Monday, December 13, 2010

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Sales pitch from an ATM-skimmer vendor

Posted: 13 Dec 2010 12:28 AM PST

Brian Krebs tracked down a black-market retailer of mobile-phone-based ATM skimmers that capture your PIN and transmit it to fraudsters over the GSM network. The vendor gave him the whole sales-pitch for the efficiency and safety (for the criminals) of GSM-based skimmers. It's a fascinating read, unless you use ATMs, in which case, it's a terrifying one.

So we potentially have already about 20k dollars. Also imagine that if was not GSM sending SMS and to receive tracks it would be necessary to take the equipment from ATM, and during this moment, at 15:00 there comes police and takes off the equipment.

And what now? All operation and your money f#@!&$ up? It would be shame!! Yes? And with GSM the equipment we have the following: Even if there comes police and takes off the equipment, tracks are already on your computer. That means they are already yours, and also mean this potential 20k can be cash out asap. In that case you lose only the equipment, but the earned tracks already sent. Otherwise without dumps transfer - you lose equipment, and tracks, and money.

That's not all: There is one more important part. We had few times that the police has seen the device, and does not take it off, black jeeps stays and observe, and being replaced by each hour. But the equipment still not removed. They believe that our man will come for it. And our observers see this circus, and together with it holders go as usual, and tracks come with PINs as usual.

Why GSM-Based ATM Skimmers Rule
 


Art Nouveau steamboat inkstand

Posted: 12 Dec 2010 10:06 PM PST


This swell Art Nouveau steamboat inkstand is up for auction with a starting bid at $300. I have no use for an inkstand, but what an object!

Art Nouveau Influenced Steamboat Inkstand Molded m (via Dinosaurs and Robots)

 


Weird Tales-inspired poetry from a 73-year-old retired civil servant

Posted: 12 Dec 2010 10:02 PM PST

Tavie writes,
Fred Phillips is a Fan. A lifelong lover of gothic horror and weird verse, his favorite author is H.P. Lovecraft. He grew up in the Bronx with parents who were suspicious of his Fandom, his obsessive book-collecting, his poetry. They frequently disposed of his comic books and told him he was wasting his life.

He didn't waste his life. He took up with science fiction Fans, and joined up with the Society for Creative Anachronisms. To most of the world he was an oddball, kind of a loser. He talked too much. He probably had Asperger's. A Lehman College dropout, he worked at a bookstore. In 1968 he met Dorothea Nissen, and they married and eventually had twin daughters.

He got a low-level civil service job clerking at the NY Dept of Labor. It was drudgery, but he had his poetry and he had his girls and he fancied himself happy. He clerked for 30 years. He wasn't what you would call successful, and but he worked hard for his family and lived largely in his head. His Fandom kept him sane.

And then he retired, and he still wrote his poetry and discovered e-mail and then something marvelous happened. He met a man called Derrick who ran a publishing house specializing in scholarly criticism of HP Lovecraft, and Derrick really liked Fred. So at the age of 73 Fred Phillips' poetry was published.

And his daughter Tavie is very, very proud of him.

From the Cauldron by Fred Phillips (Thanks, Tavie!)
 


8 Great Ways to Spend A Year

Posted: 12 Dec 2010 11:28 PM PST

Noah Scalin is the creator of Skull-A-Day and author of Skulls. His latest book 365: A Daily Creativity Journal is designed to help people make their own yearlong creative projects. You can see all 365 of the skulls Noah made HERE
I've been doing a lot of research on yearlong creative projects lately and I thought I would share (in no particular order) some of my recent favorites and hopefully encourage more people to spend this coming year being creative ...

Mask365: Gary Lockwood in LA was inspired by my Skull-A-Day project to start making a piece of mask art every day for a year. The results, which range from illustration to functional sculpture, are consistently impressive. Be sure to check out his recent Nike and Converse masks made entirely from deconstructed shoes!

Burger365: Gary's friend Charlton Yu also committed to doing a yearlong project at the same time. His project is filled with an dizzying array of solutions to how you can make a burger out of anything and everything. One of my recent favorites is his literal knuckle sandwich.

Weekly Reliquary: My friend Tere Hernández-Bonét is an accomplished jeweler here in Richmond, Virginia and rather than commit to making something every day she's chosen to spend more time on larger pieces each week working with small found objects & cherished items and creating beautiful reliquaries for them. I particularly love one she made recently to hold one of cats' baby teeth!

Mailart365: London based Andy Hoang decided that he didn't want to commit to making 365 pieces of mail art alone so he decided to corral 20 of his friends into doing it as well! There's so much work being posted every day on this group site it's hard to pick a favorite. Though of course I am partial to the pieces that my mom is making for it!

Year of Thanks: Friends Karlin Lictenberger & Jaime Patterson are taking turns finding someone to publicly thank every day for a year. They're documenting their experiences along the way and so far they seem to be having a lot of fun. What I especially like about their fairly personal project is that it's a wonderfully simple idea that anyone can do right away.

Every Day Is Awesome: My friend Paul Overton, the force behind Dude Craft, has decided that one blog isn't enough and has committed himself to writing 500 words each day in his attempt to make "every day as awesome as possible." He's off to a rollicking start and has already initiated many great conversations with his readers.

BBCX365: Johnny Selman decided to create a poster a day for a year as part of his graduate thesis at Academy of Art in San Francisco. He's using headlines from the BBC news website as his source material and has already created an amazing body of work. Check out the compelling images that read like gorgeous protest posters for subjects ranging from Cholera in Haiti to Poaching in South Africa.

Napkin Moustache A Day: I'm just waiting for friend Phil Ford's project to start a nationwide craze! Phil is wearing a napkin as a mustache at one meal every day for a year and his silly expressions and stories of baffled observers are priceless. The commitment is low and the results are hilarious, so seriously why aren't you doing this at your next luncheon?

Inspired yet? And hey, if you've done a yearlong project or are in the midst of one, I'd love to hear about it and share it on my 365 blog!

 


How to get conservative professors to blog about Cthulhu's gigantic horror cock

Posted: 12 Dec 2010 09:55 PM PST

donald_douglas.jpg Remember Dr. Donald Douglas, the associate professor of Political Science at Long Beach City College who wrote an extraordinarily mean-spirited opinion piece about cancer victim Elizabeth Edwards? (Recap: Edwards believed in God but failed to mention Him in her last farewell, and is therefore a nihilist and so forth) Well, my link to his grave-dancing has earned a spectacular response! After describing Boing Boing as 'vile left-wing demonology,' the thought evidently came to preoccupy him, as he has now posted an enormous image of Cthulhu's gigantic horror cock to his blog. This is apparently to serve as a warning about progressives, but the wide stance adopted suddenly by his hitherto non-dildonic website only validates their supernatural powers. One can only hope his readers (weaned perhaps on the more normative smut creepily objectified as 'totty' on what Blogger lists as his other website) have insurance adequate to cover any non-Euclidean anal fistulae that his next product recommendation inflicts. Previously: Cthulhu sex-toys!

The fall of the House of Vikings

Posted: 12 Dec 2010 03:20 PM PST

At 5:00 Sunday morning, the weight of 16-odd inches of snow accumulation finally pushed the roof of the Metrodome—Minneapolis' pro football stadium—past its structural limits. The good news: Security cameras caught this awesome moment as it happened. The bad news: This is probably not going to stop the Vikings from whining about how much they totally need an outdoor stadium.

Here's a still shot of the aftermath of that collapse. More photos from SnOMG 2010.

Boardgame Remix Kit makes inspired new games out of old Monopoly, Clue, Trivial Pursuit and Scrabble sets

Posted: 12 Dec 2010 12:26 PM PST

The most insanely clever Christmas gift idea of the year must be Hide&Seek's inspired Boardgame Remix Kit. Having observed that the four most common household boardgames -- Monopoly, Cluedo (AKA Clue), Trivial Pursuit, and Scrabble -- are often tedious and frustrating and overlong, the game designers at Hide&Seek set about to create a whole book's worth of variant rulesets and tweaks that use some or all of the pieces from some or all of the games. After exhaustive playtesting, they've arrived at a set of games that are insanely fun to play, treating the wicked bits and pieces (all those green houses, exciting little murder weapons, handy letter-tiles, question cards and pie-wedges) as infrastructure on which new, better games may be built.


Some examples: a Monopoly-based solitaire where you have to lay out the property cards in a grid while following certain rules (each card must touch another from its set, railroads need to be in the same row but not adjacent, etc); a Scrabble-meets-Balderdash word game where you have to make words that "beat" other words (e.g., Robot beats Twig, Twig beats Wasp) and then convince your fellow players you have the winning word; a full-blown zombie-combat tabletop strategy game made out of the Clue board, the lead pipe, and some Chess pawns; and "Dadaist Trivial Pursuit" where players are read out an answer and have to come up with odd questions that suit it.

It's fun, it's beautifully designed, and it will save the sanity of anyone stuck indoors over the holidays with nothing but Christmas reruns and stale boardgames. You can get it in book (coming soon)/ebook (now available) form, as a deck of cards, or a mobile app. Here's the sample PDF.

Boardgame Remix Kit

 


The Geminids: A Fiery Death

Posted: 12 Dec 2010 12:58 PM PST

Leonid_Meteor_Storm_1833.jpg

(Photo, via Wikipedia: "Leonid Meteor Storm, as seen over North America in the night of November 12./13., 1833. Source, E. Weiß: "Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt"; Published 1888)

The Earth is hurtling through mostly empty space at nearly 70,000 mph. But space is only mostly empty. Throughout the solar system is debris left behind by comets, colliding asteroids, and even dust from interstellar space. When the Earth hits these things - at 70,000 mph - it puts on a nice show.

You can see the show any time of the year. Just find a dark moonless sky and stare up for a while. You'll eventually see the quick streak of a shooting star. That "shooting star" was what happens when one of these tiny dust-sized pieces of debris gets in the way of the earth. It burns high in the atmosphere. Very very occasionally the earth will run into an even larger piece of debris.

The best I ever saw in my life was when I was sitting on a beach in Hawaii and noticed a bright light behind me, turned around, and saw a huge bolide split multiple times in the air before disappearing behind a volcano behind me.

These days they are often caught by security cameras or by whoever happens to have a video camera in their hand at the time.

Some parts of the solar system are dirtier than others, and right now the Earth is plowing through one of the dirtier ones. We are plowing right through the orbit of a former comet, and that orbit is full of dust and small rocks sputtered out by the comet over centuries. The comet has lost so much debris, in fact, that by now it appears as a barely distinguishable rocky asteroid quietly orbiting the sun.

If you want to see shooting stars and see a lot of them, now is a good time to get outside and do it.

When? Where?


There's a little bit of bad news here, that you can understand just by thinking about how the direction Earth is moving through space. View from the north pole, the Earth goes counter-clockwise around the sun. So imagine, as we did a few days ago, that you are looking down on the Earth and that the Sun is off at the 6 o'clock position. If you were standing on the Earth at the 6 o'clock position the sun would be straight overhead; it would be noon. If you were standing on the Earth at the 12 o'clock position it would be the middle of the night: midnight. Since the Earth also rotates counter clockwise, if you are standing at the 3 o'clock position you see the Sun on the horizon, but soon you will rotate into darkness: sunset. And at the 9 o'clock position you will be experiencing sunrise. The 9 o'clock position is also special because it points in the direction that the Earth is travelling around the sun. In other words, if you are standing on the Earth and the sun is rising and you point straight up (and you don't live too close to the north or south pole!) you will be pointing in the direction that the Earth is travelling.


The Earth is slamming into the cometary debris as it travels, so the place to look is in the direction of travel. Straight up. Sunrise. Sunrise is, of course, too bright, so you're actually better in the hours before sunrise when it is still dark. The Moon and Jupiter will have set (don't miss Venus and Saturn, too, but we'll talk about those next week), and the skies will be dark. (The debris itself is moving too, actually, so this rotates the impact point around enough that the actual best time is more like 2am, but any time after the Moon sets and before the Sun rises should be fabulous).


What will you see? No one ever knows precisely what a meteor shower will show, or even precisely when it will peak. The current one is expected to be good tonight, better tomorrow night, and fade quickly. At its peak you could see a shooting star every minute from a nice dark clear site. If you're lucky, you'll see one split into pieces and color the skies.


It's the end of life for the little piece of cometary debris that first coagulated out of the interstellar cloud of gas and dust more than four billion years ago. It's been a long ride: billions of years out in the asteroid belt, finally heated and ejected from a comet, a lonely flight through empty space, and then a firey death as the Earth slams into it. Don't you want to be there to see its last ride?
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