Links for 21 September 2008:

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? -