“web”

Grouped under the ARG, Alternate Reality Gaming, label for lack of a better term. I think all 3 exemplify something new, unsettling, and fascinating that I don’t yet have a word for.

1. Little Brother^ELZR, now available as atoms and bits, has a glorious climax of hundreds of vampires invading San Francisco’s civic center, messing with general paranoia.
   
   
   > RULES FOR VAMPMOB
   
   

   > You are part of a clan of daylight vampires. You’ve discovered the secret of surviving the terrible light of the sun. The secret was cannibalism: the blood of another vampire can give you the strength to walk among the living.

   > You need to bite as many other vampires as you can in order to stay in the game. If one minute goes by without a bite, you’re out. Once you’re out, turn your shirt around backwards and go referee—watch two or three vamps to see if they’re getting their bites in.
   
   

   > To bite another vamp, you have to say “Bite!” five times before they do. So you run up to a vamp, make eye-contact, and shout “bite bite bite bite bite!” and if you get it out before she does, you live and she crumbles to dust.

   > You and the other vamps you meet at your rendezvous are a team. They are your clan. You derive no nourishment from their blood.
   
   

   > You can “go invisible” by standing still and folding your arms over your chest. You can’t bite invisible vamps, and they can’t bite you.

   > This game is played on the honor system. The point is to have fun and get your vamp on, not to win.
   
   

   > There is an end-game that will be passed by word of mouth as winners begin to emerge. The game-masters will start a whisper campaign among the players when the time comes. Spread the whisper as quickly as you can and watch for the sign.

   > M1k3y
   
   > bite bite bite bite bite!
   


2. Freezing Grand Central, a most elegant improv piece (via Alan).
   
   


3. That great Free Hugs campaign a while ago:
   
   


4. Got more samples along these lines? I wanted to quote something from SFZero but I’m still too new to it…
   

oSkope many views are a nice, rich way to browse Amazon (for other engines it isn’t nearly as successful) but this simple diagram in particular —plotting book covers against price and sales rank— is genuinely useful. Shame there’s no option to choose your axes. How about price vs stars? Stars vs. length?

Apropos of trusty old Cartesian planes, ain’t it weird they weren’t with us 500 years ago? What could be more straightforward than a coordinate system?

Amazing how compelling a dollop of interactivity an underwear catalog makes. (via reddit)

I figured someone had to have done something like this for hardcore porn. Apparently, the Virtual sex with.. series is just that. (Via NYT) Anyone tried it?

Or how about a 360 interactive a la Apple product showcase? Someone has to have done something like that but my google fu fails me. Anyone knows of something like that?

Whoodathunkit? Yahoo!’s omg! gossip rag is one of the most enticing and innovative web interfaces I’ve seen in a while.

Jump Point’s presentation the other day neither captivated nor disappointed me. Author Tom Hayes rapid-fired commonplaces for every enticing bit. About to forget it as yet one more glib futurist book, I saw it again today at my B & N, added it to my skimming pile (oh, the joys of American bookstores: they’re even better places for free reading than public libraries), and stumbled on a quote that took my heart away:

I love his phrase. In 20 something words he nails down the present and future I want to contribute to, belong to.

In the spirit of Little Brother I’ll post about a password stealing idea I’ve worried about for a while now: using email addresses as login names. It’s now a very widespread practice among webapps and the reason is they’re a convenient way to eliminate having to come up with and remember a unique identifier and in the process they make you give your email address away, which is a boon for marketing and for easily authenticating you. In itself there’s of course nothing insecure about the practice but the problem is that they make registrations so simple and straightforward that suddenly they’re everywhere and you don’t think twice about them.

And the true problem is that a lot of people use one password everywhere and the chances are high many will choose the same password for the webapp du jour as for their lifelong email account.


So imagine an unscrupulous webapp maker who creates a popular webapp requiring registration and doesn’t hide from himself user passwords (there’s absolutely nothing but his own conscience preventing him). It is now a simple matter of running a script to test each email address password pair for him to coolly break a good bunch of email accounts.

Blaise Pascal famously commented in a letter that it was long because he didn’t have the time to make it shorter. Another possibility comes to mind, perhaps more appropriate for our era of small pieces loosely joined, of fragmentation of the units of content (think email, IM, posts, tweets, minute-long YouTube videos, individual iTune songs, Wikipedia articles…): he didn’t have the time to split it into many short letters.

When out of dumb luck I found myself the owner of an advance-reading, not-for-sale copy of Cory Doctorow’s new novel, Little Brother (Amazon, Facebook, Cory’s reading), due to be released this April the 29th, I knew I’d have to gulp it down in one rapt, sleepless night. Cory’s a writer worthy of that, but it was also, well, my first “scoop” ever.

It’s past 6am and I’ve done just that. And before crashing into bed I just want it out that it is Cory’s best novel yet. Science fiction about our present, with our current, unevenly distributed future only slightly jiggled. A novel about America after a terrorist attack bigger than 9/11 and the young hackers who rebel at the idiotic police state that ensues.

It made me feel I belonged to San Francisco, to California, more than ever. It was stomach churning and exhilarating and fun. Yeah, it can be a tad over-educational and preachy at times but just a tad and to its great merit it makes security topics accessible and immensely interesting. The teenage voice of the main characters is a gem (Cory has always shined in dialogue, the more technology mediated the better) and their sexual fumblings are so masterful and eerily accurate (to me, at least) that wistfulness tore me apart. It made me want to hack a new world.

An important book, sure to change many lives.

Believe.

I owe Bill for introducing me to Here comes another bubble, a fantastic parody on bay area culture that most of you will probably have seen by now but that I can’t just not put here because it’s pure genius.

The most interesting part for me was to discover how most every reference was familiar. At a recent Stanford conference on legal futures (ah, I love the bay area!) there was talk of how national newspapers created the national conscience needed for nations to emerge and how something similar may be happening with the web. This video definitely felt like that to me—somehow or other, thousand of miles away in Mexico’s center and having never visited it before, bay area culture became my culture.

I’m reminded of xkcd’s legendary comment: ”I’m waiting for the day when, if you tell someone ‘I’m from the internet’, instead of laughing they just ask ‘oh, what part?’”

Oh, and btw, that glib, charlatanish, bubble milking attitude parodied in the video was one big thing that kept me away from the bay area for a long time. While I have stumbled on it once in a while, it’s easy enough to ignore and often comes not out of guile but out of Sturgeon’s law and just how damn hard it is to predict in advance what will end up being important.