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The Local-global Flip
Jaron Lanier |
EDGE |
Aug 2011
The idea that people would “inexpensively have access to a tremendous global computation and networking facility” was supposed to create wealth and wellbeing. Has it instead created a technologically advanced dystopia… Continue reading
Posted in syndicated, technology
Tagged dystopia, Early Computing, EDGE, Futurism, information, Jaron Lanier, syndicated, The
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Free book! Black Hat: Misfits, Criminals, and Scammers in the Internet Age
John Biggs of Techcrunch and Crunchgear has made his first book, Black Hat: Misfits, Criminals, and Scammers in the Internet Age available as a free download. Biggs asks only that you email him or tweet him at @johnbiggs to let him know you grabbed a c… Continue reading
RSA SecurID breach linked to hacker attack on Lockheed Martin; other US military contractors may be affected
[F-35 Lightning II, also known as the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), planes built by Lockheed Martin arrive at Edwards Air Force Base in California in this May 2010 photo. REUTERS/Tom Reynolds/Lockheed Martin]
This week, Lockheed Martin—the largest … Continue reading
More Sony customer info plundered
Another 2,000 customer records were looted from a Sony-related site, this time from the Canadian branch of the online cellphone store it runs with Ericsson. The third such event in the last few weeks was executed using SQL injection, according to a cra… Continue reading
Science proves that staring at a screen all day is bad for you [Dangerous Habits]
Proving the words of countless mothers across countless nations, new research shows that spending all day staring at computers and TVs actually is bad for kids, giving them heart problems later in life.
Scientists say that kids who spend many hours i… Continue reading
Posted in computers, health, syndicated, technology
Tagged biology, Dangerous habits, science, syndicated, Top
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Bandwidth changes everything for cloud storage
Amazon’s Cloud Player — an online file storage service — upsets the music labels because people could use it to share music instead of simply store and listen to it. Nilay Patel writes that earlier legal outcomes might not be a good guide this time a… Continue reading
SSL certificate authorities put us all at risk by handing out certs for “mail” “webmail” and other unqualified domains
In the wake of the revelation that a major SSL certificate provider suffered a serious breach, Chris Palmer from the Electronic Frontier Foundation has analysis of the common practice of issuing certificates for unqualified domain names, such as “mail”… Continue reading
Posted in security, syndicated, technology
Tagged Action, Business, eff, ssl, syndicated
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How emacs got into Tron: Legacy
Here’s a great account of the good, nerdy thoughtfulness that went into generating the command-line screenshots for Tron: Legacy; JT Nimoy decided that he’d go for a mix of l33t and realistic, and landed on emacs eshell and posix kill:
In addition… Continue reading
Posted in culture, syndicated, technology
Tagged Entertainment, geeky, happymutants, movie, syndicated, tron, unix
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World’s largest spam botnet goes down (for now?)
Brian Krebs reports on the takedown of the command-and-control servers for Rustock, the largest and most successful spam botnet. The botnet’s output has fallen from thousands of spams per second to one or two spams per second:
It may yet be too soo… Continue reading
Posted in security, syndicated, technology
Tagged Action, botnet, Business, infosec, spam, syndicated
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Ebook readers’ bill of rights
LibraryGoblin sez, “The Librarian in Black, Sarah Houghton-Jan, has posted this call for basic e-book user’s rights. She’s released it into the public domain and is encouraging people to spread it as far and wide as possible. Enough of anti-user DRM an… Continue reading
Posted in culture, syndicated, technology
Tagged Action, Business, drm, ebook, Gadgets, library, manifesto, submitterator, syndicated
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What happens when you stick your head in a particle accelerator
Here’s the fascinating story of Anatoli Petrovich Bugorski, the only person to have stuck his head into a particle accelerator. His head accidentally strayed into the path of the proton beam at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino in 1978,… Continue reading
The Machine Age
Forty years ago this December, President Nixon declared a war on cancer, pledging a “total national commitment” to conquering the disease. Fifty years ago this spring, President Kennedy declared a space race, promising to land a man safely on th… Continue reading
Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property: understanding the state of play in global knowledge politics
Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property is a book and free download from MIT press:
What might “terminator” seeds, access to medicines, free software, and free culture have to do with one another? Do the global attempts to push back… Continue reading
Posted in culture, health, syndicated, technology
Tagged Action, book, Business, copyfight, creativecommons, foss, genome, patent, syndicated, wipo
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Kickstarter, the brilliant site that lets you fund strangers’ brilliant ideas.
Last July, Dan Provost and his friend Tom Gerhardt, two designers who live in New York, came up with an idea for a tripod mount for the iPhone—a cleverly shaped accessory that lets you screw the phone into a standard camera tripod and doubles as a ha… Continue reading
What happens when you put a Luneburg lens on a silicon chip [Physics]
Recently British physicists announced to the world that they managed to put a Luneburg Lens on a silicon chip. Here’s why this odd bit of news could change the world.
Well, at least the world of data processing.
A Luneberg lens is a perfectly spherica… Continue reading
Posted in syndicated, technology
Tagged Fb, Light, Luneburg lens, Optics, Physics, science, syndicated, tweet
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The Facebooks of China
April Rabkin |
Fast Company |
Feb 2011
How the social networks that popped up in Facebook’s absence—the site is not available behind the Great Firewall—are changing Chinese culture.
[full story] Continue reading
Posted in syndicated, technology
Tagged china, Dot Coms, Facebook, Social Networks, syndicated, World
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2010?s Best Long Reads: Science & Technology
Longreads and Brain Pickings have teamed up to highlight the most fascinating in-depth stories published on the web this year. Earlier, we featured the best of Business and Art, Design, Film & Music. Our final spotlight shines on Science, Medicine … Continue reading
Posted in culture, health, syndicated, technology
Tagged Best of, Open Source, Psychology, remix, science, syndicated
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Car immobilizers cracked due to crappy proprietary crypto
Karsten Nohl of Security Research Labs, a white-hat hacker, believes that a recent spike in car theft is due to a break in the car immobilizer security systems; thieves are able to re-mobilize the immobilized vehicles. My question is: how long until so… Continue reading
Posted in security, syndicated, technology
Tagged automotive, Business, copyfight, syndicated
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2010?s Best Long Reads: Business
Longreads and Brain Pickings have teamed up to highlight the most compelling in-depth stories published on the web this year. Earlier, we featured the best of Art, Design, Film & Music. Next up: Business. Here are 10 must-reads from 2010, from “w… Continue reading
Posted in culture, syndicated, technology
Tagged Best of, Business, free market, partnerships, retail, syndicated
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EFF on US domain copyright seizures
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Corynne McSherry’s got great commentary on the Department of Homeland Security’s seizure of 82 domain names — this act of quasi-legal confiscation and censorship is not only ineffective at combatting infringement… Continue reading
Posted in syndicated, technology
Tagged Action, Business, censorship, coica, copyfight, dhs, mpaa, p2p, riaa, syndicated
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