Common Paradox Tech Blog

This astute synopsis of Lindsay Lohan’s ultra-meta pièce de résistance isn’t a fluke—no, over at Comcast, movie summarization has been elevated to an artform. That, or their whole staff has a raging pill habit. Either way!

WTF Comcast started collecting Comcast’s best synopsis work about a week ago, and they’ve already unearthed a treasure trove of top-rate film criticism, thinly disguised as Tweet-length cable box blurbery. My favorites:

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As a Time Warner customer, I have to say I feel cheated. Comcast, or whatever subcontractor they’re buying this stuff from: Give this (wo?)man a raise. [WTF Comcast]

UPDATE: Deadspin sheds some light on the source of Comcast’s listings.

If you’ve been backing up your Pre, you might think that if you, say, drop it in the toilet, you’ll be set to have all your data placed on a replacement. That might not be the case.

It looks like the Palm Profile has been having issues with corrupted backups, leaving users trying to restore from a backup without their data. It’s not everyone who’s had this problem, just more people than can be called a fluke.

Here’s Palm’s statement on the matter:

We are seeing a small number of customers who have experienced issues transferring their Palm Profile information to another Palm webOS device. Palm and Sprint are working closely together to support these customers to successfully transfer their information to the new device.

Good to know, clumsy Pre owners. [PreCentral]

Wired writer Evan Ratliff spent 27 days in constant fear of getting caught as a small army of amateur and professional investigators hunted him. He had a bounty on his head and the Internet nipping at his heels.

Vanish, a combination of a manhunt and an experiment, began at 5:38 pm on August 14, 2009 as a bold headline on Wired proclaimed “Author Evan Ratliff Is on the Lam. Locate Him and Win $5,000.” We would discover if someone could disappear in today’s world, or whether the electronic trails from ATM, email, and cell phone usage would give him away.

Of course, in Evan’s case it wasn’t just a few concerned family members or police officers looking. It was any person on the Internet whose curiosity was aroused, either by the sheer challenge or by the bounty. Any and all traceable information would be shared over the next few weeks. Soon Evan’s phone records, credit card statements, IP dumps, interviews with friends, and anything that his hunters could dig up would be posted on Twitter, Facebook, and Wired’s own site.

The end goal for the hunters was to locate Evan, photograph him after giving the codeword “fluke,” and then submitting that photo along with a codeword Evan would provide to Wired. And after 27 long days, someone did just that. Evan was caught.

You can read the entire tale here. As you do, consider whether Evan made any genuine mistakes or whether his capture was simply inevitable. Is there a way to disappear, without giving up travel and technology? How would you do it? [Wired]

Ben Huh is usually holed up in his Seattle-based company Pet Holdings Inc—better known as the company that brings you I Can Has Cheezburger?, the FAIL Blog and nearly thirty other sites that aim to make you laugh for five minutes every day. But he’s down in the Bay Area this week to promote the launch of three new books “How to Take over the World: A LOLCat Guide 2 Winning,” “Graph out Loud,” based on GraphJam and FAIL Nation: A Visual Romp through the World of Epic Fails.” A big party is happening tonight.

Annoyingly, Huh is also running around San Francisco this week doing all kinds of media interviews. But here are some things I pried out of him yesterday that you may not know.