links.pop()

Someone I know used to do a linkage dump every now and again of interesting articles or sites he came across in surfing. I'm not sure what his motivations were, but I just want to keep the links I come across some place other than my browser bookmarks (which undoubtedly get deleted come bookmark house cleaning time).

Open source hardware... Two thumbs up to Sun for plans to release design specs (plus a verification suite, simulation models, ISA, etc.) for their UltraSPARC processor. Hopefully a mutual benefit between the development community and Sun will result and motivate other companies to follow suit in releasing design docs and APIs.

Take down wikipedia... A class action lawsuit against wikipedia because it's not the entirely legitimate information source it has always claimed to be. Wait, who said anything about the Internet being reliable? Goodness people, it's a wiki. The lawsuit is claiming to have expected damages in the tens of millions of dollars, so make sure to sign up and join their cause! Ugh, this is just disappointing.

Don't forget to write down your memories... A short article inspired by Tsar Ivan really not being so Terrible (or at least our lack of basis in that opinion) that brings up a really important point about history preservation and our age of information. With so many people documenting their own lives and experiences on the web, we are creating this huge basin of information that can be used in retelling tomorrow's history. Similar to a major theme from The Transparent Society, it will be a lot harder to lie if there are hundreds of eyes telling the story.

SIGMil dominates U.S. competition... Two weeks ago SIGMil participated in the UCSB International Capture the Flag competition (iCTF), which pits teams of student hackers from around the world against each other for 6 hours of an offensive and defensive battle in computer security. Our team placed fourth overall and first in the United States. So ya know, that's pretty 1337.

The next thing to hit photo sharing... Slide is the new startup by Paypal co-founder and former CTO (and UIUC alum) Max Levchin. I have a friend that's dropping out of school to go work for them, but I have my doubts on how successful (re: profitable) this is going to be. I mean, it's photo-sharing. What's the big deal?