WATCHISMO TIME MACHINES - Timing is everything...
Canada's spying bill also allows appointed "inspectors" unlimited access to ISP data DRM gives companies security -- from competition Fallout shelter ads Newspaper claims Vikileaks Twitter account traced back to House of Commons WSJ: Google caught circumventing iPhone security, tracking users who opted out of third-party cookies Bruce Schneier's Liars and Outliers: how do you trust in a networked world? Minecraft creators building a fan-specified game live and on camera this weekend with Humble Bundle, with proceeds to charities Gatekeeper: Cancel or Allow? White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army" performed on things found in a laboratory Tiny, adorable lizard is tiny, adorable "Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure" - Maggie speaking in Vancouver Privacy plugin keeps Facebook from reading your updates On writing fiction with voice-recognition software DIY electric street racing benefits school in SF, March 18, 2012 Canadian tweeps bare all for spying MP Colorblind painter's wearable "synesthesia camera" reportedly broken by police Apps for Kids interview on New Hampshire Public Radio Record industry lobby attains chutzpah singularity Space Available: photos of empty commercial buildings Building has a parasitic cabin Official Lego Minecraft set ships this summer For sale: house in Los Angeles: $125 million Canadian MP demands trick photography to disguise rampant Friday absenteeism in Parliament Martin Amis's guide to arcade games How to Build a Time Machine indie sf flick needs your help LED Pulse Sensor for self-tracking applications Where's Colbert? Complaint: TSA agents targeted female travelers Soviet space propaganda posters Prime Suspect, or Random Acts of Keyness Canada's spying bill also allows appointed "inspectors" unlimited access to ISP data
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 17, 2012 12:58 pm Criticism of C-30, Canada's proposed domestic spying law, has focused on the fact that the police could access certain kinds of ISP subscriber information without a warrant. But as Terry Milewski writes on the CBC, the bill also gives the government the power to appoint special inspectors who can monitor and copy all information that ...
Read in browser DRM gives companies security -- from competition
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 17, 2012 12:10 pm Last night, Rob posted a very good piece on Apple's new "Gatekeeper" technology, which defaults to warning users of Apple's new Mountain Lion OS that software from companies that haven't been officially recognized by Apple should not be installed (though users can still choose to override it, or turn it off). But I have one ...
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By Cory Doctorow on Feb 17, 2012 12:00 pm On the always-excellent How to Be a Retronaut site, a great collection of 1960s fallout shelter ads, a perfect capsule of upbeat, cheerful fear-selling. Fallout Shelter Ads, 1960s
Read in browser Newspaper claims Vikileaks Twitter account traced back to House of Commons
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 17, 2012 11:24 am The @Vikileaks30 account on Twitter has been publishing embarrassing personal information about Canada's Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, who is pushing for a domestic spying law that would require ISPs to gather and retain your personal information and turn it over to police without a warrant. The Vikileaks account kicked off with excerpts from the ...
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By Cory Doctorow on Feb 17, 2012 10:13 am Google has been caught circumventing iOS's built-in anti-ad-tracking features in order to add Google Plus functionality within iPhone's Safari browser. The WSJ reports that Google overrode users' privacy settings in order to allow messages like "your friend Suzy +1'ed this ad about candy" to be relayed between Google's different domains, including google.com and doubleclick.net. This ...
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By Cory Doctorow on Feb 17, 2012 09:35 am John Scalzi's Big Idea introduces Bruce Schneier's excellent new book Liars and Outliers, and interviews Schneier on the work that went into it. I read an early draft of the book and supplied a quote: "Brilliantly dissects, classifies, and orders the social dimension of security-a spectacularly palatable tonic against today's incoherent and dangerous flailing in ...
Read in browser Minecraft creators building a fan-specified game live and on camera this weekend with Humble Bundle, with proceeds to charities
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 17, 2012 06:59 am The Humble Indie Bundle people are gearing up for their next event, the Humble Bundle Mojam, and this one's pure charity. Humble fans voted on which game they wanted to see the folks at Mojang (creators of Minecraft) make, and over the weekend, Mojang is going to build it, live and on camera, in 60 ...
Read in browser Gatekeeper: Cancel or Allow?
By Rob Beschizza on Feb 16, 2012 11:19 pm The new OS X Gatekeeper encourages desktop apps to be registered with Apple, with users warned against installing unsigned software unless they disable the prompts. The benefits—and the potential pitfalls—are obvious. It's intended as as an anti-malware system (with a whitelist rather than a blacklist), and the registration process will be simple and inexpensive. It'll ...
Read in browser White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army" performed on things found in a laboratory
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Feb 16, 2012 10:36 pm The Blast Lab at Imperial College, London, is a place where scientists study how explosions affect the human skeleton, and try to find ways to mitigate some of those effects. As you can imagine, this involves blowing stuff up fairly regularly and The Blast Lab is a pretty loud place. But the team of students ...
Read in browser Tiny, adorable lizard is tiny, adorable
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Feb 16, 2012 09:51 pm Meet Brookesia micra, one of four newly identified species of ultra-small chameleons that live in Madagascar. Never let it be said that reptiles can't be totally cute. Submitterated by Dr. Sideshow and lecti.
Read in browser "Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure" - Maggie speaking in Vancouver
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Feb 16, 2012 08:54 pm I'm going to be speaking on Monday, February 20th, at the meeting of the British Columbia Sustainable Energy Association, starting at 7:00 pm. My presentation will focus on the North American electric grid—where it came from, how it works today, and how it affects what we can and can't do in the future. I'll be ...
Read in browser Privacy plugin keeps Facebook from reading your updates
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 16, 2012 07:57 pm "Encrypt Facebook is a Chrome extension that would prevent snooping on the discussions,status updates in Facebook groups by storing it them in an encrypted format on Facebook's database instead of normal text and also it would convert encrypted format back into normal text whenever that particular group's url is accessed in Chrome." (Thanks, Joly!)
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By Cory Doctorow on Feb 16, 2012 06:54 pm Justine Larbalestier, a very good novelist with very bad RSI, has written a great post called "Why I Cannot Write a Novel With Voice Recognition Software." In it, she explains why machine-based speech-to-text software isn't sufficient for fiction. I think that if I absolutely lost the use of my hands and had no other choice, ...
Read in browser DIY electric street racing benefits school in SF, March 18, 2012
By Mark Frauenfelder on Feb 16, 2012 06:26 pm Gever Tulley, co-founder of the Brightworks K-12 school, says: The whine and growl of high-performance electric motors, the smell of ionized air, the squeal of rubber on pavement, the roar of the crowd and the thrill of the checkered flag -- this is the inaugural Grand Prix de la Mayonnaise! Imagine a shipping crate: smaller ...
Read in browser Canadian tweeps bare all for spying MP
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 16, 2012 05:44 pm Canadian MP Vic Toews is pushing bill C-30, a domestic spying bill that requires ISPs to log your online activity and give it to police without a warrant. He says that if you don't support this, you "stand with child pornographers." Canadians are giving MP Toews what he wants: on Twitter, Canadians are flooding his ...
Read in browser Colorblind painter's wearable "synesthesia camera" reportedly broken by police
By David Pescovitz on Feb 16, 2012 05:13 pm Back in 2008, I posted about Neil Harbisson, an artist with complete color blindness who makes paintings like those above using a camera/computer system that translates colors into sounds. In an editorial he's just written for the BBC News, he mentions that last year he "was attacked by three policemen at a demonstration who thought ...
Read in browser Apps for Kids interview on New Hampshire Public Radio
By Mark Frauenfelder on Feb 16, 2012 04:57 pm Virginia Prescott of New Hampshire Public Radio interviewed me today about the Apps for Kids podcast that my daughter Jane and I do each week. With developers pumping out an estimated 2,000 applications daily for use on smart-phones and tablets, reviewers and web-critics are keeping busy sorting out what's worth downloading, and what's worth squat. ...
Read in browser Record industry lobby attains chutzpah singularity
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 16, 2012 04:48 pm IFPI, the international recording industry lobby, has gone on the offensive to save ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, an unprecedented international copyright agreement negotiated in secret (so secret that even Congress and the European Parliament weren't allowed to see it). In recent weeks, popular protests against ACTA have grown, and many nations are pulling back ...
Read in browser Space Available: photos of empty commercial buildings
By David Pescovitz on Feb 16, 2012 04:45 pm Matthew Frye Jacobson, a professor of American Studies at Yale, made a gallery of hundreds of photographs of commercial buildings that have "Space Available." Indeed, that's the name of the photo series. For Jacobson, these signs are visceral representations of the economic crisis. Space Available is part of Jacobson's larger Historian's Eye project, a photographic ...
Read in browser Building has a parasitic cabin
By David Pescovitz on Feb 16, 2012 04:21 pm Artist Mark Reigelman, working with architect Jenny Chapman and engineer Paul Endres, created a rustic cabin and installed it as a parasite on a big building in San Francisco. Too bad nobody is living in it. Yet. From Design Boom (Cesar Rubio photos): …The structure, which measures approximately W7 x D8 x H11 feet, takes ...
Read in browser Official Lego Minecraft set ships this summer
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 16, 2012 04:21 pm This summer, Lego will ship an official Minecraft "Micro World" set, with blocks designed to look like the primitives used for construction in the popular game/virtual playset. Help Steve survive his first night in a strange new world. Avoid the creeper and start mining for resources that will help you survive and thrive. Configure your ...
Read in browser For sale: house in Los Angeles: $125 million
By Mark Frauenfelder on Feb 16, 2012 04:15 pm Expensive, yes, but I heard the public schools in the area are very good. It's 35,000 square feet and includes a a three-bedroom caretaker's house. It was part of the divorce settlement between Texas billionaire David Saperstein and his wife Suzanne. In 2008, David abandoned his wife for their 32-year-old Swedish nanny and now Suzanne ...
Read in browser Canadian MP demands trick photography to disguise rampant Friday absenteeism in Parliament
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 16, 2012 02:51 pm A Canadian Conservative MP has asked for an end to medium-wide camera shots in the broadcasts of Parliament on Friday afternoons. Fridays are when many MPs travel to their home ridings (districts) and Parliament empties out. The medium-wide shots used by Parliamentary broadcasts reveals a largely empty House of Commons. Worried about how bad this ...
Read in browser Martin Amis's guide to arcade games
By Rob Beschizza on Feb 16, 2012 02:27 pm In 1982, famed author Martin Amis published a book about arcade games: Invasion of the Space Invaders. He's since become reluctant to discuss this curiosity, which poses the question--why? Was it rendered silly by gaming's progression from the cutting-edge to mass entertainment? Was it written only for a quick buck? Alas, the right answer is ...
Read in browser How to Build a Time Machine indie sf flick needs your help
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 16, 2012 02:00 pm Indie documentary maker Michael McMahon sez, The year is 2036. Decades after the second American Civil War and the global nuclear strike known as 'N-Day', an American soldier named John Titor is assigned a top secret mission: travel back in time to the year 1975 and retrieve an IBM 5100 computer. During this mission, John ...
Read in browser LED Pulse Sensor for self-tracking applications
By Mark Frauenfelder on Feb 16, 2012 01:33 pm Do you want to add a more "human element" to your next project? The Pulse Sensor, available in the Maker Shed, measures subtle changes in light from expansion of the capillary blood vessels to sense your heartbeat. Gently place the sensor on any area of skin (such as a finger or earlobe) and it will ...
Read in browser Where's Colbert?
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 16, 2012 01:10 pm The Colbert Report is off the air and no one knows why, or if they do, they're not saying.
Read in browser Complaint: TSA agents targeted female travelers
By Rob Beschizza on Feb 16, 2012 01:10 pm Kim Zetter in Wired: TSA agents in Dallas singled out female passengers to undergo screening in a body scanner, according to complaints filed by several women who said they felt the screeners intentionally targeted them to view their bodies.
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By Cory Doctorow on Feb 16, 2012 12:47 pm RussiaTrek's DeIntegro has assembled a marvelous gallery of mid-century Soviet space-program propaganda posters, showing brave and noble Russians ascending to the heavens on the back of sound socialist rockets. Propaganda posters of Soviet space program 1958-1963 (via How to Be a Retronaut)
Read in browser Prime Suspect, or Random Acts of Keyness
By Glenn Fleishman on Feb 16, 2012 12:42 pm The foundation of Web security rests on the notion that two very large prime numbers, numbers divisible only by themselves and 1, once multiplied together are irreducibly difficult to tease back apart. Researchers have discovered, in some cases, that a lack of entropy—a lack of disorder in the selection of prime numbers—means by analogy that ...
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