I will start doing this more often. I really do. pinky swear.

finally got deep into regexps. I feel like a super hero!

I’m sitting at a coffee shop in Mission district in San Francisco and experimenting with Firesheep. I knew about the “cookie fail” for quite some time now, but never took the time to exploit it (unless we’re talking about my roommates) and luckily someone did the job for me.

now, the Firesheep exploit itself if a huge fail on behalf of many a social networks, but Facebook takes their fail to a whole new level:

the obvious thing to offer your users (at least on demand) is https. and you can do that most of the time at the majority of the pages. now go and try this at Facebook. seriously, go and try. it works! now go click on any link. it doesn’t matter which one. just click.

it’s magic! you’re no longer using a secure protocol. not only does Facebook not default to https, even when you demand it, The Social Network decides you’re better off browsing their way.

FAIL.

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Using any female checkins as signifiers of an even larger “lady” ratio, it’s like Trinh and Hodson have totally made an app giving nerds some kind of advantage in natural selection.

you’ve got to love displays of evolutionary ingenuity! and what’s even more interesting, it looks as if it just might work - now all I have to do is data mine the sh*t out of the service and see what happens.

a sociologist’s dream

the only problem now is that I have to work fast. TechCrunch already picked up the story…

m

after a long discussion with myself I finally decided to opt for tumblr over posterous. in the end it seems as a false choice, but let us wait and see what happens.

in other news I finally synced my emacs org-mode with gcal. it is a pretty dirty (and lazy) hack but it works. I might decide to write a how to at one point but for now a different project is on the rise.

the problem with the social internet for a productivity freak and a hacker at heart is that every new service that shows up has to take decisions in terms of which service they are going to link themselves to. that presented a problem a while back (especially with Facebook’s fugly API and policies) but it looks as if the interwebs picked a winner. twitter seems to have prevailed with it’s simplicity and a wide range of applications to different areas of the social sphere. so here’s the idea:

it seems perfectly rational to demand a single outlet that you could use to manage most of your information, scheduling schemes and digital artifacts. until now, one had to hack their way through countless APIs which made the life of a lazy hacker hard. but things have changed. with most services trying to boost their appeal and recognition through twitter they inadvertently have to connect themselves with it at one point or another. all of this transforms twitter from a microblogging platform to a perfect funnel of accessing the internet.

in the end I was searching for an interwebs-emacs, a wmacs. if you could get a simple tool that was highly customizable and that you could link to everything you could have a single “platform” solution for all your internet business. and what is high customizability in emacs is the API and interconnectivity at twitter. the idea should be fleshed out by now.

a) connect twitter to emacs through an existing library (I still have to check which one would be most optimal)

b) use twitter as a channel to manage everything else you do on the internet. you then transform the need to set up dedicated web apps/servers/services to hacking together a couple of twitter bots.

c) wrap it all in a bit of agile dev philosophy and you should end up with a simple way of accessing the interwebs.

more on this to come, in the meantime, just think about how easy sharing plans suddenly becomes (emacs ~onestep~> plancast, facebook, gcal, dopplr, … = automagic)

m