Dear Tripit: what is it about Wharton that makes you think I’m going to need laser toenail fungus removal after I attend?

Very interesting explanation of how a botnet “sinkhole” is used to subvert a network of compromised computers.

Infected machines typically receive commands from other infected machines — this makes it more difficult to “decapitate” the network by eliminating a single command-and-control server. The peer-to-peer network can also change quickly in response to threats; each node can propagate a list of new peers if there’s an intrusion. But it’s exactly this capability that enables the “sinkhole” technique. If researchers can crack the communications protocol used among the peers, they can create “poison” data that will propagate through the whole botnet. The data forces all peers to connect to a single machine. That machine, of course, belongs to the white hats, who now control the botnet.

Hysterical.

Awe-inspiring, jaw-dropping, and comprehensible presentation spanning dark energy, string theory, multiverse hypotheses, and several approaches to answering the paradoxes of the anthropic principle.

This lecture gets fairly technical, but it’s a fascinating deep dive into how Alan Turing broke the Enigma machine during WWII, and how that same technique is used in speech-to-text synthesis today.

The Onion’s analysis of Obama’s rant against the nation. Personally, I think we might be better off if this actually happened from time to time. More details in this article.

Précis: if you don’t think money can buy happiness, you don’t know how to use money right.

This talk by Michael Moran is sheer brilliance. Putting his book on my reading list.

Software patents are broken. Here’s one result of how that plays out.

Standing O for an excellent talk on something I’ve been trying to express for years. Reid does it in minutes.

From The Consumerist:

File-sharing in the United Kingdom just got a little bit more difficult, as the nation’s High Court has ordered the country’s largest internet providers to completely block access to BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay.

What makes this truly idiotic is that now that the entire Pirate Bay can be stored on a flash drive, there’s an infinite number of mirrors that can appear elsewhere. It’s effectively unblockable.

Step 1: a friend of mine on Facebook, whom I’ve known since she was 14 or so and is now in college, posts to say that she’s holding a marathon watching all eight Harry Potter movies.

Step 2: I see this in my RSS feed.

Step 3: I feel like I’ve done something wrong.

It’s been my theory for a long time that once Provigil becomes available as a cheap generic, it’s going to be as widespread as aspirin, and eventually over-the-counter.

Excellent presentation on the use of SMS to crowdsource humanitarian aid in Haiti and elsewhere.

I’m looking forward to attending The Amazing Meeting 2012 later this year. If you missed my coverage of last year’s conference, here’s a recap, and a video of one of the sessions.

The Amazing Meeting 2011: What is the JREF?
The Amazing Meeting 2011: Skeptic Podcasts
The Amazing Meeting 2011: Richard Dawkins vs. Chuck Norris

Normal service was resumed six hours after TSA agents shot the puppy with a sniper rifle. Initial analysis shows evidence of soil on the puppy’s coat, potentially indicating the presence of foreign biohazards in contravention of US import restrictions.

NYT by way of Consumerist:

The tactics, like embedding debt collectors as employees in emergency rooms and demanding that patients pay before receiving treatment, were outlined in hundreds of company documents released by the attorney general. To patients, the debt collectors may look indistinguishable from hospital employees, may demand they pay outstanding bills and may discourage them from seeking emergency care at all, even using scripts like those in collection boiler rooms, according to the documents and employees interviewed by The New York Times.

In some cases, the company’s workers had access to health information while persuading patients to pay overdue bills, possibly in violation of federal privacy laws, the documents indicate.