Simon Willison's Weblog: internet

Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group

2024-12-08T21:05:56+00:00

I just learned about this delightful piece of internet culture via Leven Parker on TikTok.

Occlupanids are the small plastic square clips used to seal plastic bags containing bread.

For thirty years (since 1994) John Daniel has maintained this website that catalogs them and serves as the basis of a wide ranging community of occlupanologists who study and collect these plastic bread clips.

There's an active subreddit, r/occlupanids, but the real treat is the meticulously crafted taxonomy with dozens of species split across 19 families, all in the class Occlupanida:

Class Occlupanida (Occlu=to close, pan= bread) are placed under the Kingdom Microsynthera, of the Phylum Plasticae. Occlupanids share phylum Plasticae with “45” record holders, plastic juice caps, and other often ignored small plastic objects.

If you want to classify your own occlupanid there's even a handy ID guide, which starts with the shape of the "oral groove" in the clip.

Or if you want to dive deep down a rabbit hole, this YouTube video by CHUPPL starts with Occlupanids and then explores their inventor Floyd Paxton's involvement with the John Birch Society and eventually Yamashita's gold.

Via @leven_parker

Tags: information-architecture, internet, tiktok

100 years of whatever this will be

2021-12-02T20:37:00+00:00

100 years of whatever this will be

This piece by apenwarr defies summarization but I enjoyed reading it a lot.

Tags: internet, avery-pennarun

What the Hell is Going On?

2019-03-17T16:50:04+00:00

What the Hell is Going On?

David Perell discusses how the shift from information scarcity to information abundance is reshaping commerce, education, and politics. Long but worthwhile.

Via @patio11

Tags: education, internet, politics

Quoting Benedict Evans

2019-01-18T06:55:58+00:00

[On 5G] This is the great thing about the decentralized, permissionless innovation of the internet - telcos don’t need to decide in advance what the use cases are, any more than Intel had to decide what the use cases for faster CPUs would be.

— Benedict Evans

Tags: internet, decentralisation, benedict-evans

My Internet Mea Culpa

2017-12-26T14:59:16+00:00

My Internet Mea Culpa

Rick Webb asks “What if we were wrong?” about the internet leading to enormous benefit for humankind. I’ve been worrying about this a lot recently: it turns out the internet provides tools that allow bad people to spread lies, propaganda and discrimination with lethal effectiveness. It’s hard to believe that universal access to the sum of all human knowledge can have negative effects, but there are clearly a whole load of negative effects that us internet utopians failed to predict.

Tags: internet

This Is What Happens When Millions Of People Suddenly Get The Internet

2017-09-19T04:59:00+00:00

This Is What Happens When Millions Of People Suddenly Get The Internet

“Countries which come online quickly rank lowest in digital literacy & are most likely to fall for scams, fake news”

Via Twitter

Tags: internet, digital-literacy

What steps can I take to protect my data in case my laptop gets stolen?

2013-08-07T09:51:00+00:00

My answer to What steps can I take to protect my data in case my laptop gets stolen? on Quora

Set up full drive encryption - that way if someone steals your laptop they won't be able to access your data without a password.

Keep the files you can't afford to lose in Dropbox (if you are working on then on the road) so they are constantly backed up in case if theft. Your Dropbox folder will be safely encrypted along with the rest of your drive. You do need to trust Dropbox though.

Tags: hacking, internet, security, travel, quora

What technologies were used in developing web applications in the '90s?

2013-07-21T16:17:00+00:00

My answer to What technologies were used in developing web applications in the '90s? on Quora

Perl. Lots of Perl. There was a site called Matt's Script Archive which was full of terribly written Perl scripts for things like hit counters and form emailers and guest books. It was very popular.

Good lord... It still exists! http://www.scriptarchive.com/

Tags: internet, webapps, web-development, quora

What will HTTP be superseded by?

2012-12-26T12:28:00+00:00

My answer to What will HTTP be superseded by? on Quora

HTTP 1.x will likely never be completely replaced, but there is ongoing work at the moment to define HTTP 2.0. The first draft of this was released in November and is based on Google's SPDY protocol, which is already widely deployed in Google Chrome and Google's web properties (other browsers have experimented with support for SPDY as well): http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

One thing that looks pretty likely is that any replacement will only work over SSL - not just to improve privacy and security on the web, but also because this is the most reliable way to avoid breaking all of the legacy proxy servers already deployed around the net.

Tags: http, internet, web-development, quora

Which web startup conferences are there nowadays?

2012-12-04T18:01:00+00:00

My answer to Which web startup conferences are there nowadays? on Quora

We have a pretty comprehensive list on Lanyrd - the site works like wikipedia, so if there are any we are missing you can sign in and add them to our Startups topic: Startup conferences and events

Tags: conferences, internet, technology, quora

How are websites hacked to have their content defaced? How can I prevent such attacks on my website?

2012-12-04T14:35:00+00:00

My answer to How are websites hacked to have their content defaced? How can I prevent such attacks on my website? on Quora

There are countless ways in which a website could be defaced - way too many for a single Quora answer!

Here are a few off the top of my head:

An unpatched operating system with vulnerabilities in system services (SSH daemons, web servers, other procceses). Defence is to make sure you keep your packages up to date and avoid running anything exotic that might not be actively maintained.
XSS attacks. Make sure you have a deep understanding of what XSS is and how it works, and ideally use a template language that escapes output by default to help avoid the most obvious problems.
SQL injection attacks. Make sure you use a library that paramaterises SQL queries and handles escaping correctly for you, NEVER append strings together to create a SQL statement.
Sniffing your administrative username/password or even your authenticated cookie over an insecure WiFi network - make sure you only ever send those things over HTTPS.
Brute force attacks on your administrative login screen - make sure you rate limit login attempts.
Guessing your server's SSH password (or your admin interface password) - use a one-time, random password stored securely in something like 1password and ideally don't have SSH passwords at all, use SSH public-key authentication instead.
Serving JavaScript on the page from another URL (e.g. an externally hosted JavaScript library or an advertising network) which gets compromised. It doesn't matter how good your own site security is if you link to insecure JavaScript from a third party.

Tags: hacking, internet, sql-injection, quora

How does a new Website that depends on content from users start?

2012-09-10T17:18:00+00:00

My answer to How does a new Website that depends on content from users start? on Quora

The tried and tested way to solve this problem is with a closed alpha period. Launch the site as a private alpha, then invite a bunch of people you know and trust to start trying it out. Once you launch to the public you'll already have some content and more importantly you'll have set an example of how new users to the site should behave.

If you don't have enough friends to pull this off your site is probably doomed, but you could always try what the Reddit guys did and invent a bunch of personas that have conversations amongst themselves! http://arstechnica.com/business/...

Tags: internet, web-development, quora

Do country/city IP addresses always stay the same?

2012-08-05T13:28:00+00:00

My answer to Do country/city IP addresses always stay the same? on Quora

Yes, they can change - and there isn't much central control. IANA dish out IP blocks to regional authorities, who hand them on to ISPs,who distribute them to end users... But the ISPs might cover multiple cities or even countries. You can read a bit about this process here: http://www.iana.org/numbers

So there are no absolute guarantees that the geographical location of a given IP address won't change, or that an IP address won't be reassigned.

For this reason, there are companies that specialise in researching and collating information on IP addresses. Probable the most widely known is www.maxmind.com who offer a ppvarious commercial databases, depending on the level of detail you need (they have a free end which just does county level and is infrequently updated). They charge a site license and an optional subscription for ongoing updates.

Tags: internet, programming, quora

How did slashes become the standard path separators for URLs?

2012-02-10T14:51:00+00:00

My answer to How did slashes become the standard path separators for URLs? on Quora

I'm going to take an educated guess and say it's because of unix file system conventions. Early web servers mapped the URL to a path on disk inside the document root - this is still how most static sites work today.

Tags: internet, urls, w3c, quora

What are some good ways to promote a "networking event" on the internet ?

2011-05-23T12:10:00+00:00

My answer to What are some good ways to promote a "networking event" on the internet ? on Quora

Add your event to http://lanyrd.com/ and encourage your attendees to mark themselves as attending. That way, anyone who follows them on Twitter and uses Lanyrd will hear about the event, either directly on the site or via email if they've signed up for our email alerts.

Putting your event on Plancast is a good idea for the same reason.

Tags: events, internet, networking, quora

What are the main things a non-technical co-founder of a tech company should focus on while the site is still being developed?

2010-12-23T09:24:00+00:00

My answer to What are the main things a non-technical co-founder of a tech company should focus on while the site is still being developed? on Quora

Building the right product.

Tags: business, entrepreneurship, internet, startups, quora

What are some popular movies that are no longer plausible due to the ubiquity of cell phones & the internet?

2010-12-19T12:19:00+00:00

My answer to What are some popular movies that are no longer plausible due to the ubiquity of cell phones & the internet? on Quora

"No Signal"

Tags: internet, quora, movies

What is the story of Advogato?

2010-10-26T15:15:00+00:00

My answer to What is the story of Advogato? on Quora

There's a Google Tech Talk about Advogato: http://video.google.com/videopla...

Tags: community, internet, open-source, quora

Is the 90-9-1 rule of user participation a myth?

2010-10-11T15:29:00+00:00

My answer to Is the 90-9-1 rule of user participation a myth? on Quora

Anecdotal evidence from crowdsourcing style projects I've worked on tend to support the basic principle (if not the exact ratios). The vast majority of the work on projects I have been involved with ends up being performed by a tiny subset of highly active users.

Tags: community, internet, startups, quora

Why do so many Internet sites end with the letter 'r' (but not 'er')? Think about Tumblr, Dopplr, Migratr. What's behind this?

2010-09-08T13:52:00+00:00

My answer to Why do so many Internet sites end with the letter 'r' (but not 'er')? Think about Tumblr, Dopplr, Migratr. What's behind this? on Quora

We just launched a project called lanyrd, which is a play on lanyard. We partly picked the name because the domain was available, but there's actually a big advantage to using a made-up word: it's really easy to search for coverage and feedback on Twitter, Google Blogsearch and the like. The string "lanyrd" is almost exclusively used to discuss our project - had we used a dictionary word, tracking down feedback would have been a lot harder.

Tags: domains, internet, quora

Quoting Tim Bray

2010-02-10T17:40:40+00:00

The Net is the greatest listening engine ever devised. These days anyone can choose, with its help, to be well-informed. You have to make the effort to figure out which key people are really on top of what you care about, so that you can start listening to them. Plus, you need to deploy some saved searches. Once you’ve done these things, then when you turn your computer on in the morning, it’ll tell you if anything’s happened that you need to know about.

— Tim Bray

Tags: tim-bray, internet, blogging, information

Quoting Joe Gregorio

2009-11-19T18:53:49+00:00

Authority, historically, gets bestowed on the gatekeepers of information, such as Britannica, universities, newspapers, etc. Everything that can be digitized will be digitized, and will then be available over the internet, which is disruptive, not only to business models, but to authority.

— Joe Gregorio

Tags: joe-gregorio, wikipedia, authority, newspapers, internet

Quoting Meg Pickard

2009-10-26T21:59:50+00:00

I was thinking the other day how long it had been since I used the acronym "IRL" or the expanded phrase "In Real Life." It used to be the thing we'd say when we meant "not on the internet", and I'm glad that it has become gradually obsolete over the years, now that the internet is accepted as part of life.

— Meg Pickard

Tags: meg-pickard, slang, irl, internet

Quoting Tom Steinberg

2009-01-22T10:20:49+00:00

There's no such thing as a good day to bury bad news any more, the Internet has seen to that.

— Tom Steinberg

Tags: internet, news, tom-steinberg, mysociety

Quoting Clay Shirky

2009-01-13T14:22:59+00:00

What the Internet has actually done is not decimate literary reading; that was really a done deal by 1970. What it has done, instead, is brought back reading and writing as a normal activity for a huge group of people.

— Clay Shirky

Tags: clay-shirky, tv, internet, reading

Happy 30th Birthday Internet!

2007-11-22T15:25:24+00:00

Happy 30th Birthday Internet!

“Exactly 30 years ago today on November 22, 1977 the first three networks were connected to become the Internet.”

Tags: birthday, elliotte-rusty-harold, internet