How to show everyone what's on your Kodak frame.

So much win:

• If you know or guess the MAC address of any Kodak wireless digital picture frame, you can extract the images that are displaying on it.

• You can also remotely reset the frame, meaning you can 0wnz0r it and change its image sources.

So Kodak has built an appliance for letting complete strangers (a) browse your family photos, and (b) beam shock porn directly into your living room! GOD BLESS AMERICA!

This all works because the appliances won't connect to (e.g.) Flickr directly, they only phone home to Kodak's server, which then proxies all of the requests. But at least they're using OAuth instead of making you type your Flickr password into Kodak's server. This is a little surprising, actually, given the tip-top job their security engineers did of designing the rest of the infrastructure of this product line.

I guess I ought to add a WebCollage source to generate random Kodak MAC addresses for use as an image source!

A couple of good stories I came across today:

• The Things by Peter Watts -- The Thing from the perspective of the alien.

• The Gentle Seduction by Marc Stiegler -- The Rapture of the Nerds from the perspective of a non-nerd.

What happens when the immovable object of terrorism meets the unstoppable force of kiddie porn?

Previously, previously.

DNA Lounge update, wherein we bend over and take it.

The male duck's penis is spiral-shaped: like a corkscrew, it twists in a counter-clockwise direction so that sperm will target the oviduct on the female's left-hand side. In almost all birds only the left ovary is functional, but in a 2007 study, Brennan and colleagues noticed that in ducks the female's vagina twists in the opposite direction.

Brennan thinks that, while the males are evolving long and flexible penises to help them force copulations, the females are using their complex vaginal anatomy to take back control over which sperm fertilises their eggs. When a female wants to mate with her chosen partner, she can make the process easier by relaxing the muscles around the vagina entrance.

Brennan's team also timed the male's penis eversion, which took a mere one-third of a second - around 60 times faster than was previously thought (see video above). "This definitely gives the males a mechanism by which they can copulate," says Brennan, who was taken aback by the speed. "To be totally honest, I'm still in shock," she says.

Previously, previously, previously.

There are 15,740 social media gurus on Twitter.

445 social media gurus
12 viral marketing gurus
340 internet marketing gurus
20 new media marketing gurus
41 digital marketing gurus
68 social media stars
8112 social media marketers
2091 social media consultants
807 social media experts
931 social media strategists
576 social media agencies
79 social media ninjas
626 social media companies
271 social media marketing specialists
560 internet marketing specialists
154 internet marketing agencies
401 digital marketing agencies
206 digital marketing strategists

Many of you seem to be confused about this.

The 201st Decade, known as "The Aughts", ended last night.

• The "Twentieth Century" ran from Jan 1901 through Dec 2000.
• The "Nineteen Hundreds" ran from Jan 1900 through Dec 1999.
• The "Nineties" ran from Jan 1990 through Dec 1999.
• The first "decade" only contained nine years, making it an "enneade".

Some people say that the current decade should be called "The Teens". I think we should only call it that if we pronounce the first few years as "Twenty Teen", "Twenty Oneteen", and "Twenty Twoteen".

SpamAssassin gives any message sent in 2010 a default score of 3.2 because that date "is grossly in the future." But it gets better: they discovered and "fixed" this in June 2009... but never bothered to push out a release. Because being fixed in CVS is good enough, right? That's the Linux way.

You want "score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0".

The fluid dynamics of swimming jellyfish have provided a plausible mechanism for a once-wild notion: that marine animals, hidden from sight and ignored by geophysicists, may stir Earth's oceans with as much force as its wind and tides. Called induced fluid drift, it involves the tendency of liquid to "stick" to a body as it moves through water -- and a little bit of drift could add up quickly on a global scale.

That the mere motion of animals could play a profound role in water-column commingling was once considered absurd. The sea would surely absorb the force of a flapping fin, to say nothing of a phytoplankton's flagellae. It was a basic principle of friction, applied to water.

But in recent years, this consensus has sprung some leaks. When added up, winds and tides don't quite provide enough energy to account for the amount of water-mixing observed in the seas. In 2004, a study found that a school of fish could cause as much turbulence as a storm. Other researchers soon suggested that ocean swimmers could account for the gap. Soon after that, ocean physicists measured enormous turbulence generated by a swarm of krill, a crustacean considered too small to have meaningful mixing effects.

←← This guy!

Stolen from the bike rack at the top of the BART stairs at 4th and Market, around 7pm. This bike lasted over three years, though, which is an all-time record since way back in the nineteen-hundreds. (Previously.) They didn't leave a broken lock behind, which is somewhat puzzling. It was a u-lock with one of the new-style flat keys with the dimples on them, whatever those are called.

Please enjoy my 2009 music wrap-up. I'm slacking this year: no mixtape, no micro-reviews. However, it is a list of 40 fantastic albums that I advise you to acquire at your early convenience.

Anniversary of a cosmic blast

The sheer amount energy generated is difficult to comprehend. Although the crust probably shifted by only a centimeter, the incredible density and gravity made that a violent event well beyond anything we mere humans have experienced. The blast of energy surged away from the magnetar, out into the galaxy. In just a fifth of a second, the eruption gave off as much energy as the Sun does in a quarter of a million years.

Oh, and did I mention this magnetar is 50,000 light years away? No? That's 300 quadrillion miles away, about halfway across the freaking Milky Way galaxy itself!

And yet, even at that mind-crushing distance, it fried satellites and physically affected the Earth. It was so bright some satellites actually saw it reflected off the surface of the Moon! I'll note that a supernova, the explosion of an entire star, has a hard time producing any physical effect on the Earth if it's farther away than, say, 100 light years. Even a gamma-ray burst can only do any damage if it's closer than 8000 light years or so.

Bugs Inside: What Happens When the Microbes That Keep Us Healthy Disappear?

The human body has some 10 trillion human cells -- but 10 times that number of microbial cells. So what happens when such an important part of our bodies goes missing?

With rapid changes in sanitation, medicine and lifestyle in the past century, some of these indigenous species are facing decline, displacement and possibly even extinction. In many of the world's larger ecosystems, scientists can predict what might happen when one of the central species is lost, but in the human microbial environment -- which is still largely uncharacterized -- most of these rapid changes are not yet understood.

Meanwhile, each new generation in developed countries comes into the world with fewer of these native populations. "They're actually missing some component of their microbiota that they've evolved to have," Foxman says.

Previously, previously.

Exercise 4-13. Write a function reverse(s) which reverses the string s by turning the mind inside out, converting madness into reality and opening the door to allow the Old Ones to creep forth once more from their sunken crypt beyond time.

Slumming on lolfbmoments.com:

• "Ladies and Gentlemen... my sister is a whore."
• "Werewolf."
• "Thundercats."
• "Sunglasses."

Overtime by Charles Stross.