Clever new voluntary-virus morphology

You get an email that actually looks like it may have been composed by a native English speaker welcoming you to a web-based community you may not necessarily recall asking to join, and providing a raw numeric IP address (uh oh) as a confirmation link.

Clicking the link calls up a bare-naked web page (uh oh) with a single line of text apologetically informing you that you need to download (uh oh) a "secure login" thingum to actually see the website, and offers another link to an .exe file (uhhh ohhh).

I assume that carrying on with the download and running the file would (if I were on a Windows box) instantly zombify my PC and put it to use making DDoS attacks against the Turkish government or whatever they're up to now. When it comes down to it I guess I'm really just impressed that the initial email actually doesn't look entirely unreasonable, except for the giveaway raw IP link.

Why you should not link to Slashdot

While looking at the ETech 2008 website, I see that they link to this Slashdot story as an example of something cool that they'd welcome a presentation on. Really, you shouldn't do that. Link to the story that Slashdot is linking to, instead. Otherwise the page you link to looks like this:

Headline (literallly) MILITARY RUNNING A PARALLEL EARTH SIMULATOR

Story (on theregister.com, my summary): The US military is looking into a proposal to predict domestic and political reactions to various speculative events through by a sophisticated computer program that would be able to work with various kinds of gathered intelligence data. It is currently just a concept paper and is not "running", by the military or anyone else, and the scope of its simulation doesn't go beyond the political. (The Register's tone is pretty over-the-top ZOMG YOU ARE BEING SIMULATED as well, but it's not hard to read past.)

Comments (taking up 99 percent of the page's vertical space): Booger-flinging fight about the Iraq War, mixed with +5 Funnys involving iPhones, beowulf clusters, and assorted sexist leering.

Dude, no.

Why you'll never see "The Science of Harry Potter"

A background process I didn't realize I had going returned a value yesterday and told me the point at which the last Harry Potter novel soured a little on me, preventing it from being really great. It was when ( Crusher said 'Their DNA is devolving into amino acids!' and then Riker turned into a spider or something. )

Then again

After I wrote that last subject line I thought I bet that isn't actually true, and lo.