Brain on Fire Tim McCormack, distilled.

Due to a lawsuit by Eolas against Microsoft, Internet Explorer (both 6 and 7) is not allowed to auto-load movies, flash, and other plugins. The effect is that users must click an empty area with a gray outline to load the content or start interacting with it. The standard approach to route around this usability fiasco is to dynamically load the <object> and <embed> tags with javascript. Here I present an easier, more readable, and unobtrusive technique for embedding content in IE6 and IE7.

Star Simpson, the 19-year-old arrested at Logan airport for having a "hoax device", is just another living, breathing, hoping, dreaming human, like you. Essentially, she was arrested for being an idealist, for not understanding that the people with the guns and the power see "different" as "dangerous".

The following was written by a friend of mine, who wishes to remain anonymous, but gave permission to share it.

I thought I was being so clever when I put a content-negotiated API into TradeUps.net, my web development playground. To put it simply, a page can return the same information in different formats, depending upon the HTTP Accept: header. For example, this profile page (view only in Firefox for now) responds to a standard browser request with an HTML document, but returns JSON when it sees Accept: application/json as a header. In this case, a script on the page calls the same URL (/user/admin) again to get the map data in javascript-friendly format. That's where the weirdness starts.

Four days ago, a group calling itself the "MediaDefender-Defenders" released a torrent pointing to 700 megabytes of corporate emails from MediaDefender, a company providing "BitTorrent protection services" to record labels and movie studios. The emails expose company strategy, confidential contracts, passwords and login information, lists of servers and IP addresses, and reactions to mentions of the company in the news [read them here]. This post is a summary of recent events, along with a heaping of speculation as to what happened behind the scenes.

If you feel like being a little bit silly today, you might check out some code I wrote to generate BMP images right in the browser, using javascript. For maximum compatibility, I'm using the v3 header and uncompressed 24-bit color.

All mine does so far is generate a quasi-random bitmap. The same technique could be used to generate very small rounded-corner images and other progressive enhancements. Perhaps some other file formats might be interesting to play with as well. Excel spreadsheets, perhaps? I don't have much interest in continuing work on javascript-based file production, but I'd love to see other people take this idea for a spin.