So in anticipation of a quiet Friday, here’s a collection of links to the most interesting of the past few weeks: (Actually just an excuse to clear up some browser tabs!!).

• A (Photo) History of Obama Feigning Interest in Mundane Things
  Sometimes being the POTUSA has its advantages, sometimes it doesn’t…
• The 40 Most Sexual Photos from the Olympics
  Kinky stuff indeed.
• Backdoor Corporate Sabotage with DNS
  Another relatively-obvious-in-hindsight corporate espionage scenario
• Parking Strategies
  Because some lazy people, really, really need to read this.
• Setup Your Own Proxy Server in 5 Minutes For Free (with little to no technical knowledge)    Because Corporate Internet Proxy Filters are misguided, misdirected and usually misconfigured too.
• Lyricstraining helps you learn foreign languages through music and lyrics of songs.
  The interface on this is, quite simply, brilliantly done… and yes, it is fun.
• Understanding Credit Card Numbers
• How To Write Your Own Facebook App in 5 Minutes
  Build a Facebook app – make millions of dollars, in theory, anyway.
• The Man Your Man Could Smell Like
  If you haven’t seen this, where have you been?
• The Age Old Question: Is It Better To Rent or Buy A Property
  America specific discussion, but still handy for getting your head around the details.

Seems rather pointless to me, but make your own mind up I guess.

Ok, so it’s kinda like my job a labour of love and tribute to talent to make sure their website DieAntwoord.com stays up and running all perfeshinal and serving poes-cool next level beats and pics, so today I saw they’ve updated with 20 Fun Facts About Die Antwoord (It’s on their “About” page.) Here are a few of my faves:

1-NINJA, YO-LANDI and DJ HI-TEK made all their music, music videos, video stings, photos, and this next-level interwebsite all on their own with the help of some good friends.

3-NINJA has a secret fairy forest tattoo on left arm that he covers with bass. (Isn’t that “heavy bass”??)

5-Yo-landi’s mom cuts her hair, but she gets her hair dyed at SCAR HAIR. Yo-landi says: It’s always important to remember your roots.

7-NINJA likes Dolfins.

10-ZEF is a unique South African term that has been around for fuck knows how long. This term was made famous 10 years ago by a next-level interwebsite called WatKykJy.com.

17-NINJA does not sit like a doos with a koki pen and draw every single one of his tattoos on in the exact same identical place every time he has to be in a photo or a music video or a rap show you fuckin idiot, or wait…maybe he does. Jissis!

19-DIE ANTWOORD raps for the Chosen Ones.

Visit the site for the rest: DieAntwoord

Yes, according to site logs they’ve been pushing up to 280 Gigabytes of traffic from their site in a single day. (Yes I host the site, which is how I know).

Check their website here: Die Antwoord, and sommer Youtube a bit for their other videos.

“Allahu Ekber! denmark israel asshole Americas – 45 thousand people will give account – Hooray Chechnya”.

I like the background music though – that was a nice touch! Visit the site here or a screengrab here if it gets switched off.

Elaborate hoax
Industry experts, however, are calling the hack “an elaborate hoax”. Some claim the “hack” is simply a carefully crafted “viral marketing campaign” to try and get the website its first visitor. South Africa, they say, with a mere 400 000 broadband subscribers, simply has not had the internet penetration that would see people visiting a bland local government website instead of getting their usual facebook fix, and so a drastic approach was developed to pump up the traffic to the government site.

Only time will tell if the approach works, or if the site will simply return to its previous anonymity.

MusicDNA

MusicDNA should be MusicDOA.

Why? Well firstly, (Mail and) Guardian, file formats are female, in the same way that LPs are female. They always have been, and always will be – ask any geek. So, if MusicDOA is the son of MP3, then it’s not a welcome part of the music family.

But issues of gender aside, Apple has already invented MusicDNA – they just called it the “iTunes LP“, a much nicer name. Bundling additional digital content and interweb-link-crud along with the MP3 is not the revolution. It’s not even a warning shot over the bow. It’s more like “a tribute to the zip archive”. Yet some musically challenged business-moron (Stefan Kohlmeyer, the chief executive of Bach Technology, which has developed the file) feels that *this*, a rehash of MP3, will save the record companies?

C’mon, guys, it’s already over. The music label is done. Over. Archaic. Closed. Piracy does and always will prevail. Artists will make money from performing. Additional revenue streams will open up here and there, but the giant middle-man of music has been turned away at the gates, left to wonder (and wander) at how they ended up hat-in-hand, shunned by the masses.

We simply don’t need another audio file format. MP3 / FLAC / AAC is probably good enough, until we have flying cars anyway. And we especially do not need another proprietary format that is riddled with DRM and all kinds of consumer-abusing mechanisms (think tracking cookies, spyware, behaviour profiling). And of course alongside this “MusicDNA archive” will be the potential to literally hack the shit out of the consumer who buys and uses it. No longer will viruses be delivered by email, but by iTunes (or equivalent) instead. If we ever do need another format, it will be open source, patent-free and flexible, such as Ogg Vorbis.

So here’s to MusicDOA and the millions of stupid dollars spent developing an obfuscated zip file. Well fucking done, clowns. When you’re done pissing money away, please build me my flying car.