Throwing a bit dye into the geist, a group of programmers have developed a Firefox plugin that will route your websurfing through a Chinese server, thus allowing you to get sense of what sort of Internet the Chinese state security services have in mind for their citizens. [Link to the plugin project website]
The control that governments, and other interested parties, can exert over one’s websurfing can take a much more insidious form than simply block content. Through some form of packet injection, or server based cacheing, web pages can be changed en route to the web browser, thus allowing for the manipulation of the user’s trust and expectation.
For more information, The Atlantic published an interesting article during the 2008 Olympics about the limitations and scope of the system.
Links for the week of 25 October 2008:
- Smithsonian Libraries : Digital Library - Webcasts, lectures
- Journal of Biological Engineering | Full text | Engineering BioBrick vectors from BioBrick parts - We define a biological part to be a natural nucleic acid sequence that encodes a definable biological function, and a standard biological part to be a biological part that has been refined in order to conform to one or more defined technical standards.
- Strange Culture, A new film by Lynn Hershman Leeson - The surreal nightmare of internationally-acclaimed artist and professor Steve Kurtz began when his wife Hope died in her sleep of heart failure. Police who responded to Kurtz�s 911 call deemed Kurtz�s art suspicious and called the FBI. Within hours the artist was detained as a suspected "bioterrorist" as dozens of federal agents in Hazmat suits sifted through his work and impounded his computers, manuscripts, books, his cat, and even his wife�s body.
- YouTube - Time-Lapse: Zebrafish Embryos Developing - Time-Lapse: Zebrafish Embryos Developing, first 24 hrs
- Microsoft vs. Google: The New Space Race? - MSFT and Google investing in large telescopes and open source astronomy
- Spy Pigeons Circle the World | Danger Room from Wired.com -
- Survival Communities - State Maps and Information for
Nuclear Survival
(with Intentional Communities list)
- Geophysicist Shares a Song of Earth’s Polarity : NPR - Geophysicist Shares a Song of Earth's Polarity
- Team records ‘music’ from stars - Scientists have recorded the sound of three stars similar to our Sun using France's Corot space telescope. A team writing in Science journal says the sounds have enabled them to get information about processes deep within stars for the first time.
- YouTube - Face Shift — Arthur Elsenaar, Remko Scha — 2005 -
- Electric Stimulus – today and tomorrow - Daito Manabe stimulates his facial muscles with small electric pulses, synced to music. The result is amazing, he now has to figure out how the hide the cables, then it would be an excellent music video.
- BCMA Medical Museum : Collections -
- Scientists make cat that glows in the dark - Telegraph - transgenic cat: The gene, which was added to Mr. Green Genes' DNA when he was created, has no effect on his health. "Created"…
- An Extremely Quick and Simple Introduction to the Vi Text Editor -
- ANSI Launches Guide to Help Calculate Cyber Security Risk - Desktop Security News Analysis - Dark Reading - In a nutshell, the guide advocates that organizations calculate cyber security risks and costs by asking questions of every organizational discipline that might be affected: legal, compliance, business operations, IT, external communications, crisis management, and risk management/insurance. The idea is to involve everyone who might be affected by a security breach and collect data on the potential risks and costs.
- Second International conference on image science of the Department for Image Science, Danube-University Krems - Never before the world of images has changed so fast and the way images are produced transformed so drastically like in the latest presence: Second Life, Micromovies, Flickr, Virtual Reality, You Tube, Visual Music, Scientific Visualisation, Google Earth etc. are keywords standing for a multitude of new possibilities for individual producing, projecting and distributing of visual material.
- Jeremy Mayer -Typewriter Sculpture, Illustration, Studio - Mayer has created a series of sculptures that capture the mysteriously delicate, yet sturdy, inner structures of living things using old typewriters.
- The United States Air Force Art Collection - The United States Air Force Art Collection documents the story of the Air Force through the universal language of art. The actions and deeds of Air Force men and women are recorded in paintings by eminent American artists in a way words alone could never tell. These paintings are both historical and educational and expose the military and the public to the role and diverse capabilities of the United States Air Force.
- Atlas of Cyberspace - The Atlas of Cyberspace, by Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin, is the first comprehensive book to explore the spatial and visual nature of cyberspace and its infrastructure.
- Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive - truly bizarre set of posters, from the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive. Using the words of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and George W. Bush, they remind our spies not to spill secrets — or switch to the other side. Recruiters from Beijing to Moscow to Tehran are, no doubt, cursing the poster-makers' cleverness, and their boundless Illustrator skill. Here are some samples:
- Hackermedia - is on the air! - hacking and security podcasts
- Pollster.com - 2008 Election Polls, Trends, Charts and Analysis -
- IEEE Spectrum: The Hunt for the Kill Switch - Are chip makers building electronic trapdoors in key military hardware? The Pentagon is making its biggest effort yet to find out
- YouTube - Miriam Makeba-Pata Pata(TV Record,S.Paulo,Brazil,1968) -
- Online Divorcee Jailed After Killing Virtual Hubby - NYTimes.com -
- Podcasts from the University of Oxford -
- Vintagetextile.com high style vintage clothing - Exquisite vintage clothing 1750-1980: Early Costume; 19th-20th century Couture; wearable designer fashion for the discriminating collector. Since 1998 exclusively on the internet, Vintage Textile has offered a wide selection of the best high-style clothing in all the major categories: Early, Victorian, Edwardian, 1920s, 1930s-1950s, 20th century Designer, Shawls/Textiles. We are proud to count major collectors and museums worldwide among our valued customers.
- YouTube - Exploding Whale -
- YouTube - Björk talking about her TV -
- YouTube - bjork talking about her TV -
- Sublime Frequencies produces music from Java Bali Sumatra Burma Morocco Thailand India Mali Syria Laos Cambodia and Nepal -
- The Ultimate Collection Of Useful Photoshop Actions | Developer’s Toolbox | Smashing Magazine -
- LASEC - The Security and Cryptography Laboratory (LASEC) was created at EPFL in 2000. It is part of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences (I&C). The main activities of LASEC are research and education on the security of communication and information systems, cryptography, and applications.
- Compromising Electromagnetic Emanations of Wired Keyboard - Martin Vuagnoux and Sylvain Pasini - Computer keyboards are often used to transmit sensitive information such as username/password (e.g. to log into computers, to do e-banking money transfer, etc.). A vulnerability on these devices will definitely kill the security of any computer or ATM.
Wired keyboards emit electromagnetic waves, because they contain eletronic components. These eletromagnetic radiation could reveal sensitive information such as keystrokes. Although Kuhn already tagged keyboards as risky, we did not find any experiment or evidence proving or refuting the practical feasibility to remotely eavesdrop keystrokes, especially on modern keyboards.
- Welcome to Virtual Vigilance.org - Operation Virtual Vigilance is concerned with securing America's borders. Cameras located along the border are operated by American citizens over the Internet. Suspicious activity is reported to the Border Patrol.
VirtualVigilance.org is hosted by American Border Patrol (a non-profit 501c3 corporation).
For background information, please click on "background."
The camera system is currently in operation and being viewed by a select core group of volunteers.
If you sign up as a "Virtual Volunteer" and you meet certain criteria, you will be contacted for training.
- DVN - Homepage - Access the world's largest collection of social science research data here by searching across or browsing through one of the virtual data archives (called "dataverses") listed below.
- Robert Marion LaFollette (1855-1925), speech in Senate, 1908 March 17 - [While the public's mind and the Hearst and the Pulitzer papers (and other papers) were preoccupied with the sex-life and murder of Stanford White, and the night of the "velvet swing"; while senators and congressmen interrupted their business to read the details of the "trial of the century" in the evening papers, there was some trouble in America]
Congressional Record — Senate
page 3434
1908 March 17
Senate bill 3023
AMENDMENT OF NATIONAL BANKING LAWS.
- 83 Beautiful Wordpress Themes You (Probably) Haven’t Seen | Smashing Magazine -
In 2001, Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin published an Atlas of Cyberspace, described by Vint Cerf as “explor[ing] a remarkable universe of visual representations of the Internet’s diversity, structure and content.” The atlas locates cyberspace along many dimensions: geographic maps of core fiber optic back bones, logical maps of network organization and hierarchy, social maps showing the relationships between individual users in virtual worlds, hierarchy trees of web page design, world maps from 3-d shooters, etc. While some of the visualizations, designed to shock and awe through their graphical sophistication, have become curious artifacts in their own right, almost like a first generation iPod, harkening back to simpler times, the book itself promises not to disappoint. The good news is that it has been re-released under a Creative Commons license and can be downloaded here. There is a 20MB low-res version and a 200+MB high-res version.
Arpanet’s geographical configuration, 1975
Submarine fiber optic cables in the Caribbean
“Great Circle” map designed as a bit of marketing ephemera for the Cable and Wireless Company, showing the global connectivity of its telecommunications network, with Britain centered representing its position as “hub of the world”, 1945
The huge and dense mesh of connections shows the social geography of LambdaMOO, a multi-user dimension, by mapping how over half of the 4,800 or so players related to each other. LambdaMOO was a well-established and well-known virtual environment created at Xerox PARC in 1990. The map was created using social statistics gathered by Cobot, a software agent that “lived” in LambdaMOO, sitting in the “living room” and observing the social interactions of players. 2000
IEEE Spectrum published an article this past May about the growing concern within defense circles about the loss of oversight along the military hardware supply chain. With many of the semiconductor components manufactured in the People’s Republic of China, rumors and fears of maliciously implanted “backdoors” abound:
According to a U.S. defense contractor who spoke on condition of anonymity, a “European chip maker” recently built into its microprocessors a kill switch that could be accessed remotely. French defense contractors have used the chips in military equipment, the contractor told IEEE Spectrum. If in the future the equipment fell into hostile hands, “the French wanted a way to disable that circuit,” he said. Spectrum could not confirm this account independently, but spirited discussion about it among researchers and another defense contractor last summer at a military research conference reveals a lot about the fever dreams plaguing the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD)…
Vetting a chip with a hidden agenda can’t be all that tough, right? Wrong. Although commercial chip makers routinely and exhaustively test chips with hundreds of millions of logic gates, they can’t afford to inspect everything. So instead they focus on how well the chip performs specific functions. For a microprocessor destined for use in a cellphone, for instance, the chip maker will check to see whether all the phone’s various functions work. Any extraneous circuitry that doesn’t interfere with the chip’s normal functions won’t show up in these tests…
Nor can chip makers afford to test every chip. From a batch of thousands, technicians select a single chip for physical inspection, assuming that the manufacturing process has yielded essentially identical devices. They then laboriously grind away a thin layer of the chip, put the chip into a scanning electron microscope, and then take a picture of it, repeating the process until every layer of the chip has been imaged. Even here, spotting a tiny discrepancy amid a chip’s many layers and millions or billions of transistors is a fantastically difficult task, and the chip is destroyed in the process…
The Pentagon is now caught in a bind. It likes the cheap, cutting-edge devices emerging from commercial foundries and the regular leaps in IC performance the commercial sector is known for. But with those improvements comes the potential for sabotage. “The economy is globalized, but defense is not globalized,” says Coleman. “How do you reconcile the two?” [link]
With respect to recent news pertaining to electronic security and surveillance see also:
Links for the week of 17 October 2008:
- YouTube - Journey by a London Bus (1950) - in the event you needed a bit of a refresher, please take note of this
film, kindly produced by the colonial film board, on how to ride a
london bus
- The Things He Carried - The Atlantic (November 2008) - Airport security in America is a sham—“security theater” designed to make travelers feel better and catch stupid terrorists. Smart ones can get through security with fake boarding passes and all manner of prohibited items—as our correspondent did with ease.
- YouTube - RFID Implant in Hand Do It Yourself -
- Fast, Cheap and Sustainable: Ex-Pentagon Geek Plots Disaster Relief 2.0 | Danger Room from Wired.com - The project is called STAR-TIDES (Sustainable Technologies, Accelerated Research-Transportable Infrastructures for Development and Emergency Support). The acronym may be long, but the concept is simple: it is supposed to pull together cheap and effective solutions for humanitarian emergencies or post-war reconstruction.
- Plug Pulled on Hamas’ YouTube Ripoff - A few weeks ago, Western intelligence officials discovered that the Palestinian jihadist group Hamas had set up a video-sharing site — to spread propaganda and to train would-be terrorists. Now, that radical Islamic answer to YouTube is offline. And jihadists are blaming the FBI for the takedown.
- A DNA Database for Counterterrorism - DNA samples of thousands of suspected terrorists from Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere have been collected and preserved in a little-known U.S. government database that is intended for forensic intelligence and counterterrorism purposes.
- Designing a Malicious Processor - Hidden malicious circuits provide an attacker with a stealthy attack vector. As they occupy a layer below the entire software stack, malicious circuits can bypass traditional defensive techniques. Yet current work on trojan circuits considers only simple attacks against the hardware itself, and straightforward defenses. More complex designs that attack the software are unexplored, as are the countermeasures an attacker may take to bypass proposed defenses.
- U.S. Cockpits - cockpit images
- everystockphoto - searching free photos -
- Free Stock Photos at freerangestock.com - Totally Free Stock Photography and Textures! -
- http://www.morguefile.com/archive/ -
- Cheat Sheets for Front-end Web Developers - Six Revisions -
- stock.xchng - the leading free stock photography site -
- Liam’s Pictures from Old Books -
- ITA Software: Trip Planner - airplane ticket service used by many travel agents
- Collect Russia Collect Russia Soviet Russian - various military artifacts
- Bloomberg.com: Bloomberg Podcasts - Lapham’s Quarterly Editor Puts Events in Context
- BLAST: Basic Local Alignment Search Tool - dna sequence search engine
- Turbo-charged wireless hacks threaten networks • The Register - “Brute force decryption of the WPA and WPA2 systems using parallel processing has been on the theoretical possibilities horizon for some time - and presumably employed by relevant government agencies in extreme situations - but the use of the latest NVidia cards to speedup decryption on a standard PC is worrying.”
Accompanying the recent military action on the ground in Georgia was a cyber campaign that took down many government sites and generally impeded the dissemenation of information throughout the country. Shortly after things cooled down in Georgia, a collection of security researchers in and around the intelligence community got together under the banner of “Project Grey Goose” in an attempt to see if open source information, particularly through semantic analysis of Russian hacker forums, could be used to unmask those responsible. The team drew widely from the community:
- Lewis Shepherd - former CTO, Defense Intelligence Agency; CTO, Microsoft Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments
- Bob Gourley - former CTO, Defense Intelligence Agency; founder, Crucial Point LLC, a technology research and advisory firm
- Matt Devost - former Senior INFOSEC Engineer at SAIC; Security Consultant to foreign governments and corporations; President, Total Intelligence Solutions
- Preston Werntz - Project Manager, Newbrook Solutions, currently engaged at DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis
- Derek Plansky - former Director, Lexis-Nexis Risk and Information Analytics Group; President, Informatic Ideas Consulting
- Andrew Conway - former analyst performing classified work for a three letter agency analyzing leadership emergence in covert networks; currently a Ph.D candidate in Politics, NYU
- Jeremy Baldwin - Analytic Tradecraft Developer, The Analysis Corporation [source]
Following 56 days of investigation the group has published its findings [pdf] [intelfusion blog]. The conclusions?
- We assess with high confidence that the Russian government will likely continue its practice of distancing itself from the Russian nationalistic hacker community thus gaining deniability while passively supporting and enjoying the strategic benefits of their actions.
- We assess with high confidence that nationalistic Russian hackers are likely adaptive adversaries engaged in aggressively finding more efficient ways to disable networks.
- We judge with moderate confidence that a journeyman-apprentice relationship will continue to be the training model used by nationalistic Russian hackers.
- We estimate with moderate confidence that hacker forums engaged in training Russian cyber warriors will continue to evolve their feedback loop which effectively becomes their Cyber Kill Chain.
- After analyzing over 200 posts in the Xakep.ru and StopGeorgia.ru forums, as well as Georgian network server data, Grey Goose analysts were able to discern a cyber kill chain which is comprised of the following steps:
- 1) Encourage novices through patriotic imagery and rhetoric to get involved in the cyber war against Georgia
2) Publish a target list of Georgian government Web sites which have been tested for access from Russian and Lithuanian IP addresses.
3) Discuss and select one of several different types of malware to use against the target Web site.
4) Launch the attack
5) Evaluate the results (optional step)
- We assess with high confidence that all visitors to Russian hacker forums which originate from U.S. IP addresses will be monitored.
Links for the week of 11 October 2008:
- Kent’s Imperative: Intelligence and financial crisis, historical edition - “The system of mutual espionage and rivalry which exists amongst joint-stock banks is another source of security to the public. That a system of espionage exists upon every joint-stock bank, at least in Scotland. by their sister banks, who exchange notes and checks with them, must be admitted, after what took place with regard to a joint-stock bank establishment in the west of Scotland.
- 20 Useful Visualization Libraries : A Beautiful WWW -
- YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. - Catch up on your Favorite MacGyver Moments. Watch Full Episodes Now!
- Welcome to the Chemical-Biological Warfare Exposures Site - The Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) play distinct roles in dealing with chemical and biological (CB) exposures. DoD identifies and validates veteran’s exposure to CB agents (What was he exposed to? When and Where was he exposed?) and provides the names of these individuals along with their exposure information to the VA. The VA then notifies individuals of their potential exposure, provides treatment, if necessary, for these individuals and adjudicates any claim for compensation.
- BibliOdyssey: Early Microscopes -
- U.S. Geological Survey Photographic Library -
- Browse the Artifacts of Geek History in Jay Walker’s Library -
- Antonie Pannekoek - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Pannekoek studied mathematics and physics in Leiden from 1891. Even before he went to college he was interested in astronomy and studied the variability of Polaris. He published his first article, On the Necessity of Further Researches on the Milky Way, as a student. Some years after he had finished his study he started work at the Leidse Sterrewacht (Leiden observatory), where he wrote his thesis.After reading Edward Bellamy’s Equality, Pannekoek became a convinced socialist and started studying Karl Marx’s theories.
- How I became a soldier in the Georgia-Russia cyberwar. - By Evgeny Morozov - Slate Magazine - My experiment also might shed some light on why the recent cyberwar has been so hard to pin down and why no group in particular has claimed responsibility. Paranoid that the Kremlin’s hand is everywhere, we risk underestimating the great patriotic rage of many ordinary Russians, who, having been fed too much government propaganda in the last few days, are convinced that they need to crash Georgian Web sites. Many Russians undoubtedly went online to learn how to make mischief, as I did. Within an hour, they, too, could become cyberwarriors.
- Big Brother Is Listening - The Atlantic (April 2006) - The NSA has the ability to eavesdrop on your communications—landlines, cell phones, e-mails, BlackBerry messages, Internet searches, and more—with ease. What happens when the technology of espionage outstrips the law’s ability to protect ordinary citizens from it?by James Bamford
- Defense Tech: JIMMY CARTER: SUPER SPY? - The rumors are that the Navy’s newest nuclear sub, the USS Jimmy Carter, has been designed for spywork, with a “special capability… to tap undersea cables and eavesdrop on the communications passing through them,” according to the AP.
- Sense Networks - How many people are going out at night? Locally or to
destinations? By income level? Did the financial district come
in early this morning?
- Curt Herzstark and his Pocket Calculator CURTA -
- Leyden jar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - The Leyden jar is a simple device that “stores” static electricity in large amounts. It was invented in 1745 by Pieter van Musschenbroek (1692–1761), in Leiden, The Netherlands. It was the original form of the capacitor. The Leyden jar was used to conduct many early experiments in electricity, and its discovery was of fundamental importance in the study of electricity.
- India’s first virtual porn star. | MetaFilter - Savita Bhabhi is India’s First Virtual Pornstar (NSFW). A sexy, buxom, and lusty almond-eyed femme fatale, Savita, bearing the title ‘bhabhi’ which means ’sister-in-law’ indicating that she’s married, is the quintessential Indian male porn fantasy ‘toon. Launched in March this year, the web site has proven to be a hit, incorporating South Asian themes such as sleeping with the servant boy; with a cousin; and, of course, the boys playing cricket next door.
- Personal History: The Madness of Spies: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker - The Madness of Spies A Secret Service secret by John Le Carré
- Colliding-beam accelerators — will they reveal the ultimate particles? -
- Quantum Hacking group - Quantum cryptography is a method of secure communication using qubits. Such communication can be proved by the rules of quantum mechanics to be, in theory, completely secure. That is, any attempt of eavesdropping will be caught. We consider practical implementations of quantum cryptography. First, we play the role of an eavesdropper and try to hack a variety of quantum cryptosystems by taking advantage of non-ideal behavior of the equipment. Then, we suggest countermeasures, either practically by modifying the setups, or theoretically by modifying the way of communicating. This makes future cryptosystems harder to crack, ultimately approaching the goal of absolute security.
Links for the week of 5 October 2008:
- The Tilt-Shift Miniature Fake Technique in Photoshop CS: A Simple How-To -
- 23 Personal Tools to Learn More About Yourself | FlowingData - Applications spring up every month that let people track, monitor, and analyze their habits and behaviors in hopes of gaining a better understanding about themselves and their surroundings.
- Leif Bloomquist’s Commodore 64 Telnet BBS - n a moment of nostalgic geekiness, I decided to set up a Bulletin Board System (BBS) on my Commodore 64 again - after 15 years! However, I wanted to avoid long distance charges for any callers, and the need for a second phone line.
- Privoxy Frequently Asked Questions - Privoxy is a non-caching web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities for enhancing privacy, modifying web page data, managing HTTP cookies, controlling access, and removing ads, banners, pop-ups and other obnoxious Internet junk. Privoxy has a flexible configuration and can be customized to suit individual needs and tastes. Privoxy has application for both stand-alone systems and multi-user networks.
- Darik’s Boot And Nuke | Hard Drive Disk Wipe - Darik’s Boot and Nuke (”DBAN”) is a self-contained boot disk that securely wipes the hard disks of most computers. DBAN will automatically and completely delete the contents of any hard disk that it can detect, which makes it an appropriate utility for bulk or emergency data destruction.
- Mystery surrounds hijacked Iranian ship - The Long War Journal - Within days, pirates who had boarded the ship developed strange health complications, skin burns and loss of hair. Independent sources tell The Long War Journal that a number of pirates have also died.
- Vote 2008 - The Takeaway - Track the Electoral College vote predictions - Aggregates many of the major media sources’, including Intrade, perdictions about each state. It does so in a nicely designed grid.
- SydLexia.com - Are You Afraid of the Dark: The Tale of the Pinball Wizard -
- Technology Review: Wireless at Fiber Speeds - the team was able to send a 10.6-gigabit-per-second signal between antennas 800 meters apart. And more recently, the researchers demonstrated a 20-gigabit-per-second signal in the lab
- AnandTech - The LCD Thread -
- SCADA - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - SCADA is the abbreviation for Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition. It generally refers to an industrial control system: a computer system monitoring and controlling a process. The process can be industrial, infrastructure or facility based
- Virtual Worlds Forum Europe, conference and expo, London, 6-8 October 2008 -
- English Russia » Moscow Zoo at 1920 -
- Monitoring System of Belgrade Water Supply - Belgrade water supply was founded 115 years ago and over the years, it constantly expanded its capacity, following the demographic and industrial city growth. During this period, the number of Belgrade citizens increased 25 times, while the quantity of fabricated water increased 110 times. The 90’s crisis stopped all the development projects. It most affected the application of modern solutions in areas of water monitoring, fabrication control, distribution and quality.
- The Atlas of the Real World - Telegraph - The Atlas of the Real World uses software to depict the nations of the world, not by their physical size, but by their demographic importance on a range of subjects. Here, we select a series of travel- and news-related maps.
- Pentagon Wants Cyberwar Range to ‘Replicate Human Behavior and Frailties’ (Updated) | Danger Room from Wired.com - Congress has ordered the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, to put together a National Cyber Range, as part of a massive (and massively secret) $30 billion, government-wide effort better prep for battle online. The project is now considered a top priority for the Agency. And to make sure the facility is as true-to-life as possible, Darpa wants the contractors running the Range to be able to “replicate realistic human behavior on nodes,” a request for proposals, released today, reveals.
- Sustainable Cities: A new global database | Sustainable Cities - Sustainable Cities™ collects and disseminates knowledge on cases and initiatives from cities all over the world. You will find descriptions to create better public transport, to optimize waste management, to reduce energy consumption, to manage waste water better and use the cleaned water to create new recreational activities for citizens in cities, and many, many other initiatives.
- DoS attack reveals (yet another) crack in net’s core • The Register - The bug in the transmission control protocol (TCP) affords attackers a wealth of new ways to carry out denials of service on equipment at the heart of data centers and other sensitive points on the internet. The new class of attack is especially severe because it can be carried out using very little bandwidth and has the ability to paralyze a server or router even after the flood of malicious data has stopped.
- Pictured: Inside the £800m Dubai hotel boasting a £13,000-a-night suite and dolphins flown in from the South Pacific | Mail Online - It’s the latest word in Gulf excess - a sprawling £800million resort boasting a £13,000-a-night suite and dolphins flown in from the South Pacific, all atop a palm tree-shaped island.
- the hacker’s choice - THC - GSM CRACKERS & PASSPORT SPOOFERS ——- THC is a non-commercial group of computer experts focusing on practical and theoretical computer security. The group holds a broad expertise in analysis, design and development of security solutions, ranging from efficient network surveillance scanners to kernel modules for operating systems.
- Ning. Create your own social network for anything. - Name Your Social Network
- https://www.myaoc.org/eweb/DynamicPage.aspx?Site=CROWS2&WebKey=ecfde565-811d-4760-9d8a-f8f62135cacb - The name “Old Crows” emerged from the first large-scale use of Electronic Warfare during the WWII Battle of Britain and the US and allied bombing raids over Europe. The Allied Radar Countermeasure operators used the code name “Ravens” and employed receivers and transmitters to monitor and jam threat frequencies. Military jargon later changed “Ravens” to “Crows.”With origins in WWII, Electronic Warfare has been, and remains, a critical enabling capability in military operations in peace and war. With the evolution of digital/computer technology, Electronic Warfare (EW), Information Operations (IO), and related disciplines are increasingly necessary to achieve knowledge superiority, strategic and tactical dominance, and asset protection in both offensive and defensive operations. Information Operations include those actions taken to influence, effect, or defend information, information systems, and decision-making.
- CASOS: Home | CASOS - CASOS brings together computer science, dynamic network analysis and the empirical study of complex socio-technical systems. Computational and social network techniques are combined to develop a better understanding of the fundamental principles of organizing, coordinating, managing and destabilizing systems of intelligent adaptive agents (human and artificial) engaged in real tasks at the team, organizational or social level.
- CCSA - Cyber Conflict Studies Association - Welcome to the Cyber Conflict Studies Association (CCSA) website. CCSA is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to promoting and leading a diversified research agenda in the field of cyber conflict.
- ModLab - ENTER TERMINATOR - This project introduces a new challenge problem: designing robotic systems to recover after disassembly from high-energy events and a first implemented solution of a simplified problem.
- Thwarting NSA Traffic Analysis -
- Darpa Budget -
- DARPA 2009 Budget - Danger Room -
- Pentagon’s Mind-Reading Computers Replicate | Danger Room from Wired.com - Augmented Cognition relies on the idea that people have more than one kind of working memory, and more than one kind of attention; there are separate slots in the mind for things written, things heard and things seen. By monitoring how taxed those areas of the brain are, it should be possible to change a computer’s display to compensate
- DARPA: Fake Brains, ASAP - According to DARPA’s recently-released budget, the Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) program isn’t set to being until the next fiscal year.
- Möbius transformations revealed - the beauty of Möbius transformations and shows how moving to a higher dimension reveals their essential unity.
- 2007 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge - he articles linked on this page describe the accomplishments of the creative and gifted scientists, artists, and others who put the winning entries together
- Number of cell phone subscribers to hit 4 billion this year, UN says - The ITU emphasized the need to carefully interpret data. A 61 per cent penetration rate does not mean in reality that every other person in the world is using a mobile phone; rather, the statistics reflect the number of subscriptions, not people. Double counting could occur if people have multiple cellular subscriptions, while some could be sharing their phone with others.
- Friend or Foe? Crows Never Forget a Face, It Seems - NYTimes.com - Though Dr. Marzluff’s is the first formal study of human face recognition in wild birds, his preliminary findings confirm the suspicions of many other researchers who have observed similar abilities in crows, ravens, gulls and other species.
- Insomnia – Victorian style - Vol. 21, Part 10 ( October 2008) - We owe much to Charles Dickens’ insomnia. Sleepless, he would tread the streets of London and encounter the inspirations for many of his novels and conceive of the tortured minds of various characters. On returning to his northwards-pointing bed he would sleep exactly in the middle, placing his arms out and checking that his hands were equidistant from the bed’s edge. Away from home he would realign the bed accordingly, which is why he always carried a compass; and he had to be facing north before he could write, as this would foster his creativity.
- OpenSpime - OpenSpime is a project of WideTag, Inc., a technology infrastructure company providing innovative solutions for an Open Internet of Things.
