One of the more cringe-worthy stories to come out of the Wikileaks-Anonymous-DDOS plotline in the last few weeks is the lack of security practiced by just about everyone involved. Authorities found the name of a designer named Alex Tapanaris embedded in a PDF press release purporting to come from the hacker group Anonymous. His site was later inaccessible and he was said to have been arrested.
Several other people were arrested, said to be allied to Anonymous, in the Netherlands. Their identities may have been ascertained because the LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon) software used for the retaliatory DDOS attacks carried user information with it.
Hacker vigilante group Anonymous may have followed up its distributed denial of service attacks against Mastercard and Visa with a threat to do the same to...the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The group, allied with 4chan, prosecuted "Operation Payback" to harm the credit card companies allegedly for suspending WikiLeaks' payments. The threat to attack the online freedoms group came after EFF tweeted its opposition to DDOS attacks.
There's been no end to the stories about 3D in the field of entertainment. It's the death of film! It's the salvation of a moribund art form! It's a flash in the pan! I'm all like whatever. Where 3D is really exciting is where it brings our inaccessible, buried past to life and light. In archaeology.
Lidar has been used to unveil the three-dimensional reality of a lost city and 3D printing has been used to create life-sized, ultra-detailed copies of Tutankhamun's mummy. The latest efforts have used 3D laser mapping to recreate a medieval castle's dungeon and a neolithic village's holy objects.
When I first wrote about radically new computer construction being based on water, I thought that was plenty amazing. IBM launching a five-year quantum computing project was an astounding follow-up, but when I found a group of scientists using the human brain to further computing, I thought I'd pretty much found the weirdest component possible. But when it rains it pours. The latest entry into future computing is . . . an invisibility cloak.
Using "metamaterials" (artificially-engineered substances with new properties), a team led by optical physicist Martin McCall of the Imperial College London has blueprinted a cloak that will bend not just light but time itself. He's published the team's paper in this month's "Journal of Optics."
Sir Maurice Wilkes has died. Wilkes led "the development of EDSAC, the first stored-program digital computer to go into service in the 1940s."
The idea of building high-level, large-scale computer instructions from sets of small ones was his as well, giving birth to software programming. He also did work on the first computer network.
Wilkes led the Mathematical Laboratory (later the Computer Laboratory) at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. After retiring from Cambridge he worked for Digital Equipment Corporation and taught at MIT.
Finally. The Internet is now good for something. Ancestry.com, leaders in putting freaky shit online, have fired 100 years of Sears Catalogues through a series of tubes and straight into your eyeholes.
250,000 pages of cataloguey goodness are yours for perusal, covering the years 1896 to 1993, when it ceased production as a paper artifact.
The artillery shelling of the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong on Nov. 23 has captured the attention of the world - then set it on edge. In a media-saturated era like our own, we have no end of resources for staying current with the continuing, and increased, conflict between North and South on the Korean peninsula. But a surfeit can be overwhelming sometimes, especially when it is difficult to tell which sources are reputable.
So, we've put together a list of reliable sources for news on this event. We've compared notes as to what we've used to get the news and have asked readers via Twitter.
The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, from April 20 to July 15, was probably the disaster most extensively covered online. BP itself launched a social media channel for it. Oilholic let you track the spill as it spread, as did NOAA. The White House answered spill questions via YouTube.
But what about the aftermath? "Out of sight, out of mind" doesn't work for the inhabitants of the Gulf. Or anyone else who likes, say, water. So we hunted down some resources for those who wisely do not think, or unfortunately personally know, that it's not over.
Acoustic archaeology is a burgeoning field of inquiry into the past. The discipline seeks to understand how sound played a role in a given culture, using the artifacts of that culture and to abstract and reproduce sound from their artifacts. Also called archaeoacoustics, earlier explorations seems to have been a bit more oozy-groovy than how it is currently practiced. What makes recent explorations fascinating for us is how easy it is to share a direct experience of that past via social media.
We have found some hopefully representative examples, both of ancient sound and explorations of those sounds, to share with you.
In a remarkable series of articles on the World Policy Institute's blog, Anais Borja introduces this distressing thought.
"With easy storage made even easier by cheap disk space, our ability to create and save information has outpaced our ability to think critically about the theory and practice of archiving it."
Will this increase in materials force a democratizing of information and impress that on future historians or will it create an epochal informational garbage dump where real understanding will defy human and machine thought?
