Monthly Archive for September, 2008

Links for 28 September 2008:

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on 28 September 2008
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Links for 28 September 2008:

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On rogues of the high seas and the hunt for bounty

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marc
on 27 September 2008
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Marvelously fluttering around the margins of the mediascape during the past few days has been news of a hijacking by a group of Somali pirates of some heavy old world war-fighting technology. Piracy on the high seas is certainly something that excites the imagination filled with tales from yesteryear’s maritime literature and folk stories told before bed. However, knowledge of the sort of gritty reality of modern piracy is, like many of the unpleasant things in life, curiously absent from that font of common sense that we all draw from.

The Strait of Malaca, pictured above, accounts for approximately 40% of annual maritime piracy

Interestingly, the International Maratime Bureau, part of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) Commercial Crimes Services, maintains an international piracy monitoring center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. In this role they investigate incidents of piracy and armed robbery at sea and in port, publish weekly reports of piracy incidents, and maintain a google mashup of attacks (as pictured above).

However, to discover a bit of greater resolution when it comes to the sorts of statistics that one finds meticulously maintained by the IMB, one would suerly not be doing themselves a disservice to consider the person of one F. Max Hardberger ((really quite a marvelous name)). Hardberger, through his ‘asset recovery’ firm Vessel Extractions , is one of a special breed of repo men that work for ship owners and insurance companies to recover hijacked ships:

If a repossession is requested, Hardberger and his team quietly enter the country involved. They seek out friendly officials and trusted local contacts such as ship agents who tend to a vessel’s logistical needs in port.

“You need to pick up clues about the ship and what is said in the bars, at the ship chandlers and in the local whorehouses,” Hardberger said. “Crews are not that sophisticated and talk about their orders and departure times. You can really keep track of a vessel this way.”

Hardberger said he does not carry a firearm, though he has hired bodyguards, as he did with the Aztec Express. Stealth and trickery are the preferred methods. [link to entire LA Times profile of Hardberger]

While Hardberger and others like him place an exiciting and romantic inflection on piracy through his fantastic adventures, it is also interesting to consider what an account from the crew of a hijacked ship would look like:

Everything seemed fine that spring afternoon as Captain Ken Blyth watched over the loading of his ship in Singapore. He was skippering the Petro Ranger, a medium-size tanker with a $1.5 million cargo of jet fuel and diesel oil bound for Ho Chi Minh City. It was a three-day turnaround…When the Petro Ranger finally slipped its berth, it was just another cargo vessel amid the daily parade that makes Singapore the busiest port in the world. Not far outside the harbor is the Horsburgh Lighthouse, the last outpost of domestic law. From Horsburgh on, you pass into the only true frontier of the 21st century: international waters — the no-man’s land of the new world economy. Not technically owned or patrolled by anyone, these waters are the last place on earth where you are truly alone.[Link]

However, if one does actually steal a ship and wants to disappear without a trace, this following video may be of some interest

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On the Kodak Instamatic 800 Camera

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marc
on 24 September 2008
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This past weekend, at a flea market, I came across a Kodak Instamatic 800 manufactured in 1964. From the aspect of design and material culture, I rather liked the aesthetic packaging that the camera came in. There was something very classic, very tasteful and not at all kitschy about it. So, I thought I would post scans here. The Instamatic was a huge product for Kodak during the 1960s. They sold over 50 million of them, and it was arguably The Camera that popularized amateur photography as a fixture of healthy, modern middle class life.

Thinking about the manufactured objects of life more generally, Edward Burtynsky [a photographer I posted about earlier] is working with the Long Now Foundation to put together an exhibit of contemporary material culture. Not so much the stuff one would find in the design section of a contemporary art musuem, but surely some of that, but more so the sorts of things that one would expect to find doing an archeological dig of mid-century America. Burtynsky gives a 5 minute presentation on it with many a slide.

[higher resolution]

[higher resolution]

[higher resolution]

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J. Craig Venter on booting up a chromosome

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marc
on 23 September 2008
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J. Craig Venter is a highly prominent synthetic biologist and entrepreneur whose research into the human genome and cellular biology has placed him as one of the main public faces of this rapidly unfolding field.

I just recently came upon www.fora.tv which, for any of those who do not know it, really promises to tickle the fancy, and to kill the time. It seems that they have done a very good job positioning themselves as a major repository of lectures and intellectual discussions by forging content relationships with universities, think tanks, public forums and cultural institutions.

That said, I found Fora by way of this presentation (see below) given by Craig Venter about the recent history and future trends of synthetic biology. For those who may have missed it, we are rapidly approaching the moment when, entirely novel forms of life can be designed on a computer and brought to life through a combination of DNA sequencers and other laboratory techniques. This has doubtlessly started to cause much in the way of both ethical concern and concern for the possibility of garage biohackers designing all sorts of killer bugs.

The exciting part was we took this piece of DNA and inserted into the bacteria E. coli and what had happened was E. coli recognized this as a piece of software and started making viral particles. And true to form in nature when the viral particles were released from the cell.  They turned around and killed the bacteria that had made it.  So, this is a process that we see all the time in nature.  I was just speaking to oil executives and I said they clearly understood that process.  But this was pretty exciting: just taking a piece of DNA and having it activated, making viral particles. So we view this as the software actually building its own hardware. This is an important concept as we’re trying to go forward in this field, that even most people that are working in this area have not truly grasped the implications of this, that we don’t have to design life from scratch.  We just have to design the software appropriately. [link to the presentation video - many of the latter chapters are of particular interest]

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Links for 21 September 2008:

Published
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marc
on 22 September 2008
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Links for 21 September 2008:

  • Chinese hacker “Milk Rebellion” - As the scandal over melamine laced food products widens, Chinese hackers seem to be taking up the cause to punish guilty corporations.
  • Five Thoughts On The Popularity Of Steampunk - On the most basic, most appealing social level, steampunk is a way to masculinize romance. That is to say: Steampunk takes something stereotypically feminine that most boys hate — Victorian lace and frills and tea and crumpets — and says, “Hey, how about some robots with that?” It’s like the Dance Dance Revolution of nerd culture: now we all have something we can play together!
  • 20 Most Incredible Desert Oases [pics] | Environmental Graffiti - 20 Most Incredible Desert Oases [pics]
  • DARPA Archives - Past DARPA Programs
  • Verner Panton -
  • Printing a Book - Video runs through entire production process of book printing. Produced by Encyclopedia Britannica in 1947
  • Revision3 - MediaDefender, a copyright hitsquad attacks, Revision 3
  • Video of a guy who makes his own vacuum tubes - Boing Boing -
  • Main Page - IGEM07 - 4 teams from around the world spent their summer engineering novel biological machines using and creating BioBrick standard biological parts
  • Oil Rocks - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - The Oil Rocks lies 45-50 km offshore on the Caspian Sea and extracts oil from the shallow water portion of the Absheron geological trend. The most distinctive feature of the Oil Rocks is that it is actually a functional city with a population of about 5,000 and over 200 km of streets built on piles of dirt and landfill. Most of the inhabitants work on shifts; a week on Oil Rocks followed by a week on the shore. The small city includes shops, school and a library. After almost 60 years the Oil Rocks is still quite unusual as Azerbaijan’s first and largest oil platform.The facility is poorly maintained, with miles of roads now submerged beneath the sea. Around some worker’s dormitories, the waterline now stands at the second-floor windows.
  • Grytviken - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia -
  • STATEWATCH - monitoring the state and civil liberties in Europe -
  • U.N. agency eyes curbs on Internet anonymity | Politics and Law - CNET News - A United Nations agency is quietly drafting technical standards, proposed by the Chinese government, to define methods of tracing the original source of Internet communications and potentially curbing the ability of users to remain anonymous.The U.S. National Security Agency is also participating in the “IP Traceback” drafting group, named Q6/17, which is meeting next week in Geneva to work on the traceback proposal. Members of Q6/17 have declined to release key documents, and meetings are closed to the public.
  • Tech sabotage during the Cold War - The result was the most monumental nonnuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space. At the White House, we received warning from our infrared satellites of some bizarre event in the middle of Soviet nowhere. NORAD feared a missile liftoff from a place where no rockets were known to be based. Or perhaps it was a detonation of a small nuclear device. The Air Force chief of intelligence rated it at 3 kilotons, but he was puzzled by the silence of the Vela satellites. They had detected no electromagnetic pulse, characteristic of nuclear detonations. Before these conflicting indicators could turn into an international crisis, Gus Weiss came down the hall to tell his fellow NSC staffers not to worry. It took him another 20 years to tell me why.
  • What a Botnet Looks Like - CSO Online - Security and Risk - Researcher David Vorel mapped interconnected, bot-infected IP addresses and created this geometric representation; CSO contributor Scott Berinato annotated the map and added interactive controls so you can zoom in and explore botnets’ inner workings.
  • Shadowserver Foundation - Main - HomePage - Established in 2004, The Shadowserver Foundation gathers intelligence on the darker side of the internet. We are comprised of volunteer security professionals from around the world. Our mission is to understand and help put a stop to high stakes cybercrime in the information age.
  • Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Blogs - The Social Science Research Council is now developing a series of blogs, organized around various topics of interest and edited by experts in their respective fields. We hope the blogs will create new opportunities for discussion, debate, analysis, and networking among social scientists and interested readers.
  • Moroccan hacker arrested for web virus launch (Magharebia.com) - The pair is believed to responsible for unleashing the worm that disrupted computer operations in mid-August at several large news organisations, including The Associated Press, ABC, CNN, and The New York Times.
  • The BioBricks Foundation - Using BioBrick™ standard biological parts, a synthetic biologist or biological engineer can already, to some extent, program living organisms in the same way a computer scientist can program a computer.
  • MayDay! MayDay! Ruskies reinvent cyber crime - Researchers have unearthed two previously undetected botnets that exhibit sophisticated new capabilities that could significantly advance the dark art of cyber crime.
  • Tracking down the Ron Paul spam botnet | Channel Register - More specifically, he’s uncovered new information about “Reactor Mailer,” the sophisticated piece of spamware used by Ukrainians to send the Ron Paul messages to more than 162 million addresses.
  • New technique sees into tissue at greater depth, resolution - By coupling a kicked-up version of microscopy with miniscule particles of gold, Duke University scientists are now able to peer so deep into living tissue that they can see molecules interacting.
  • Slashdot | Best Reference Site For Each Programming Language? -
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An elegy thought over the carrion of a nighthawk

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marc
on 20 September 2008
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This was really such a startling picture to come across. The F-117 Nighthawk was certainly for me, and I think at least for many boys growing up around the collapse of the Soviet Union, the quintisential icon of the infinite possibility of American military technology. It was The Stealth Fighter, invisible, invincible, built of a super high tech material that would absorb radar and make the whole plane look no bigger than a sparrow upon an enemy’s screen. It was super top secret, and even knowing about it gave one the sense of some how being included in all of that intrigue and magic. But, if WE know about THIS, can you just imagine all the things they are not telling us? They must even more fantastic things, maybe even X-Files and secret UFO technology. They did, after all, develop and test it at Area 51.

But now here it is. Torn apart by an ordinary Caterpillar excavator, reduced to a formless tangle of industrial material, like one saw in the pictures dispatched from New Orleans, or South Ossetia. Giving up the ghost, the spell is broke, the charm is flown. There was so much promise in you, oh Nighthawk. Yours was a special place, a harbinger from the coast, signaling the floods would soon recede and Eden would be reclaimed. But as they have stripped you of your feathers, we too must go naked for a season.

[link]

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The bottom of the barrel, or a brief anatomy of an oil well

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marc
on 19 September 2008
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It was not until the fantastic rise in energy prices of the last several years (remember: a decade ago a barrel of crude was less than $15) that companies that do oil exploration and production (E&P) began a serious consideration of extracting the very low grade bitumen (essentially the most expensive part of a barrel of oil to refine, and directly the stuff that holds the stones together in asphalt). When prices looked as if they were heading straight for $100, and even more so when it looked like they were heading straight for $200, companies began investing heavily in the Canadian province of Alberta, which is estimated to hold 1.7 trillion barrels of oil, according to government sources. However, the recent turn around in the direction of oil prices, combined with the banking crisis which is (1) making it difficult to put together financing for exploration projects and (2) creating concerns that the slowing economy will push oil below $70, the price that determines profitability for these projects, has cast the future in doubt. All of that said, the physical process by which oil is extracted from the ground is quite interesting and something that is as mysterious as the magic smoke inside an ipod to most people. So for your edification, take a look at the diagram below:

The above image, taken from an investor presentation given by Petrobank, an E&P company working in Alberta, shows the basic anatomy of a well site.

  • The vertical well sections are drilled about 1.5km on average, although they could get as deep as 3-4km
  • Once the drill reaches the oil sand deposits, the direction will be changed so that the well will continue horizontally. This is done because the seam containing the oil sand is relatively shallow and the more surface the well can make contact with, the more production that will follow.
  • Once the actual hole of the well is drilled, it is shored up with a high pressure casing that maintains the structural stability of the well.
  • Following this, the casing is fractured in many places using explosives. This has the double effect of loosening up the surrounding sand formations, allowing the oil to flow more easily, as well as providing more entry points for oil to flow into the casing.
  • On the surface, the pump jack helps create the pressure required to extract the heavy bitumen from the ground
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Links for 17 September 2008:

Published
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marc
on 18 September 2008
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Links for 17 September 2008:

  • Duchenne - Guillaume Benjamin Amand Duchenne was French neurologist, who was first to describe several nervous and muscular disorders and, in developing medical treatment for them, created electrodiagnosis and electrotherapy. He applied electrodes for recording the path that electricity took in a contracting muscle’s fibres. Duchenne investigated every major superficial muscle with his development and application of surface electrodes, which were used to measure abnormal and normal muscle action.
  • Images from the Cultural Revolution 文化大革命图片库档 - These galleries with photographs cover various aspects of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution 文化大革命 in China (generally dated 1966-1976).
  • FFFFOUND! - image bookmarking
  • GPS Spoofing - Jon used a desktop computer attached to a GPS satellite simulator to create a fake GPS signal. Portable GPS satellite simulators can fit in the trunk of a car, and are often used for testing. They are available as commercial off-the-shelf products.
  • J. Craig Venter Institute: About / Overview - Today all these organizations have become one large multidisciplinary genomic-focused organization. With more than 400 scientists and staff, more than 250,000 square feet of laboratory space, and locations in Rockville, Maryland and La Jolla, California, the new JCVI is a world leader in genomic research.
  • PARC Forum Archive - Many recent PARC Forum presentations are available below. Each title link includes an abstract and speaker bio, as well as streaming video and downloadable audio podcasts.
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On farming data shadows and other aluminium sleakness

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marc
on 17 September 2008
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Schneier on Security has an interesting bit on identity farming today. The idea essentially runs that one can incubate rock solid fake identities if they have 25 years during which to fabricate the birth of children, open bank accounts in their names, fill out the relevant paper work to have them home schooled, and otherwise scatter little bread crumbs here and there (apparently this is also a premise common in Highlander fan faction as a plot technique through which the immortals continue to stay integrated in human society). It is through these techniques that one creates, as Schneier nicely phrases it, a data shadow for the fictitious identity. This all could work, right, because it is the data shadow itself that is the salient aspect of one’s existence as a citizen-consumer and not really their corporeal person as such.

As a good case in point – one that also reveals the absurdity of the US’s paper tiger homeland security initiatives — a Quebec business man who had his identity stolen, consequentially winding up on a US terror watch list, was ultimately able to circumvent the travails of security check point purgatory by changing his name from Mario Labbé to François Mario Labbé . It seems its created a bit of a fresh start for him:  F. Mario Labbé can now pass through airport security unaccosted because of a vulnerability in, what we can perhaps refer to in a bit of biblical sounding legalese. the Several Databases.

It seems that this idea of a data shadow can be potentially quite powerful. It certainly has the ring of one of those buzz phrases that, like a sleak aluminum frame, can house either a powerbook or a fighter jet. Now what is wanting is for the notion to get caught in an updraft and to be transformed into the cynosure of public attention. At least, that would be nice.

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Links for 16 September 2008:

Published
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marc
on 16 September 2008
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Links for 16 September 2008:

  • Noam Chomsky: Towards a Second Cold War? - The typical reactions recall Orwell’s observations on the “indifference to reality” of the “nationalist,” who “not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but … has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”
  • Moscow Journal - At Chocolate Factory Site, a New Kind of Luxury Box - Their marketing presentations carefully explain that lofts are unusual residences without interior walls, pioneered by “the king of Pop Art, Andy Warhol.”
  • First 3-D processor runs at 1.4 Ghz on new architecture - Many in the integrated circuit industry are talking about the limits of miniaturization, a point at which it will be impossible to pack more chips next to each other and thus limit the capabilities of future processors’. He says a number of integrated circuit designers anticipate someday expanding into the third dimension, stacking transistors on top of each other.
  • New method identifies meth hot spots - The study examined statistics from four sources then identified five counties with the most meth-linked incidents per capita, such as deaths, poisonings and places where meth is made.
  • India’s use of brain scans in courts dismays critics - International Herald Tribune - India has become the first country to convict someone of a crime relying on evidence from this controversial machine: a brain scanner that produces images of the human mind in action and is said to reveal signs that a suspect remembers details of the crime in question.
  • Fears over privacy as police expand surveillance project | UK news | The Guardian - A national network of roadside cameras will be able to “read” 50m licence plates a day, enabling officers to reconstruct the journeys of motorists.
  • A Killer Paint Job (nanoclaims) - A new type of paint for walls and ceilings may, when exposed to fluorescent light, be able to kill “superbugs,” antibiotic-resistant bacteria, according to preliminary studies.
  • CIA recruited cat to bug Russians - Telegraph - In one experiment during the Cold War a cat, dubbed Acoustic Kitty, was wired up for use as an eavesdropping platform. It was hoped that the animal - which was surgically altered to accommodate transmitting and control devices - could listen to secret conversations from window sills, park benches or dustbins.
  • Mystery of the Real 3D Mandelbrot Fractal - When Mandelbrot first saw the shape’s outline - that was in itself a curiosity - but nothing could have prepared him for what he saw when he zoomed in. The edge of the basic Mandelbrot shape gave way to millions of intricate details, which after further zooming, unveiled elaborate shapes of every type and description.
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