Bicycle advocates keep coming up with creative ways to show the virtues of two wheeled transportation. Here’s a nice video from Africa:

As I’ve mentioned before here, here and here the concept is inexpensive, resilient, convenient, efficient…what’s not to like? My only complaint with the video is how little it emphasizes the opportunity for innovation in safety for the riders. I had a similar issue with the South Sudan study of two-wheeled ambulances.

I guess highlighting safety features on two-wheels in Africa is about as likely as mentioning seat belts in a video about the uber-functional and fun Fiat Panda. I’ve driven a Panda under water in rivers and up the steepest slippery slopes with no problem. No wonder the police in the Alps are known to use a Panda to chase suspects. Hmm, somehow that sounds wrong… It is a brilliant design that has been proven in Africa but you just know a video of it wouldn’t highlight the safety features.

Incidentally, speaking of Fiat did you know the new Jeep will be based on the Panda? I never thought I’d see the day when 4×4 products in the U.S. would be designed by Europeans based on a market study of Africa. Then again, I didn’t expect Americans in 4×4 to adopt piercings, tattoos and scarification as beautification. Are bicycles the next rural adaptation in America to follow African trends? Stranger things have already happened.

On June 14th a comment on Github asked Basho about validation in their API

The riak http api for map reduce doesn’t check if the content-type is application/json. The javascript http api also lets the user execute arbitrary code on the server. These two coupled together allow a malicious web page to execute arbitrary code on a users machine if they are running the riak http api. I’m not sure if this is a bug or not but there should be a warning that if you are running riak http api then you should be very careful about the sites you visit.

About a week later on June 20th Basho announced a security alert

We are releasing both a security patch (for Riak versions 1.0.3 and 1.1.2) and a full 1.1.4 security release. We advise all users of Riak to either apply the appropriate patch or upgrade to 1.1.4. If you are running a version of Riak other than 1.0.3 or 1.1.2, it will be necessary to upgrade to 1.1.4.

[…]

Additional information about the exploit will be released in the next few weeks.

A few people have mentioned that my title on the prior post is causing confusion for those trying to find the original report. Here’s a brief summary to help save time, and then a link to the PDF if they really want to read the whole thing.

Summary: Microsoft researchers say they are from Microsoft because people believe they are from Microsoft (known at Microsoft Research as being gullible). Since being gullible means people believe Microsoft researchers actually are from Microsoft, therefore Microsoft researchers say they are from Microsoft.

Not convinced by Microsoft’s logic (PDF link)? You could read our long-standing hypothesis instead.