08/01/09

Apt’s links for January 7th

• Stephen King fan publishes Shining’s Jack Torrance’s novel | Books | guardian.co.uk – “A Stephen King fan has published an 80-page version of the book which novelist Jack Torrance obsessively writes during King’s The Shining, where his descent into madness is revealed when his wife discovers that his work consists of just one phrase, endlessly repeated.” Lovely idea – shoddy execution. Awful jacket.
• beeker ideas: A very nice thing – “Lots of these things I’d read, a good few of them I hadn’t. But all of it translated really well into print. The sensation of reading posts in this way is hard to describe. The only similar thing I can think of is premature nostalgia, when you get a sense of how something happening right now is going to echo down the years to come in a precious way. It has something to do with the intention behind the original posts, and the way that’s been honoured, but bamboozled at the same time. What a lovely kind of attention.” What a beautiful thing. Curation is sacred.
• Weak Password Brings ‘Happiness’ to Twitter Hacker | Threat Level from Wired.com – “An 18-year-old hacker with a history of celebrity pranks has admitted to Monday’s hijacking of multiple high-profile Twitter accounts, including President-Elect Barack Obama’s [...] The hacker, who goes by the handle GMZ, told Threat Level on Tuesday he gained entry to Twitter’s administrative control panel by pointing an automated password-guesser at a popular user’s account. The user turned out to be a member of Twitter’s support staff, who’d chosen the weak password “happiness.” “
• Books of The Times – ?Appetite for Self-Destruction,? by Steve Knopper – When Labels Fought the Digital, and the Digital Won – Review – NYTimes.com – “The final sections of ?Appetite for Self-Destruction? describe the arrival of Steve Jobs and Apple on the scene. The release of the iPod was a kind of coup de grâce for the struggling industry. Before long, Apple became America?s biggest music retailer. Music executives watched, apoplectic and helpless. ?Apple had basically taken over the entire music business,? Mr. Knopper writes.” NY TImes review of a book about the myopia of the music biz.

Posted by Peter Collingridge in Links.

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