Massive security incompetence at American Express.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision to grant first amendment rights to corporations, Murray-Hill Incorporated is running for congress:

Danny O’Brien sums up all the talk about the closed nature of the iPad/iPhone/iPod operating system perfectly:

But the truth is, the cyclical fight against locked-in systems has been the recurring theme of computing since the mainframes.

Neil Freeman’s recent Electoral College Reform map:

is reminiscent of C. Etzel Pearcy’s 1973 Thirty-Eight states of America:

Both suffer from a problem that the National Popular Vote plan doesn’t have: what happens when the population distribution changes?

On Black Friday, artist Michele Pred “shop-dropped” prints of her artwork at Ikea. The prints are barcodes, which, when scanned, read “You are what you buy.” Ikea ends up with unexplained extra cash on their books, and a bunch of unsuspecting people have art hanging on their walls that’s both making fun of consumer culture, and worth a whole lot more than they think.

Here are two nifty visualizations of the evolution of open-source projects:

When Banksy makes a film, even I will play the viral video game:

Looks like Jackass crossed with Wild Style. One thing, though. Helvetica? How could a world renowned artisté such as Banksy stoop so low?

From the official Google blog:

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

The not so subtle subtext of the post is this: why should Google play nice for the Chinese government and operate a special, censored version of Google, while Google’s infrastructure is under attack from what are probably Chinese government agencies?

Now that I’m all grown up, maybe it’s time to get some antique Dutch Delft table settings.

This is dope: