Trafigura vs The Internet

Gaz Davidson — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:04:45 +0000

The news are banging on about how the Internet has won against Trafigura’s attempts to gag the British press from reporting on questions in parliament, they couldn’t stop social media hosted in other countries so the whole thing blew up in their faces. Great news!

However, far more interesting IMO is metadata provided by Google Sidewiki, which allows anyone with a Google account to add uncensored discussion to the side of the page:

SideWikiLeaks anyone?

All the fuss seems to be about the Minton report, apparently the press aren’t allowed to talk about the content or tell people where to find it, and certainly not link to it.

FYI it talks about a cocktail of toxic chemicals being dumped on the Ivory Coast (including ten tonnes of sodium hydroxide), and you can get it from WikiLeaks here.

Songs in code

Gaz Davidson — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 12:46:28 +0000

I’m a bit late on commenting on this Twitter meme as it’s over a month old, like all memes it’s a variation of something as old as the Earth and just recently revived. The concept is simple, just write a song lyric or title as a code snippet, set it as your status and share with others by linking the #songsincode hashtag. That’s all.

Someone’s even made a database of all the posts where you can vote on the entries. Most are boring and just consist of lyrics padded out by punctuation, but there are some quite creative, non-obvious ones which use programming constructs to infer the lyrics. Here’s mine…

(Hover over the links for spoilers)

class BillieJean : public girl
{ 
  int i; 
  relationship lover;
public: 
  BillieJean(relationship &me) 
  : lover(!me), i(1) {} 
};

spoil

body() { 
  print '' . body() . ''; 
} 
love() { 
  body();
}

spoil

/* mon = 255; tue=wed=0xaaaaaa; */ 
if (friday)
  love.insert(me);

spoil

GET /back.html HTTP/1.1
 
HTTP/1.1 301
Location: /you_once_belonged.html

spoil

Some of my favourites (with slight edits):

video$ kill -9 `ps -ef | grep radio*`

by brozow

int main() {
  return -1;
  get_Satisfaction();
}

by stevecooperorg

$live = ($you==true) ? false : false;

by o_Freud_o

$i = '';

by whybird

class City : Rock, Roll {};

by alexmdac

try {
  get(WHAT_YOU_WANT);
} finally {
  get(WHAT_YOU_NEED);
}

by rickgrundy

/dev/null << shout();

by plikrg

bitplane.net » twitter

Trafigura vs The Internet

Songs in code