Dread Pirate Roberts was in the empire business. In a twist of fate, Silk Road, the largest online drug marketplace, has been shut down by authorities just a few days after the Breaking Bad series finale. There’s talk of $1.2 billion in transactions and $80 million in personal profit for Ross William Ulbricht—a number which happens to equal the…
Author: sImenSIasMS
Cyberdérive
No one surfs the web anymore. Increasingly, we get everything we want from an endless stream provided by a small selection of websites: Reddit, Google, Tumblr, Facebook, Wikipedia and Amazon would be my list. Those six sites probably constitute a frightening percentage of my web browsing, and most of the content that originates on other sites can…
GIF: A Technical History
From a technical standpoint, the success of the lowly GIF is a mystery. Both as an image format and as a video/animation format, it’s vastly inferior to the alternatives. It only supports 256 colors; its compression is inefficient; it doesn’t support sound; the last specification was published more than twenty years ago. Yet it’s still…
John Blogkowski, Curator of Hyperlinks, Dies at 81
John Blogkowski, a curator who almost single-handedly elevated the hyperlink’s status in the last half-century to that of a fine art, making his case in seminal writings and landmark exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, died in on Saturday in Pittsfield, Mass. He was 81. The cause of death was complications…
Outside
Welcome to the outside. The outside is like the inside, only farther out. You may notice subtle shifts in your personality as you enter the outside. This is to be expected. You may notice a curious feeling located somewhere in the middle of your face. Outsiders call this “smell”, and it is completely normal. If…