Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

January 4, 2018

Who’s on everyone’s 2017 “hit list”?

Filed under: R,Web Server — Patrick Durusau @ 8:10 pm

Who’s on everyone’s 2017 “hit list”? by Suzan Baert.

From the post:

At the end of the year, everyone is making lists. And radio stations are no exceptions.
Many of our radio stations have a weekly “people’s choice” music chart. Throughout the week, people submit their top 3 recent songs, and every week those votes turn into a music chart. At the end of the year, they collapse all those weekly charts into a larger one covering the entire year.

I find this one quite interesting: it’s not dependent on what music people buy, it’s determined by what the audience of that station wants to hear. So what are the differences between these stations? And do they match up with what I would expect?

What was also quite intriguing: in Dutch we call it a hit lijst and if you translate that word for word you get: hit list. Which at least one radio station seems to do…

Personally, when I hear the word hit list, music is not really what comes to mind, but hey, let’s roll with it: which artists are on everyone’s ‘hit list’?

A delightful scraping of four (4) radio station “hit lists,” which uses rOpenSci robotstxt, rvest, xml2, dplyr, tidyr, ggplot2, phantomJS, and collates the results.

Music doesn’t come to mind for me when I hear “hit list.”

For me “hit list” means what Google wasn’t you to know about subject N.

You?

So You Want to Play God? Intel Delivers – FUCKWIT Inside

Filed under: Cybersecurity,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 2:16 pm

Kernel-memory-leaking Intel processor design flaw forces Linux, Windows redesign by John Leyden and Chris Williams.

From the post:


It is understood the bug is present in modern Intel processors produced in the past decade. It allows normal user programs – from database applications to JavaScript in web browsers – to discern to some extent the layout or contents of protected kernel memory areas.

The fix is to separate the kernel’s memory completely from user processes using what’s called Kernel Page Table Isolation, or KPTI. At one point, Forcefully Unmap Complete Kernel With Interrupt Trampolines, aka FUCKWIT, was mulled by the Linux kernel team, giving you an idea of how annoying this has been for the developers.

Think of the kernel as God sitting on a cloud, looking down on Earth. It’s there, and no normal being can see it, yet they can pray to it.

Patches are forthcoming, to make your Intel machine 5% to 30% slower.

Cloud providers are upgrading but there’s a decade of Intel chips not in the cloud that await exploitation.

Show of hands. How many of you will slow your machines down by 5% to 30% to defeat this bug?

Next question: How long will it take to cycle out of service the most recent decade of Intel chips?

You’ll have to make your own sticker for your laptop/desktop/server:

BTW, for FUCKWIT and another deep chip flaw, see: Researchers Discover Two Major Flaws in the World’s Computers.

These fundamental flaws should alter your cybersecurity conversations. But will they?

January 3, 2018

How-To Defeat Facebook “Next or Next Page” Links

Filed under: Bash,Facebook — Patrick Durusau @ 10:09 pm

Not you but friends of yours are lured in by “click-bait” images to Facebook pages with “Next or Next Page” links. Like this one:

60 Groovy Photos You Probably Haven’t Seen Before

You can, depending on the speed of your connection and browser, follow each link. That’s tiresome and leaves you awash in ads for every page.

Here’s a start on a simple method to defeat such links.

First, if you follow the first link (they vary from site to site), you find:

http://groovyhistory.com/60-groovy-photos-you-probably-havent-seen-before/2

So we know from that URL that we need to increment the 2, up to and including 60, to access all the relevant pages.

If we do view source (CTRL-U), we find:

<div class=’gallery-image’>
<img src=’http://cdn.groovyhistory.com/content/50466/90669810f510ad0de494a9b55c1f67d2.jpg’
class=’img-responsive’ alt=” /></div>

We need to extract the image where its parent div has class=’gallery-image,’ write that to a file suitable for display.

I hacked out this quick one liner to do the deed:

echo "<html><head></head><body>" > pics.html;for i in `seq -w 1 59`;do wget -U Mozilla -q "http://groovyhistory.com/60-groovy-photos-you-probably-havent-seen-before/$i" -O - | grep gallery >> pics.html;echo "</body></html>" >> pics.html;done

Breaking the one-liner into steps:

  1. echo "<html><head></head><body>" > pics.html.

    Creates the HTML file pics.html and inserts markup down to the open body element.

  2. for i in `seq -w 1 60`.

    Creates the loop and the variable i, which is used in the next step to create the following URLs.

  3. do wget -U Mozilla -q "http://groovyhistory.com/60-groovy-photos-you-probably-havent-seen-before/$i" -O - .

    Begins the do loop, invokes wget, identifies it as Mozilla (-U Mozilla), suppresses messages (-q), gives the URL with the $i variable, requests the output of each URL (-O), pipes the output to standard out ( – ).

  4. | grep gallery >> pics.html.

    The | pipe sends the output of each URL to grep, which searches for gallery, when found, the line containing gallery is appended (>>) to pics.html. That continues until 60 is reached and the loop exits.

  5. echo "</body></html>" >> pics.html.

    After the loop exits, the closing body and html elements are appended to the pics.html file.

  6. done

    The loop having exited and other commands exhausted, the script exits.

Each step, in the one-liner, is separated from the others with a semi-colon “;”.

I converted the entities back to markup and it ran, except that it didn’t pickup the first image, a page without an appended number.

To avoid hand editing the script:

  • Pass URL at command line
  • Pass number of images on command line
  • Text to grep changes with host, so create switch statement that keys on host
  • Output file name as command line option

The next time you encounter “50 Famous Photo-Bombs,” “30 Celebs Now,” or “45 Unseen Beatles Pics,” a minute or two of editing even the crude version of this script will save you the time and tedium of loading advertisements.

Enjoy!

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