Tag Archives: hacking

The Daily Feed
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Curious censoring

Photo courtesy of
‘Censura’
courtesy of ‘Inti’

At this point “change the default password” advice is pretty old news. Similarly, pranks when people don’t do so are also a little tired – there’s  a whole gallery of altered signs accompanying an article on the web indicating what the default password is over here. NBC4 has a shot here of a roadsign sign that’s been tampered with here in our area and made to say things that VDOT probably doesn’t normally say to the public. I mean, maybe in Manassas but not on the GW Parkway!

More interesting to me, though, is the parts of the image NBC blurred out. Okay, F*** I get why you redact that. B***SACK? Is ‘ballsack’ really censor-worthy?

Technology, The Daily Feed, The Hill
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Hacking The Government (For Good, Not Evil)

Photo courtesy of
‘Open Government Data Session Tack-on Free For All’
courtesy of ‘illustir’

The hackers and do-gooders at Sunlight Labs are coordinating their first ever Open Government hackathon from March 29th to March 31st. Although the event takes place in Chicago (at PyCon2009 at the Crowne Plaza Chicago O’Hare hotel) there will also be an online presence, so those of you interested in making that rather large DC employer known as the federal government more open and accessible can still take part.

The nature of the sprint will be fairly freeform, two Sunlight Labs members will be on hand guiding users that want to contribute to opening up the government. Users can come to the sprint without any background and we would help coordinate them and place them on a project where there skills would be useful (there is always a ton of scraping that needs to be done, building mini-web apps to showcase gov’t data, etc.)