Games and play

• A Less-Random Generator

  Making random numbers that "feel" more random to the limited and biased human brain. Reminds me of World of Warcraft's drop progressive frequency hack for quest item drop rates.

• Jesse Schell's Design Outside the Box presentation at DICE 2010

  It's been doing the rounds, but if you haven't seen this presentation by Jesse Schell yet you're in for a thought-provoking treat. I'd love to try to apply this type of thinking social news and journalism. Also see these responses to the more terrifying aspects of Schell's talk.

Hackery

• Can you get cp to give a progress bar like wget?

  A hack using strace to get progress information from cp.

• The World's First Non-Trivial Executable Titanic Prime

  Finding a non-trivial (allegedly illegal) executable prime.

Security

• Have your friends been there?

  Uses the well-known link colour detection data leak to let you find out if your friends have been visiting "naughty" websites. Just the kind of security pranksterism I like.

• A Practical Attack to De-Anonymyze Social Network Users

  A more serious paper describing how to use the same vulnerability to de-anonymize social network users.

• RSA Conference 2010 video, featuring Diffie, Hellman, Rivest and Shamir.

  Adi Shamir's comments at about 45:30 on cloud computing resonates with me. I'm getting more and more worried about the cloud's privacy and security implications. Also features some amusing sparring between the crypto giants and the NSA dude on the panel.

• Post-quantum cryptography

  "Imagine that it's fifteen years from now. Somebody announces that he's built a large quantum computer. RSA is dead. DSA is dead. Elliptic curves, hyperelliptic curves, class groups, whatever, dead, dead, dead." A collection of resources put together by the inimitable Dan Bernstein and one Tanja Lange.

Visualisation

• Rapid graph layout using space filling curves

  A fascinating idea: using the clustering properties of the Hilbert curve to get nearly optimal graph layout.

Social web

• Algorithmic recruitment with GitHub

  Data mining open codebases for prospective employees. A great idea.