February 2012
5 posts
Drogin: Anathema! →
cburrell.wordpress.com
Marc Drogin’s Medieval Calligraphy, not only a calligraphy instruction book but a very enjoyable and well-illustrated historical read, was an early influence on me, so it was neat to see a qualified reviewer offer a treatment of another of his books. I’ll be buying a copy for sure.
“A scribal tradition developed whereby a scribe, having completed his work, was able to append some personal thoughts to the text in a section that came to be called the explicit. In the beginning, the explicit simply recorded the work’s title (yes, at the end, oddly enough), the name of the place at which it had been copied, and the name of the scribe, but in time it became a kind of scribal graffiti zone wherein the scribe, having so long cloaked himself in the words of another, could finally step forward with a word or two of his own: perhaps a complaint, or a prayer, or even a joke.”
The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia →
chronicle.com
An example of subtle flaws built into Wikipedia’s culture and a reminder to take everything there with a big grain of salt.
Verisign was hacked last year. You’ve probably never heard of them.
Verisign, Inc. is an American company based in Reston, Virginia that operates a diverse array of network infrastructure, including two of the Internet’s thirteen root nameservers, the authoritative registry for the .com, .net, and .name generic top-level domains and the .cc and .tv country-code top-level domains, and the back-end systems for the .jobs, and .edu top-level domains. (Wikipedia)
In other words, Verisign is a big piece of the backbone that makes the internet actually work. When type in yourbank.com, you’re pretty much trusting Verisign to send your browser to the servers that your bank actually owns and controls. That’s just one small aspect of their operations. And now it’s been hacked and no one knows exactly what the attackers did or stole.
This kind of thing is happening all the time. Because the entities involved, like Verisign, do not advertise in malls or YouTube ads, most people don’t even know how, let alone whether, to care about incidents like this.
The point of all this is not to alarm anyone. I guess I’m just saying that people should be aware how thoroughly unreliable the internet really is.
