refractal

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.”

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.

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? -