JonathanRyan.org

Yesterday on Boing Boing Cory Doctorow posted about how UCLA tries to scare students out of downloading anything, warning that “most material is copyrighted” without explaining things such as fair use.  I was curious how Western Michigan University covered copyright on their website, and found a few interesting links hosted by their Office of Information Technology:

How to disable file uploading on most file sharing clients

Definition of Fair Use

I’m glad that Western does explain to students what fair use, and amused that they explain how to disable uploads.  However, the only way a student will find this fair use page is if they go out of their way to look for it on the website.  There are a few anti-piracy posters around campus that try to scare you out of downloading; they should at least tell students to look to their site for more information.  I would also like to see fair use explained more simply.  I imagine a lot of students won’t feel like reading a chunk of the US Copyright Act, even if it is pretty straightforward.

Dustin has written up a post on how to get a shell on a remote server through SSH, even if you do not have access to SSH on that server.  It uses PHP and some uploaded files to connect to an SSH server that you do have access to, and sets up a tunnel with a shell on it.  I can see this being useful for people on shared hosting servers that don’t offer SSH normally.  I’ll have to check 1&1’s ToS to see if I am allowed to.  I doubt I can, since they do offer SSH access at a higher rate.

Of course, this could easily be a huge security risk if you use it wrong, so be careful.

Link

Personally, I found today’s xkcd to be hilarious, even though I think most people reading this will have no idea what it is referencing.

The comic references Powers of Ten, a short documentary from the 1970’s that starts out with an overhead picture of a couple picnicking, just like in the comic, then zooms out by a power of 10 every ten seconds until you can see the entire universe. It then zooms back in at the same rate all the way to the nucleus of a single atom.

Randal has a way of making incredibly obscure jokes that are hilarious to those who recognize them. This can be seen in one of my favorite comics by him:

Here, he references constructs of an unusual programming language while making a 2001 joke.  I laughed a lot.  One of my other favorite web comics, Dinosaur Comics actually explains why I found this so incredibly funny:

Artist Bill Shackelford has a live, internet-connected balloon inflator on display at the Ohio State University Art and Technology show Digescape.  Each unique visitor who visits his page from a blog causes a balloon to inflate a tiny bit, and eventually pop if there are enough hits.  You can view the balloon on a live webcam.

I just realized, as I was writing this that the balloon has already popped.   In fact, MAKE: Blog, the place I found the link, linked to it after it had already popped.  Here’s the link anyway:

Link