Monthly Archives: March 2013

Poking at xkcd 1190

Posted by on 2013/03/25 No comments

I’m probably not the only one doing this, but… let’s poke around at the innards of xkcd 1190. I’ll update this as I find things. I’m not particularly clued at JS yet (browsers are not my main playground), so I’m hitting this as it comes ;)

So far, useful things found:

  • there’s a minified script for making all of this happen, run it through a beautifier of your choice to be able to read it
  • append #verbose to the end of the URL for JS console logging messages
  • there appears to be an event listener thing going on, with what appear to be UUIDs attached to the events. I suspect they’re only format-similar though, because they must be time-dependent. Update: looks like it’s just kept in memory
  • the json passed to the xkcd servers looks like so:
s {type: "comic/time", data: "{"spread":5,"image":"a901246fd70dcd0054429bf55ced123ecead832300d73dedd78857d91eaff2df.png"}", lastEventId: "c0ddcdf0-9547-11e2-8001-1c6f659cb250"}

More as I find it

P.S.: Randall Munroe you are a hell of a nerdsniper.

A Lament

Posted by on 2013/03/18 No comments

This post will not mention anything new. It will not say anything someone else hasn’t before. It serves only as a landmark, a waypoint, a memory.

This post is about weev. In recent months he’s been found guilty on a bunch of bullshit charges, and today he’s been sentenced. I won’t go into the details. Other people already have (here’s the transcript, here’s the Wired search results for his name. Check around on twitter for #freeweev. Here’s another site about it. Have fun.)

I came to know him online/on IRC very briefly, but from the first supported his side of things. weev has often been described as unpleasant (to put it very mildly). I don’t much care for that. weev’s cool, and anyone who’s spent even a bit of time talking to him will tell you that. He’s also effectively the fallguy in this whole story. He went ahead and pissed on the shoes of AT&T, and now he’s being put away for 41 months (along with restitution). For making it known that people’s information (to whatever extent) was available on a public webserver, and all you needed to do was be able to look at/modify a URL, and do math (add 1 to the identifier at the end of it). There’s a number of things that work this way. Hell, twitter status updates are posted in numerical order. A few years ago they used to have the global firehose of all content available. Viewing that without permission could’ve been equated to breaking the law (under this ruling).

This probably sets quite a fucked precedent. There’s a lot to be said about it. But I say only this: it fucking sucks. Tons. And I hope that this situation can change. :(

P.S. for anyone who wants an idea of weev’s character, this is it: “No matter what the outcome, I will not be broken. I am antifragile.” — @rabite