An analyst at Websense Security Labs did a study of the “wolfteeth bot catcher”, a tool coming out of China that allows a user to specify a particular range of IP addresses and then search for and exploit the MS08-067 bug in Windows, installing any malicious code they may choose. Careful though! It seems the authors of this program included a backdoor so that installing it also pulls you into their botnet. Here is the link for the disection, an interesting bit of thick texture even if the details are lost on you.
Brainloop is an interactive performance platform that utilizes a Brain Computer Interface (BCI) system which allows a subject to operate devices merely by imagining specific motor commands. These mentally visualized commands may be seen as the rehearsal of a motor act without the overt motor output; a neural synapse occurs but the actual movement is blocked at the corticospinal level. Motor imagery such as “move left hand”, “move right hand” or “move feet” become non-muscular communication and control signals that convey messages and commands to the external world. In Brainloop the performer is able - without physically moving - to investigate urban areas and rural landscapes as he globe-trots around virtual Google Earth. Through motor imagery, he selects locations, camera angles and positions and records these image sequences in a virtual world. In the second half of the performance, he plays back the sequence and uses Brainloop to compose a custom soundtrack by selecting, manipulating and re-locating audio recordings in real time into the physical space. [link]
The ‘Working Computer Museum‘ is an organization run by a group of net artists in Sicily. The Museum “is an interactive permanent exhibition where visitors can not only look vintage computers, but also try them, ‘put their hands on them’ using their old Operating Systems, softwares or reading their original manuals.
Most interestingly, however, for those of us not able to arrange a visit at the moment, is their online museum. From SPARCStation 5’s to VAXStation 4000’s running Unix System V to Solaris 9, visitors are welcome to telnet into a whole cadre of terminals to compile and explore to their hearts content. If you do login, do not miss the Star Trek text adventure game installed in the lobby. A list of machines and login addresses can be found here.
Shot in three-dimensions, using 64 laser beams scanning a 360 degree radius approximately 900 times per second, Radiohead today released their music video for the song House of Cards off of In Rainbows. The result is a very old school, almost Atari-class rendering of the scene. A result somewhat disturbing for the animus it inserts into an ephemeral cyberscape.
In a statement Yorke said: “I always like the idea of using technology in a way that it wasn’t meant to be used, the struggle to get your head around what you can do with it. I liked the idea of making a video of human beings and real life and time without using any cameras, just lasers, so there are just mathematical points - and how strangely emotional it ended up being.”’
The technology is ripe with potential applications because it allow one to map out point by point the exact dimensions of an environment over time. It indeed completely abstracts physical space into mathematical relationships between points, looking at distances and angles and not objects and shapes. Such data sets could give enterprising computational modelers an interesting way to represent and study interior spaces. Ha, perhaps an algorithm for feng shui and an end to bad design will come from this?
The “Digifiz” add-on, pictured above, was first introduced in the Volkswagen Golf in 1985 and was continually offered as a feature until 1992. Such product design emerged from the days when the future was being reborn, when electronic synthesizers pumped out 8-bit staccato and glistening liquid crystal offered the masculine promise of evading any nuclear nastiness that might arise (see Corvette ad below) all while simultaneously pushing forward a cutting edge, revealing the futures to come. It seems that immediately after LCD technology became commercially scalable a huge proliferation of it spread across all forms of consumer products, bringing with it an amulet of mystique and promise to the consumer device adorning it. A mystique and promise, mind you, unavailable to those lousy Soviets.
Digifiz” add-on, pictured above, was first introduced in the Volkswagen Golf in 1985 and was continually offered as a feature until 1992. Such product design emerged from the days when the future was being reborn, when electronic synthesizers pumped out 8-bit staccato and glistening liquid crystal offered the masculine promise of evading any nuclear nastiness that might arise (see Corvette ad below) all while simultaneously pushing forward a cutting edge, revealing the futures to come. It seems that immediately after LCD technology became commercially scalable a huge proliferation of it spread across all forms of consumer products, bringing with it an amulet of mystique and promise to the consumer device adorning it. A mystique and promise, mind you, unavailable to those lousy Soviets.