the proposals while some countries in the EU are contesting the directive.

Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, said it was a "crazy directive" with potentially dangerous repercussions for citizens.

All ISPs in the European Union will have to store the records for a year. An EU directive which requires telecoms firms to hold on to telephone records for 12 months is already in force.

The Media-Streams are encrypted "on the fly" by the Flash Media Server (the protocol used is rtmpe or rtmps). In addition the client player can be verified via "SWF-Verification", to make sure that only the official client can be used.

Encryption:

All contents are encrypted by the Flash Media Server "on the fly". This means, there is no encryption of the source file needed (which is different to Microsoft DRM, for instance). For data transmission, a special protocol is used: rtmpe or rtmps.

rtmps uses SSL-encryption, rtmpe makes use of proprietary encryption algorithms. rtmpe causes less CPU-load than rtmps on the Flash Media Server. In the past, some tools were able to capture rtmpe Streams by taking advantage of a security hole within the flash player object. Adobe fixed that issue in Jan. 2009.

Currently, there are no known hacks for rtmps and for rtmpe and also there are no known tools to perform rtmpe/rtmps decryption, but it is known that private groups have found a way to rip those streams (HorribleSubs ripping Crunchyroll)

SWF-Verification:

This technique is used to ensure that only the official Flash client, delivered by the content owner, can be used to request the streaming data.

All officially allowed clients (which are in fact *.swf Files) need to be placed on the Flash Media Server. Any unknown client requesting a connection will receive a "connection reject".

The combination of both techniques ensures that streams cannot be sniffed and stored into a local file. SWF verification is needed to avoid that manipulated clients can access the content. Those clients could possibly write the unencrypted content to a file.

Besides that, it is possible to restrict connections to the Flash Media Server to a list of known hosts, to avoid that the whole player (the flash client) is placed on a foreign site.

Source

According to the article the major spy network has infiltrated computers from government offices around the world. The spy network had infiltrated 1,295 computers in 103 countries.

I already implemented on multiple web sites IP bans on incoming traffic from China due to the numerous coordinated and yet unsuccessful hacking attacks coming from the particular regions of that country.

According to the recent study it took on average 8.2 seconds for a male to fall iin love. I personally think that 8.2 seconds hardly qulifies for a "first sight" as to spend that much time staring at someone one has to be looking for some redeeming qualities.

As the figures revealed, a man who rated a lady attractive held eye contact for about an average of 8.2 seconds, which increased his chances of falling in love at first sight, researchers said.

Oppositely, if the gaze lasted for about 4.5 seconds or less, the man in question was not interested in any way in the woman he had made eye contact with, which meant he did not consider her good-looking enough. Ladies, on the other hand, did not make this distinction, since they paid the same amount of attention and held eye contact for just as long with both men they were interested in and those they did not fancy, for one reason or another, the same study showed.

A wealth of information in NY Times article on how to use Skype with your mobile:

Both SkypeOut and SkypeIn carry a relatively low fee. SkypeOut calls to land lines can be as little as 2 cents a minute, while calls to mobile phones are usually a bit more. In Italy, for example, Gary’s call cost me (not him) 30.8 cents a minute (not including tax). A SkypeIn subscription, meanwhile, costs $60 a year or $18 for three months. All I have to do before I leave home is set my American cellphone (an older-generation iPhone) to forward to my SkypeIn number, and all I have to do when I arrive in a new country is get a SIM card, go online and set the Skype software’s preferences to forward all calls to the new number.

So, here’s how Gary’s call to me worked:

He dialed my regular American cellphone number, which forwarded to my SkypeIn number, which, in turn, forwarded (via SkypeOut) to my Italian cellphone number.

"Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.”

theconnor

"Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web."

timmylevad / Tim Levad Cisco channel partner advocate

In this enchanting article from Vanity Fair Michael Lewis draws parallels between a gentle people from Scandinavia who just want everyone to have the same amount of everything and "a horse that pretends to be broken."

“The Economic Theory of a Common-Property Resource: The Fishery.” The brilliant paper was written back in 1954 by H. Scott Gordon, a University of Indiana economist. It describes the plight of the fisherman—and seeks to explain “why fishermen are not wealthy, despite the fact that fishery resources of the sea are the richest and most indestructible available to man.” The problem is that, because the fish are everybody’s property, they are nobody’s property. Anyone can catch as many fish as they like, so they fish right up to the point where fishing becomes unprofitable—for everybody.

This insight is what led Iceland to go from being one of the poorest countries in Europe circa 1900 to being one of the richest circa 2000. Iceland’s big change began in the early 1970s, after a couple of years when the fish catch was terrible. The best fishermen returned for a second year in a row without their usual haul of cod and haddock, so the Icelandic government took radical action: they privatized the fish.

Twitter is not a substitute for really engaging with people and winning them over. Political Twittering is merely a displacement activity for doing something more meaningful.

Rachel Sylvester in The Times this morning quotes a psychologist (a real one, not Derek Draper) who hits the send button on the head;

Exhibit B: Twitter is reality TV without the pictures. There is a combination of neurosis and narcissism involved. The psychologist Oliver James has said: “Twittering stems from a lack of identity. It’s a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you are. Nobody would Twitter if they had a strong sense of identity.

Not sure if sense of identity is the right attribute, it is more a case of self-worth stemming from attention. That people care to know what the Twitterer is doing enhances their own sense of self worth. Draper feels validated and boasts (on Twitter of course) that he has more “followers” than his rivals. He has spent a lot of time canvassing thousands of Twitterers of other political commentators to build his following. Desperate. The desperation is shown by a key ratio, your followers to following ratio - your Twitter F2F ratio.

Exhibit C: Twitter F2F ratios

John Prescott 1,410 Followers, 29 Following - 48.62

Iain Dale 2,499 Followers, 152 Following - 16.44

Tom Watson 2,518 Followers, 909 Following - 2.77

Alastair Campbell 2,567 Followers, 2,088 Following - 1.23

Derek Draper 2,918 Followers, 2,836 Following - 1.02

Read more...

This bus top ad from N=5 Amsterdam, The Netherlands simply rocks! I guess that obese people are standing.

Finally an acknowledgment in today's article from BBC of what social networks are good for besides user profile, promotions and networking:

Status updates on sites such as Facebook, Yammer, Twitter and Friendfeed are a new form of communication, the South by SouthWest Festival has heard.

"We are all in the process of creating e-mail 2.0," David Sacks, founder of business social network Yammer said.

One of the most brilliant examples of a "V Fame" or how somebody who is completely unknown can become a celebrity overnight for doing nothing, but doing it in public.

One year ago a young, unnamed and heavily-eyelinered young woman who hung around on Gaia Online made a video. She went by the name of Boxxy.

Official version of a story from The Guardian "How Boxxy Brought Web to It's Knees."

"At Christmas, the video - by then languishing in YouTube's vaults - got posted to i-am-bored, and from there hit 4Chan, and in particular the site's /b/ messageboard... the heartland for many memes (and definitely NSFW). Why? Nobody's sure. Was Boxxy herself behind it? Or was she simply a vehicle for fans who liked her camgirl approach, apparent ADD and weirdly excitable behaviour?

Over the subsequent days and weeks, Boxxy became a topic of contention on 4Chan - with the site splitting into two groups; those who professed to love Boxxy and all she stood for and those who hated Boxxy and her fans. Every thread threaten to spill over into Boxxy spam or a flamewar, and hundreds of 4channers went hacking Boxxy's YouTube account and other websites in search of her true identity. So far they don't seem to have succeeded.

Things really came to a head, though, when Boxxy haters - sick of seeing so much about her on 4Chan - decided to launch a denial of service attack on the website itself, bringing it down for some hours as a protest."

See the new fetatures of the world's fastest web browser. Mac, PC, i-Phone, i-Pod Touch. Download Safari 4 Beta from Apple

Paul Boutin shares a number of low-tech hacks for high-tech problems.

Suppose your remote car door opener does not have the range to reach your car across the parking lot. Hold the metal key part of your key fob against your chin, then push the unlock button. The trick turns your head into an antenna, says Tim Pozar, a Silicon Valley radio engineer.

Mr. Pozar explains, "You are capacitively coupling the fob to your head. With all the fluids in your head it ends up being a nice conductor. Not a great one, but it works." Using your head can extend the key's wireless range by a few car lengths.