The Who's Who Racket

So, I get this email today:
Tom,

It is my honor to inform you that as of April 27, 2010 you are being considered for
inclusion in our forethcoming edition of the 2010 directory representing
the WHO'S WHO of Worldclass Professionals.

Our alliance is recognized by talented individuals who hold knowledge and experience in a particular industry, demonstrate a commitment to excellence, and seek career advancement or enhancement.

On behalf of the CEO and our esteemed staff, we wish you continued success.


How exciting, huh? Well I've been down this road before. These companies are basically a racket. You're buttered up with the prestige of such an honor and asked to proof the directory information about yourself. Once that's done, for the low, low price of $69.95 (plus S&H of course) you can buy a copy of this prestigious book. So WHO else is reading it besides the folks printed inside? I'm thinking nobody.

DJ Stingray interview at The Wire

HERE

A teabagger wants to shut VA hospitals as they are 'socializd' medicine too...

RGB wallpaper by Carnovsky

 Cool or what...

These RGB wallpapers by Carnovsky, which debuted at Milan Design Week, consist of three separate patterns printed over each other. By shining red, green, or blue light on them, you can isolate and hide the different images. 

@'Lost at E Minor'

At least they are honest!

UK Daily Star pulled from airports over volcano ash splash

Today's Daily Star splash headline. The accompanying picture is taken from a TV reconstruction of an incident 28 years ago. Click for full front page

Copies of today's Daily Star have been removed from airport newsagent shelves today over fears that its splash, headlined "Terror as plane hits ash cloud" with an image of a 747 with engines ablaze, could cause panic among travellers.

Richard Desmond's red top was removed from shops at Gatwick and Manchester airports after today's edition was published, with a front-page story claiming to feature "dramatic pictures as jets get OK to defy volcano".

However, the image used in the splash was taken from a TV reconstruction of an incident 28 years ago in which a BA 747's engines were knocked out by a volcanic ash cloud. The documentary, previously broadcast on the National Geographic channel, is to be shown on Channel Five tonight.

Gatwick airport's director of communications, Andrew McCallum, said: "We thought it was inappropriate at this point in time after six days of disruption and as people were anxious to get to their holiday destination or to return home to have these sort of computer-generated images on the front page.

"We had a discussion with other airports having seen the Daily Star's front page today and decided to remove it. It was in our view not appropriate."

Gatwick bosses also asked a Daily Star reporter and photographer to leave the premises today. The airport said it was unrelated to the paper's front-page story and was part of its management of media coverage of the travel disruption story.

The Star story, which featured four images from the documentary, described how a "stricken British Airways jumbo jet is engulfed by 'flames' after flying into a deadly cloud of volcanic ash".

"The dramatic pictures show the horrifying reason why flights were grounded for five days. The images are part of a gripping TV reconstruction tonight of a near disaster when BA Flight 009 flew into volcanic dust in 1982," the story continued.

"Last night the TV show's images were given a new relevance. Planes finally got the go-ahead to fly into ALL of Britain's airports from 10pm last night, despite the ash still being present."

A source at Gatwick airport said the story was "outrageous and irresponsible" as the ban on flights was lifted after the volcanic ash cloud was no longer judged to be a danger to air travel.

"There was no explanation on the front that this was a TV mock-up of an incident from 1982," added the source.

"Anyone who saw that front page would have naturally assumed these were images from a flight that had gone thrown a volcanic cloud after the restrictions were lifted last night. It was clearly designed to sell papers by inducing panic which is the last thing any of us need right now."

Russell Craig, head of communications for Manchester Airport, said the Daily Star splash had the potential to cause "absolute panic" among passengers and said the airport was considering a permanent ban on the paper.

"We felt that having spent an awfully long time in this airport over the last six days with some very frightened people, publishing something like that whether intentional or not would cause absolute panic among our passengers," he said.

"We didn't feel it was appropriate to have that on display in an airport full of people who were very happy that they were able to fly again.

"We have had so much negative feedback from passengers that we are considering whether the Daily Star will remain off the shelves on a permanent basis."

The Daily Star had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.

@'The Guardian'

(Maybe Mick Jogger had it pulled so people wouldn't read about the size of his dick LOL!)

One of Sir Michael Phillip Jogger's ex girlfriends says:

“He has the smallest penis alive. He’s a nasty little Sir Mick, with a little dick. It is very little."

The Black Dog - Remixes and Remixed (DJ Set)

    

This is an hour long set The Black Dog did at an afterparty after a gig, it mainly focuses on tracks they've remixed or had remixed for them.

Download at Soundcloud 
More
HERE

‘Woefully Underconceptualised’: Rick McGrath on J.G. Ballard’s Cover Art

'Venus Smiles’: one of five Ballardian ‘ads’ published in Ambit magazine (designer: J.G. Ballard; Ambit, #46, Winter 1970/71)

The incomparable Dali; a very successful union (artist: Salvador Dali; Jonathan Cape, London, 1970)

LEFT: A Mike Foreman illustration for Doubleday’s edition of The Atrocity Exhibition (Doubleday, NY, 1970)

RIGHT: A Phoebe Gloeckner illustration for the RE/Search reprint (RE/Search, San Francisco, 1990)

@'Ballardian'

jesus wept

@'Poorly Dressed'

Happy 70th Birthday Giorgio Moroder (for yesterday!)

  Giorgio Moroder

'Chase'

HERE

(Thanx to 'Moggieboy' for the upload!)

Kate's Party gatecrashed by 60,000 Facebook users

A screen grab from the original Kate's Party Facebook event.

Notorious party boy Corey Worthington appeared to have met his match after more than 60,000 Facebook users invited themselves to fellow Australian Kate Miller's birthday party.

But the joke may in fact be on the gatecrashers as the entire meme - and Miller herself - has now been revealed to be the brainchild of Adelaide-based serial online prankster David Thorne.

The web kicked into gear after learning of the Facebook event "Kate's Birthday Party", which was billed as a small gathering of friends in an apartment but, crucially, the event was not closed, so anyone could invite new attendees.

David Thorne.

The Facebook page for the May 1 event was created on Saturday and garnered 5000 attendees in 10 minutes, growing to 60,000 overnight. By the time the group was shut down by Facebook there were a further 180,000 people who had been invited but not yet confirmed.

Over 500 related Facebook groups sprung up around the party, such as "Who needs a ride to Kate's party", "Which turban should I wear to Kate's", "I hope there's more than one toilet in kate's apartment", "I have enough cheese & crackers for 8 ppl, do you think that's enough for Kates", "Flight QF785 to Kates Party", "Kate's afterparty" and "It's actually a surprise party don't tell kate!!".

The description for the original event was quickly altered as its popularity grew: "WTF?????????? WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE? WHY ARE THERE 10000 PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN INVITED?????? THIS IS A PRIVATE PARTY AT OUR APARTMENT."

There's now an entire website, KatesParty.com, and a Twitter feed, with people sending in "fanpics" of themselves holding up posters saying "I'm Going to Kate's Party".

The original event page has now been removed from Facebook but several unofficial Kate's Party events are being planned in Australian capital cities for Saturday.

Of course, as with any popular internet meme, there's also a t-shirt on sale emblazoned with the fake photo of Kate used on the Facebook event and the words "I went to Kates Party".

Thorne, who runs the highly popular prankster site 27bslash6.com, came clean when contacted by this website today, saying he constructed the Facebook event as "a bit of pointless fun" to entertain people over the weekend.

Word of the fake party first began to spread virally after Thorne published a link to the event on his Twitter page. "Yay. Kate's having a party in her small apartment. Hit attending & give the host an aneurysm," Thorne's tweet read.

"It took me five minutes to set it up so it would entertain a few people over the weekend," said Thorne.

"I didn't expect there to be 500+ Facebook groups about it and there's also a website called katesparty.com, and they've organised a nationwide party starting at 6pm [on Saturday] in every state."

Thorne said he was impressed with how quickly Facebook acted to shut the event down.

"Usually when stuff goes awry on Facebook it takes them several days to do anything about it, so I think it shows that they're stepping up to the plate," he said.

Thorne's hilarious pranks have entertained internet users for years and he has recently collated the best of them in a new book, The Internet is a Playground.

While the entire birthday party event was a hoax, it illustrates the risks posed by failing to double-check privacy settings on Facebook. Many have found out the hard way by winding up on failbook.com.

Julian Cole, digital strategist at The Conscience Organisation, said the Kates Party meme illustrated how users were becoming more adept at using the platform and creating viral web hits.

Cole himself believed the event was a real party until he was informed it was a prank by this website.

"[But] for users who don't have such a great understanding of the platform they can sometimes fall into these traps where this could happen ... it's very Corey Worthington-esque - I'm sure that this happens a lot," said Cole.

Asher Moses @'The Age'

 See you at Fed Square Mayday 6PM
(Thanx Leisa!)

Cock/Kunst

Facebook privacy hole 'lets you see where strangers plan to go'

Facebook: released new Graph API last Friday. Photograph: Linda Nylind

Facebook's new system for connecting together the web seems to have a serious privacy hole, a web developer has discovered.

Some people report that they are able to see the public "events" that Facebook users have said they will attend – even if they person is not a "friend" on the social network.

The discovery was made by Ka-Ping Yee, a software engineer for the charitable arm of Google, who was trying out the search query system known as the "Graph API" released by Facebook last Friday. In some cases – though not all – it will let you see the public events that people have said they will attend, or have attended.

Yee demonstrated the flaw by showing how the API – which plugs directly into Facebook's databases – can show you a list of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's planned public events.

Yee says that he was very disturbed by the discovery – because there seemed to be no way to prevent the events from appearing on the API, which is publicly accessible, except by saying you were "not attending" an event.

"It seemed that anyone could get this list. Today, I spent a while checking to make sure I wasn't crazy," he wrote on his blog. "I didn't opt in for this. I even tried setting all my privacy settings for maximum privacy. But Facebook is still exposing the list of events I've attended, and maybe your event."

The discovery will intensify the debate over Facebook's new system – which has drawn complaints that it makes it far too difficult to keep personal information private.

The implications of being able to find out the movements of any of the 400m people on Facebook are potentially wide-ranging – although the flaw does not seem to apply to every user, or every event. Yee says that the simplest way to prevent your name appearing in such lists is to put "not attending" against any event you are invited to.

"This kind of event list is not even accessible to your friends on Facebook," noted Yee. "As far as I can tell, there is no way to turn this off with your own privacy settings."

The problem mirrors that which Google ran into when it created its new Buzz systems, which aimed to create a Twitter-like social network – but annoyed people because it assumed that anyone with whom you had exchanged email would want to be part of your network. But the example of a wife who wanted to stay away from her abusive husband – but with whom she had once swapped an email – showed that Buzz had a flawed approach to privacy.

Similarly the Facebook API system may turn out to be crucially flawed. "What can your event list say about you? Quite a bit," wrote Yee. "It might reveal your home address, your friends' home addresses, the names and groups of people you associate with, your hobbies, or your political or religious activities, for example. "

However some people who have tried Yee's method of accessing the site were not able to repeat widespread invasion of privacy – though Zuckerberg's calendar was discoverable by everyone. The accessibility seemed to be semi-random: despite Yee's best efforts, a list of events still shows up for him.

Although the system only reveals data about "open" events – which by definition are public already – the new system changes the game radically. "There's a big difference between publishing an event page with a list of people attending, and publishing a list of events that you attended. Before last Wednesday, to find out which events you attended, I'd have to visit every single event page on Facebook and look for your name among the people attending. Now, I can just ask the API what you've been doing, and it will tell me. This kind of event list is not even accessible to your friends on the Facebook website; I haven't found any page at http://facebook.com/ that lets me list a friend's events. The API provides this list to anyone, so this is newly exposed information."

Charles Arthur @'The Guardian'

DJ Premier talks about his last meeting with Guru

With questions still remaining over details surrounding the death and final wishes of late rapper Guru last week, his former GangStarr parter DJ Premier has been discussing the final time he saw him.

As previously reported, immediately after Guru's death last Monday, his most recent producer Solar issued a statement and a letter purporting to be the rapper's final wishes, which included the desire for Solar to bring up his son KC and run his charitable organisation, and a particularly vitriolic rant against DJ Premier. However, the rapper's family say that they were not aware of any such charity being in operation, and claim that Guru had been in a coma since suffering a heart attack in February, so could not have written, or even dictated, the letter. Nor could he have issued the statement released via Solar in March assuring fans that he was recovering well.

Speaking on his Sirius Hip Hop Nation radio show, Premier recalled visiting his former collaborator in hospital once the rapper had slipped into a coma earlier this year. He recalled: "When I saw Guru it really fucked me up. I wore a GangStarr shirt first of all; just for the energy and so he knew that that's forever with us. And that includes everyone that came before me; I know every one of them... It was so ill [because] of what I was hearing of him waking up, writing, and tweeting and all that stuff. There was no way. He looked so gone".

He added that the rapper looked extremely dishevelled and, although you'd think that would be the responsibility of hospital staff, questioned how much care Solar had actually be providing: "If you love him, and you're taking care of him, why the fuck did his nails look longer than a fucking ruler? [And] a clump Afro? I've taken care of people in the hospital [before]. You can wash their hair and clean their nails off. His feet were swollen and his toenails were really disgusting... I took the logo on my shirt and rubbed it against his whole body and told him a message from me about how much I loved him, and that we were for live and still were for life. Then I kissed him on his face and let him know that I was going to miss him because it seemed like he was already gone"

@'CMU'

Don't forget to grab DJ Premier's wonderful Guru mix

HERE