a_point_in_dreamspace | Entries tagged with software

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Reload page in style: light

I recently learned about a browser extension (for FF/chrome) that offers very granular control over which kinds of request your browser allows.

It's initially daunting, but it has a tutorial that I find fairly easy to understand. If you, like me, are a computery security nut who thinks that web security is a dumpster fire that isn't worth trying to put out because the incentives are too monumentally misaligned to be significantly changed before some global web securitastrophe annihilates the whole system and everybody who uses it, the sole bright spot being that the sewer mutants who rebuild the Internet might, hope of hopes, look back at the coordination problems that resulted in the designs of Webs 1, 2, 3, and 4.0, and have the collective self-discipline to avoid them; then I recommend it!

Current Mood: pleased

You know that urge you get sometimes, to mummify a fresh hummingbird corpse and hang it by the feeder to see what the other hummingbirds think of it? I visited my family recently and we gave in:

"Hummingbird tries to drive mummy away from feeder" (Watch on YouTube)

The attacker only stopped because we scared him off because we were afraid he would work himself to death. (This video actually starts after we scared him off a first time, after he'd spent over a minute doing this exact same dance.)

It fascinates me how long this bird is willing to spend on an obviously(?) fruitless task. It's like we found a bug in his software, which no natural experience would trigger, but which is catastrophically bad for him. (See also: Sphex, ant mills.)

I wonder if humans have any bugs like this.