XKCD: Why you should give bad reviews to hotels you like

By Cory Doctorow at 1:11 pm Friday, Sep 30

Today's XKCD proposes a strangely optimal strategy for reviewing the hotels you love, provided you don't mind being a jerk. He calls it the "tragedy of you're a dick."

Hotels [xkcd.com] Tags: behavioral economics, Comics, economics, Funny, travel, web theory, webcomics

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LibDems get to vote on copyright reform, but who inserted the clause saying downloading should be a criminal act?

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Guy who is Muslim: “Muslims should stop apologizing for 9/11.”

Comedian and writer Aman Ali of the "30 Mosques" project featured previously here on Boing Boing has an opinion piece up at CNN about how he's sick of feeling like he has to apologize, on behalf of all Muslims, for 9/11.

Just like Christianity and Judaism, Islam unequivocally condemns terrorism. Don’t take it from me, though. Grab a copy of the Quran from a library and find out for yourself.

Don’t rely on some cherry-picked crackpot interpretation of the Muslim holy book that you read on some Islamophobic hack’s poorly designed website. Speaking of which, Islamophobes need to put down the Quran and pick up a book on HTML programming and Flash.

When 9/11 happened, I can understand why the average person would want to know what Muslims actually believe. After all, the terrorists claimed they were acting in the name of Islam.

That’s why hundreds of Islamic organizations around the globe condemned the attacks and told the truth about how Islam doesn’t condone terrorism whatsoever.

But that was 10 years ago. Why are mainstream American Islamic groups like the Islamic Society of North America, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Public Affairs Council still condemning the attacks and just about any other act of terrorism that pops up in the news?

Read More: My Take: Muslims should stop apologizing for 9/11 – CNN Belief Blog.

Aman is funny on Twitter.

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Advice for self-publishers: why should anyone care about your book?

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Tor: DigiNotar Debacle, and what you should do about it

Security researcher and Tor Project member Jake Appelbaum has been writing about the DigiNotar hack I blogged about yesterday. He's been on it for some time now, and has a couple of posts up on the Tor blog addressing how this affects the Tor anonymity/privacy proxy system. Here's a snip:

This incident doesn't affect the functionality of Tor clients or the Tor Network itself, since Tor doesn't use the flawed CA system. The Tor network uses a much simpler and flatter trust design that protects us from many of these CA issues. Further, Tor's distributed-trust design limits the damage from compromise of any given network component.

But the incident does affect users that are attempting to reach The Tor Project's infrastructure: with one of these bogus certificates, an attacker could convince your browser that you were talking to The Tor Project website, when really you were talking to the attacker.

We have taken direct action in an attempt to stop this kind of attack in the future with two major browser vendors and we hope to integrate a fix with all other willing browsers. Please contact us if you ship a browser and you'd like to help your users to be proactively secure when visiting our sites

Read the whole thing: "The DigiNotar Debacle, and what you should do about it." And, "DigiNotar Damage Disclosure."

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Beauty pageant candidates recite their non-threatening answer to “Should evolution be taught in schools”

[Video Link] It's weird that the question was "Should evolution be taught in schools?" instead of "Should creationism be taught in schools?" Also, I was hoping for at least one Pastafarian in the group!

Bonus video:

2011 Miss USA contest answering the question, “Should evolution be taught in schools?”

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