Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger, a great article from Ars Technica. Also emphasizes why two-factor authentication is going to become more important in the coming years.
Lukasz Lindell writesHow we screwed (almost) the whole Apple community. “We wanted to test this, how easy is it to spread disinformation?” Fascinating story.
John Gruber has a great essay on the paradigm shift (yes I just said that) of the Retina Macbook Pro. Highly recommended.
State of the Word 2012
I had an amazing weekend at WordCamp San Francisco hanging out with hundreds of WordPress users from all over the world at the main event and the dev day afterward. Then on Sunday I was humbled to be featured on the cover of my hometown paper the Houston Chronicle in an article David Kaplan wrote following the 10-year high school reunion I went to (PDF).
If you wanted to catch up on the State of the Word address I gave on Saturday, the video and the slides are now online, or you can watch it embedded below. The slides are on Slideshare.
It was a pleasure meeting so many of you, and I hope it’s not next year before we meet again. Thank you to Michael Pick and Pete Davies for helping me out under tight timelines again.
Automatticians in San Francisco
A wrap party for Automatticians after the WCSF dev day. Photos by Sheri Bigelow.
WordCamp San Francisco Hack Day
Hack Day at WordCamp San Francisco went really well. Developers from around the globe met up to work on WordPress. Photos by Sheri Bigelow.
WordCamp San Francisco 2012
Photos from WordCamp San Francisco 2012 taken by Sheri Bigelow and Kevin Conboy.
I’m putting together the State of the Word address for the upcoming WordCamp San Francicso, and one thing I like to do every year is highlight some cool WordPress-powered sites, especially ones that show off the power of the platform. I have a few in mind already, but are there any WP sites you’ve seen recently that really blew your mind? Leave links in the comments.
Grid-based design sure is getting popular these days: First map of the human brain reveals a simple, grid-like structure between neurons. Hat tip: Jeff Bowen.
Watching the Olympics parade thing out the corner of my eye, had never heard of Kiribati and found this snippet from their Wikipedia page interesting:
As sea levels continue to rise, the government of Kiribati is negotiating a deal with Fiji to evacuate the entire population to areas of Fiji that the Kiribati government would buy. The area of Fiji proposed for resettlement is the second largest Fijian island of Vanua Levu. The mass migration is expected to include younger, skilled workers first, and then the rest of the population would follow over a period of years.
That’s something you don’t hear every day.
HSPVA 02 Reunion
This was actually the second night of the reunion, starting at the Archway Gallery, moving to Khon’s, then ending at Whataburger. Was great catching up with so many talented old friends.
Plane Thinking
From when you leave the gate to takeoff, your phones (and iPads and Kindles) must be off, but when you land you can use your phone before you get to the gate.
Bat-Signal Heralds Launch of Internet Defense League. Proud to be a supporter.
Mike Hendrickson, Roger Magoulas, and Tim O’Reilly have a new report on the Economic Impact of Open Source Software, which included one of their findings that “WordPress is a far more important open source product than most people give it credit for. In the SMB hosting market, it is as widely used as MySQL and PHP, far ahead of Joomla and Drupal, the other leading content management systems.”
23 Air Travel Tips From Super Frequent Fliers by Elise Hu, includes two from me.
Thumbs Up: Digg Wasn’t A Failure, It Was A Beginning, by Aubrey Sabala.
In Europe, the Court Shuts Down WordPress Based Pirate Bay Proxy that was running RePress.
An oldie but a goodie: Your New TV Ruins Movies. I’ve been known to do this to TVs of friends and family without telling them.
By selling tickets directly and putting restrictions on them Louis C.K. drops scalping by 96%. This guy is on the very edge, just like VHX is making video sales and distribution available to everyone someone will do the same with this ticketing platform. It’s impressive what a creative mind paired with just a bit of technology can do.