Posts Tagged ‘action’

Ever since BitCoin appeared, I’ve been waiting for two security experts to venture detailed opinions on it: Dan Kaminsky and Ben Laurie. Dan has now weighed in, with a long, thoughtful piece on the merits and demerits of BitCoin as a currency and as a phenomenon. Bitcoin’s fundamental principle of fraud management is one of        

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Dan Kaminski on BitCoin

Years after the Department of Homeland Security said it would consider the civil liberty implications of searching electronic devices of people crossing country lines, it’s published a report — and determined that few changes are needed. Released on January 29th, a two-page summary (PDF) from the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties concludes that electronic devices like computers can be searched even without “reasonable suspicion,” a lower barrier than faced elsewhere in the country. While people can refuse to give up passwords to the DHS or take other action, they may be detained or have their devices confiscated for doing so. The overall authority to conduct border searches without suspicion or warrant is clear and… Continue reading…

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Homeland Security concludes laptop searches at borders don’t violate civil rights

During the 2000 Presidential campaign, the mysterious, satirical website www.gwbush.com appeared on the web. The criticisms of George W. Bush on it gained media attention worldwide, culminating in a mention by the Presidential candidate at a press conference. The Yes Men were born. Since then, Andy Bichlbaum (real name: Jacques Servin ), Mike Bonanno ( Igor Vamos ), and an ever-revolving gang of comrades have created amusing actions like printing a fake edition of The New York Times in hopes of calling out entities ranging from Dow Chemical and ExxonMobil to the WTO and the United States Chamber of Commerce.

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The Yes Men Kickstart a revolt

Intel’s holding its annual developer conference next week, from September 11th through the 13th, and while a certain Cupertino computer company will undoubtedly dominate the news on day two, Intel will also have a few things to reveal. Chief among them is the firm’s next-gen Haswell architecture , which is still on track for 2013. Well, actually, it’s not merely on track: Intel tells us that at least one version of highly integrated system-on-chip is now slated to have a 10-watt TDP. “It’s really the first product we’re building from the ground up for ultrabook,” a representative says. What does that mean

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Intel’s power-efficient Haswell processor targets thinner laptops with new 10-watt TDP

In 2009, Matrix creators Lana and Andy Wachowski met with director Tom Tykwer to attempt a project they’d been planning for years: adapting Cloud Atlas , a complex and wide-ranging novel that was initially called “unfilmable” by its author. The Wachowskis and Tykwer (perhaps best known for Run Lola Run ) linked the many characters together by making several of them — often from different centuries — the same soul traveling through different bodies. The initial draft, which they used to win over author David Mitchell, was constructed by writing the book’s scenes on hundreds of index cards and placing them around the house, then picking them up in a different order each day to create new narrative arcs. As the Cloud Atlas nears release, T…

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How ‘Matrix’ creators Lana and Andy Wachowski filmed the unfilmable with ‘Cloud Atlas’

Sony held a big press event at IFA in Berlin today, but we spent also got to spend some time with Sony Electronics America COO Phil Molyneux in New York. What’s interesting is that Sony isn’t announcing the intriguing VAIO Duo or Tap 20 Windows 8 PCs in America just yet — Phil told us that SEA wants to announce those later in a more focused way. But we did get to talk about Sony’s updated Tablet S, which looks quite nice.

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Sony’s Phil Molyneux: ‘consumers weren’t embracing’ split-screen Tablet P

Episode three of Telltale’s The Walking Dead game series is almost upon us , but if you’ve yet to get in on the action there’s good news — Steam is having a sale. Right now you can pick up a season pass for the episodic series on both Mac and PC for $14.99, or 40 percent off the regular price. The pass gets you access to all five episodes — once they’re released, that is — and the deal is only on until August 30th, so act quickly. While the latest episode, “The Long Road Ahead,” is launching on the PlayStation Network today, Mac and PC gamers can venture into the zombie-filled world starting tomorrow

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Good Deal: ‘The Walking Dead’ game season pass for $14.99 on Steam

Drawing from old console games and VHS tapes, artist and horror aficionado Max Capacity has created probably thousands of pieces of pixel art and kinetic animated GIFs. Mr. Capacity favors retro imagery and lines or glitches of the sort found on worn-out analog media, making viewers pay attention to what’s gone wrong with the image as much as to the action inside the frame.

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Max Capacity’s glitch-fueled pop art: beyond the average GIF

“If you want to understand GameStop, you must understand refurbishment,” says GameStop CEO Paul Raines. It’s not the most evocative mission statement, but it’s brought me to Grapevine, Texas, where Raines is speaking. Behind the tall executive lies a 182,000-square-foot facility filled with workers who are polishing discs, piecing together video game consoles, and rigorously testing pre-owned iPads, iPhones, iPods and Android tablets. It’s called the Refurbishment Operations Center, or ROC for short, and GameStop is giving us a first-hand tour of the $7 million facility

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Refurbished: GameStop’s plan for the next generation is cleaning up the old

The brilliant popular engineering Sustainable Materials – with Both Eyes Open: Future Buildings, Vehicles, Products and Equipment – Made Efficiently and Made with Less New Material has just been released in the USA. I reviewed this book last November, when it came out in the UK. Here’s a brief excerpt from then: We review a

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Brilliant pop. engineering book Sustainable Materials comes to the USA

What do you get when you mix equal parts Blade Runner , The Rock , and The Transporter ? It might be something like the upcoming film Lockout , and producer EuropaCorp has made the first few minutes available online. Set in a dystopian 2079, Guy Pearce plays Snow, an unjustly-imprisoned man who finds himself offered a complete pardon if he’ll help rescue the daughter of the president (Maggie Grace). There’s just one problem: she’s trapped in an orbiting prison space station that’s been taken over by the future’s worst criminals. The film is produced and co-written by director Luc Besson — the man behind The Professional and Taken — so you can expect a mix of stylized visuals, dynamic violence, and oddball humor

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Watch this: Guy Pearce in the first four minutes of ‘Lockout’

Artist Randy Regier and Bill North took a road trip from Kansas to Oregon, snapping photos along the way. They have a good eye for funny things. Are we there yet? One van, two friends, and the road.

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Randy Regier’s roadtrip photos

[video link] This month’s Harper’s Magazine includes a feature by Charles Glass about the growth of private security firms since 9/11, “The Warrior Class: A golden age for the freelance soldier.” The conclusion to the piece describes a series of videos shown to Glass by a source who had worked for the private-security company Blackwater

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“The Warrior Class”: Blackwater videos in Harper’s Magazine

The final item from today’s Shapeways rummage is Artfulshrapnel’s “GOATSEarring,” a goatse.cx tribute ear-plug: “The worst ear plug the internet has to offer.” GOATSEarring Standard Gauges

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3D printed Goatse ear-plugs

More and more people are reading magazines digitally , and MAD is looking to get in on the action with a new dedicated iPad app. Appropriately, the app will launch this Sunday, which just so happens to be April Fool’s Day. It’s free to download and you’ll be able to purchase new issues for $4.99, while back issues will cost $1.99. There’s also a digital subscription option, which lets you pay either $1.99 per issue of an upfront annual fee of $9.99 — but print subscribers will get the digital copies for free. MAD says that going forward new issues will hit the app on the same day as the news stand, and some will even be enhanced with “interactive” elements, including the magazine’s long running “fold-in” section

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‘MAD’ magazine coming to the iPad on April Fool’s Day

In nine years of filming, the show Myth Busters has burned through 33,500 yards of duct tape. (Via Katherine Nelson)

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Destruction by numbers

You’ve never truly seen the world until you’ve seen it through a high-speed camera, which capture reality so quickly that they can slow it down, to the point you can see every tiny little ripple in a cloth, every flex in a human muscle with your naked eyes. Today, Vision Research has a new Phantom high-speed camera designed specifically for broadcasters, which can allow them to take the next incredible moment in the next big sports game and slow it down up to 90 times. For comparison, here’s what 100x slow motion looks like: The Phantom v642 has a 2K sensor that can record full resolution 2560 x 1600 images at 1,450 frames per second, 1080p footage at 2,560 FPS, or 720p at 5,850 FPS in total, and has up to 32GB of DRAM memory (as much… Continue reading…

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Phantom v642 high-speed broadcast camera shoots at 5,850 FPS to slow down time

ADVERTISEMENT The following is a paid post from Microsoft: Are weekly steampunk paper craft enthusiast newsletters filling up your inbox? Too many daily deals on half-priced crocheted Cthulhu kitty hats? Finding it difficult to respond to those important messages from the co-authors of your Cylon romance fan fiction? Your inbox is likely filled with graymail.

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How To Manage Your Inbox

T-Mobile is kicking off a new two-week long promotion called Magenta Deal Days that could net you $150 off of a new tablet or smartphone. You won’t get the discount right away, but if you sign up for a new two-year deal with the carrier — or are an existing customer eligible for an upgrade — you’ll be able to get a mail-in rebate for a select few Samsung 4G devices. The amount of the rebate depends on whether you go with a Classic or Unlimited Value plan, but the biggest deals are for the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus and 10.1 — both of which feature a rebate of $150. The Galaxy S Blaze 4G is also part of the promotion, as are the Exhibit II 4G and Galaxy S 4G . The deals start today and runs through to April 3rd, but you’ll need to head down…

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Good Deal: up to $150 off T-Mobile 4G devices for the next two weeks

A higher regional court in Hamburg, Germany has reportedly ordered file-sharing service RapidShare to proactively filter pirated content from its site. The decision echoes those of a number of lower courts, which ruled that the site had not done enough to prevent piracy taking place on its servers. The ruling comes after January’s MegaUpload debacle , which saw the popular file-sharing service shut down, along with others of that ilk. However, RapidShare’s business model is dramatically different to that of MegaUpload, which offered a financial reward to uploaders of popular files. According to initial reports (a written account of the court’s ruling has yet to be released) the site will have to monitor its users files for copyright…

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RapidShare ordered to proactively check user uploads for copyrighted material

Michael Dell said that he would offer an enterprise tablet “on the exact day” that Windows 8 ships to customers, but his company may have some competition right out of the gate: We’ve learned that Lenovo is internally planning to be the very first manufacturer to release a Windows 8 tablet, and that the company believes that October is when the operating system will ship. Our source wouldn’t provide any details on the slate, save that it will use an Intel chip, but we already saw one possible machine at CES: the 13.3-inch Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga , pictured above, with an attached keyboard on a 360-degree hinge that lets you flip the machine into a laptop configuration. Of course, Dell and Lenovo aren’t the only companies building Windows 8… Continue reading…

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Lenovo will be ‘first to market’ with a Windows 8 tablet, says source

Even the farsighted Founding Fathers could not have foreseen this–the Fed is now on Twitter! Just think of the possibilities– one fine Friday any Fed functionary could foment a world crisis in 140 characters or less! It could be as simple as a typo. For example, the Fed’s second tweet was: “Watch a video of

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Flipping the Bird: Is the Fed on Twitter a Horrible Idea?

Sara Robinson’s written an excellent piece on the productivity losses associated with extra-long work-weeks, something that has been established management theory since the time of Ford, but which few employers embrace today. Americans are working longer hours than they have in decades, sacrificing their health, happiness and family lives, and all the data suggests that

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America’s 55-hour work weeks ruin workers’ lives and don’t produce extra value for employers

In “Linguistic properties of multi-word passphrases” (PDF, generates an SSL error) Cambridge’s Joseph Bonneau and Ekaterina Shutova demonstrate that multi-word passphrases are more secure (have more entropy) than average user passwords composed of “random” characters, but that neither is very secure. In a blog post, Joseph Bonneau sums up the paper and the research that

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Passphrases suck less than passwords, but they still suck

[ Video Link. Content warning: Contains vigorous azz-shakin' ] Via New Orleans native Clayton Cubitt, who says, I’m gonna say this again, for those of you who yearn for the energy and danger and artistic vitality that NYC had in the 70s/80s, you need to drop everything and get yourself to New Orleans right now.

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Video: "Express Yourself" (Diplo ft. Nicky Da B)