A really amazing list on MetaFilter, which I stumbled on entirely by accident. Beware; there are quite a few timesucks on this list 😉

A short, randomly chosen excerpt. Merely the tip of the iceberg:
PacMan Dossier.
Yarchive.
dedicated to the knitting of the authentic Doctor Who scarf.
RatBehavior.org.
Peacoat dating.
A history of Argentinian public transport tickets.
Alan Cooper’s All About Homonyms.
The Soda Can Library.
Internet Pinball Serial Number Database
a four-way listing of railway codes
Fire Lookouts in the Pacific Northwest
Alloy Artifacts
http://www.arcade-museum.com/
Taxonomic Data of the Breadties of the World
Rob’s Puzzle Page
The Guitar Rig Database
http://www.tapedeck.org/
Brand Name Pencils
Peeron LEGO inventories
221B Baker St
tommy westphall’s mind: A MULTIVERSE EXPLORED
Cosmic Baseball
Railway Telecomms
FreeCell — General Information and Index of Solutions

“What are some comprehensive one-topic websites maintained by cranky old guys (or gals)?”

The Old Man and the C Drive – internet websites cranks | Ask MetaFilter

[As a sort of sequel to my previous post on click fraud, here’s a discussion of it from the point of view of business site Bloomberg, which dives into the mechanics of click fraud and buying false audiences. -e]

Late that year [veteran brand marketer Ron Amram] and a half-dozen or so colleagues gathered in a New York conference room for a presentation on the performance of the online ads. They were stunned. Digital’s return on investment was around 2 to 1, a $2 increase in revenue for every $1 of ad spending, compared with at least 6 to 1 for TV. The most startling finding: Only 20 percent of the campaign’s “ad impressions”—ads that appear on a computer or smartphone screen—were even seen by actual people.

“The room basically stopped,” Amram recalls. The team was concerned about their jobs; someone asked, “Can they do that? Is it legal?” But mostly it was disbelief and outrage. “It was like we’d been throwing our money to the mob,” Amram says. “As an advertiser we were paying for eyeballs and thought that we were buying views. But in the digital world, you’re just paying for the ad to be served, and there’s no guarantee who will see it, or whether a human will see it at all.”

Source: The Fake Traffic Schemes That Are Rotting the Internet – Bloomberg Business

[Here’s an incredibly fascinating presentation about the war of all-upon-all that is click fraud, and its ugly effects on our privacy. -e]

Oh, the robots were rudimentary at first. Just little snippets of code that would load a web page and pretend to click ads. Detecting them was a breeze.

But there was a lot of money moving into online ads, and robots love money. They learned quickly. Soon they were using real browsers, with javascript turned on, and it was harder to distinguish them from people. They learned to scroll, hover, and move the mouse around just like you and me.

Ad networks countered each improvement on the robot side. They learned to look for more and more subtle signals that the ad impression was coming from a human being, in the process creating invasive scripts to burrow into the visitor’s browser.

Soon the robots were disguising themselves as people. Like a monster in a movie that pulls on a person’s face like a mask, the ad-clicking robots learned to wear real people’s identities.

They would hack into your grandparents’ computer and use their browser history, cookies, and all the tracking data that lived on the machine to go out and perpetrate their robotic deeds. With each iteration it got harder to tell the people and the robots apart.

The robots were crafty. They would do things like load dozens of ads into one pixel, stacking them up on top of one another. Or else they would run a browser on a hidden desktop with the sound off, viewing video after video, clicking ad after ad.

They learned to visit real sites and fill real shopping carts to stimulate the more expensive types of retargeting ads.

Today we live in a Blade Runner world, with ad robots posing as people, and Deckard-like figures trying to expose them by digging ever deeper into our browsers, implementing Voight-Kampff machines in Javascript to decide who is human. We’re the ones caught in the middle.

What Happens Next Will Amaze You

There have long been rumors, leaks, and statements about the NSA “breaking” crypto that is widely believed to be unbreakable, and over the years, there’s been mounting evidence that in many cases, they can do just that. Now, Alex Halderman and Nadia Heninger, along with a dozen eminent cryptographers have presented a paper at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (a paper that won the ACM’s prize for best paper at the conference) that advances a plausible theory as to what’s going on. In some ways, it’s very simple — but it’s also very, very dangerous, for all of us.

The paper describes how in Diffie-Hellman key exchange — a common means of exchanging cryptographic keys over untrusted channels — it’s possible to save a lot of computation and programmer time by using one of a few, widely agreed-upon large prime numbers. The theoreticians who first proposed this described it as secure against anyone who didn’t want to spend a nearly unimaginable amount of money attacking it.

Lost in transition between the theoreticians and practicioners was the distinction between “secure against anyone who doesn’t have a titanic amount of money to blow” and “secure against anyone,” and so many of our cryptographic tools use hard-coded and/or standardized large primes for Diffie-Hellman.

The paper’s authors posit that the NSA has undertaken a technological project on a scale “not seen since the Enigma cryptanalysis during World War II,” spending an appreciable fraction of the entire black budget to break the standard widely used primes.

 

The NSA sure breaks a lot of “unbreakable” crypto. This is probably how they do it. / Boing Boing

[An interesting — but disturbing — argument from Malcolm Gladwell about the social spread of school shootings. -e]

Between Columbine and Aaron Ybarra, the riot changed: it became more and more self-referential, more ritualized, more and more about identification with the school-shooting tradition. Eric Harris wanted to start a revolution. Aguilar and Ybarra wanted to join one. Harris saw himself as a hero. Aguilar and Ybarra were hero-worshippers.

Now imagine that the riot takes a big step further along the progression—to someone with an even higher threshold, for whom the group identification and immersion in the culture of school shooting are even more dominant considerations. That’s John LaDue. “There is one that you probably never heard of like back in 1927 and his name was Arthur Kehoe,” LaDue tells Schroeder. “He killed like forty-five with, like, dynamite and stuff.” Ybarra was a student of Virginia Tech and Columbine. LaDue is a scholar of the genre, who speaks of his influences the way a budding filmmaker might talk about Fellini or Bergman. “The other one was Charles Whitman. I don’t know if you knew who that was. He was who they called the sniper at the Austin Texas University. He was an ex-marine. He got like sixteen, quite impressive.”

Malcolm Gladwell: How School Shootings Spread – The New Yorker

“Into the Eye” by TRASH RIOT | Redbubble

A study from the International Journal of Medicinal Mushrooms reports thatDictyophora, a mushroom that grows on lava flows, induces spontaneous orgasms in about 1/3 of the woman who sniff it. From Wikipedia:

According to a 2001 publication in the International Journal of Medicinal Mushrooms, the smell of the fresh fungus can trigger spontaneous orgasms in human females. In the trial involving 16 women, 6 had orgasms while smelling the fruit body, and the other ten, who received smaller doses, experienced physiological changes such as increased heart rate. All of the 20 men tested considered the smell disgusting. According to the authors, the results suggest that the hormone-like compounds present in the volatile portion of the gleba may have some similarity to human neurotransmitters released in females during sexual activity. The study used the species found in Hawaii, not the edible variety cultivated in China.

This tropical mushroom gives women spontaneous orgasms from sniffing it / Boing Boing

#1 (Grand Prize) Takayuki Fukada, Japan / Courtesy IAPLC & Aquabase

The art of aquascaping is still a fledgling endeavor, first started in the 90s by Japanese wildlife photographer Takashi Amano. The annual IAPLC competition has grown dramatically since, with the 2015 contest seeing 2,545 entries from 69 countries. Japan, China, Brazil, and France dominate the top finalist spots (only 13 entries were from the United States). Finalists were announced in September.

#2 范博文, China / Courtesy IAPLC & AquaA3

#4 Paulo Pacheco, Brazil / Courtesy IAPLC & Aquabase

#8 タナカカツキ, Japan / Courtesy IAPLC & Aquabase

#16 张大东, China / Courtesy IAPLC & Aquabase

Awesome Aquariums: Winners of the 2015 International Aquatic Plants Layout Contest | Colossal

From the World’s Advanced Saving Project (WASP) comes the largest Delta-style 3D printer in the world, capable of printing homes out of mud.

Delta-style robots are those with three parallel arms, connected at the joint at the base.  In this printer, the joint is the printing mechanism.

This printer, called the BigDelta, is 40 feet tall and prints homes at nearly zero cost.  Inventor, Massimo Moretti, created WASP with the goal to “create a means for affordable fabrication of homes, and provide these means to the locals in poverty stricken areas.”  He saw the need for housing and noted the quality and almost endless supply of dirt/clay/fiber homes.  The machine is capable of producing highly insulated homes that cost next to no environmental footprint.

The world’s largest Delta 3D printer can print nearly zero-cost housing out of mud | Minds

Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish an alternative interpretation of the light pattern. SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star’s light pattern is consistent with a “swarm of megastructures,” perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.

“When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told me. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”