"Nobody checks the signature. Credit card signatures are a useless mechanism designed to make you feel safe, like airport security checks. So my question was, how crazy would I have to make my signature before someone would actually notice?"

"The Torn-Up Credit Card Application – I get a heck of a lot of credit card applications in the mail. I almost always tear credit card applications in half and throw them away. Is that good enough? Could a determined and dexterous criminal gather all the bits, tape them together and apply for a credit card in my name?"

The Rumpus: Do you save everything ever entered into Facebook at any time, whether or not it’s been deleted, untagged, and so forth?
Facebook Employee: That is essentially correct at this moment.
Rumpus: When you say “click on somebody’s profile,” you mean you save our viewing history?
Employee: That’s right.

It’s no great mystery that truly great user interfaces are the ones that are engineered to stay out of the way. ‘Staying out of the way’ means not distracting your users. Rather, good UIs let your users complete goals. The result? A reduction in training and support costs, and happier, satisfied and highly engaged users. When getting started on a new interface, make sure to remember these fundamentals …

October 14, 2009, the 30th annual awards ceremony of the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund took place at the Asia Society in New York City. Lu Guang (卢广) from People’s Republic of China won the $30,000 W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography for his documentary project “Pollution in China.”

In spite of some fuzziness regarding the difference between various historical forms of fascism, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.

Around a dozen Japanese tourists a year need psychological treatment after visiting Paris as the reality of unfriendly locals and scruffy streets clashes with their expectations, a newspaper reported on Sunday.

Recent analysis by the media research firm Nielsen asserts that 60 percent of Twitter users do not return from one month to the next. Thus far, Twitter has been considerably better at signing up users than keeping them.

The CCP has hired thousands of freelance Internet propagandists whose job is to infiltrate chat rooms, message boards and comment areas on the Internet posing as ordinary users to voice support for the agenda and interest of the CCP. They praise China’s one-party system and condemn anyone who criticizes China’s policy on Tibet. They comment aggressively on news reports about China’s food-safety problems, relations with Taiwan, suppression of bird-flu and AIDS information, Internet censorship, jailing of dissidents, support of Sudan’s military in Darfur and other sensitive topics. Comments applaud the Chinese government and slam its critics, all using scripts and lines approved by the party.

Some estimates claim that the 50 Cent Army includes a whopping 300,000 people. If that’s accurate, China's freelance propagandists exceed in number the total populations of 47 countries.

Google is tight-lipped about its computing operations, but the company for the first time on Wednesday revealed the hardware at the core of its Internet might at a conference here about the increasingly prominent issue of data center efficiency. Most companies buy servers from the likes of Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, or Sun Microsystems. But Google, which has hundreds of thousands of servers and considers running them part of its core expertise, designs and builds its own. Ben Jai, who designed many of Google's servers, unveiled a modern Google server before the hungry eyes of a technically sophisticated audience. Google's big surprise: each server has its own 12-volt battery to supply power if there's a problem with the main source of electricity. The company also revealed for the first time that since 2005, its data centers have been composed of standard shipping containers–each with 1,160 servers and a power consumption that can reach 250 kilowatts.

An old interview of Rob Janoff, who create the rainbow Apple logo : "The fruit of his labor: a simple 2-D monochromatic apple, with a healthy bite taken from the right side. Jobs loved the conceit-only he suggested it be more colorful. Janoff’s boss disagreed, insisting the logo be made all black to save on printing costs. But Jobs was resolute, arguing that color was the key to humanizing the company.”

Do you know cite, optgroup, acronym, address, ins, del, label, fieldset, abbr, rel, and wbr? I particularly like wbr.

Working from home, whether as a freelance contractor or remote employee, can be a great thing, particularly if you live alone. But what if you have a spouse and/or children at home with you while you work? Every work environment offers distractions, but those who work from home with their families face a unique set of issues—and need equally unique ways of dealing with them.

Using inexpensive off-the-shelf components, an information security expert has built a mobile platform that can clone large numbers of the unique electronic identifiers used in US passport cards and next generation drivers licenses. The $250 proof-of-concept device – which researcher Chris Paget built in his spare time – operates out of his vehicle and contains everything needed to sniff and then clone RFID, or radio frequency identification, tags. During a recent 20-minute drive in downtown San Francisco, it successfully copied the RFID tags of two passport cards without the knowledge of their owners.
Direct video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9isKnDiJNPk

These buttons just launched in Gmail yesterday, and they’ve been in Google Reader for two months now. The buttons are designed to look very similar to basic HTML input buttons. But they can handle multiple interactions with one basic design. The buttons we’re using are imageless, and they’re created entirely using HTML and CSS, plus some JavaScript to manage the behavior. They’re also easily skinnable with a few lines of CSS, which was a key factor now that Gmail has themes.