Category — General

again taken with mobile phone

the rest of my phone pictures

shot with my razr.

Arphid Watch: Leeches and Ghosts:
“In this study we show that the modeling predictions are quite accurate. We show how to build a portable, extended-range RFID skimmer, using only electronics hobbyist supplies and tools. Our skimmer is able to read ISO-14443 tags from a distance of 25cm, uses a lightweight 40cm-diameter copper-tube antenna, is powered by a 12V battery–and requires a budget of $100. We believe that, with some more effort, we can reach ranges of 35cm, using the same skills, tools, and budget.”

(…)
“A German hacker used a simple PDA, equipped with an RFID read/write device, and changed product prices in a grocery shop using a software he wrote. He managed to reduce the Shampoo price from $7 to $3 and go through the cashier without incident. Supermarket checkout trials held by NCR corporation showed that some clients standing at the cashier paid for groceries held by clients standing behind them in the queue.
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and yet one more reason why one cannot really trust rfid tech.

AlterNet: The Da Vinci Senator:
“In his dream, America, the one he believes both the Bible and the Constitution promise, the state will simply wither away. In its place will be a country so suffused with God and the free market that the social fabric of the last hundred years — schools, Social Security, welfare — will be privatized or simply done away with,” reads the article. “There will be no abortions; sex will be confined to heterosexual marriage. Men will lead families, mothers will tend children, and big business and the church will take care of all.”

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this would not be an america….. it would be something else entirely. something like ‘canada’ but with religion.

Fighting the L$ downward spiral – a solution:
Not usually talking about the economy, Gwyn attempts this time to see a possible solution to the L$ inflation, as proposed by some very talented residents of Second Life, and discusses the implications.
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the problem with this system is that it adapts to and accepts devaluation at a very fast pace. what that means is that it could contribute to rapid devaluation of lindens. so what the lindens should do to prevent that is to put pricestop percentages in so if the linden changes down more than say 5% in a day, the price is frozen for 5 days.

the other thing that they should do is create linden sinks, which take lindens out of the market. the best way to do that would be to tax transactions or sales at some some very small rate after 10l. so under 10 linden things are untaxed and over 10 linden a 1% tax which probably should be progressive after 1000 linden to 2%. the sole goal there is to take lindens out of the system. That will stabilize the currency

Chinese Death Van.:

Remember a previous post on Neatorama on mobile gallows in Africa? Well, China took it one step further. Executions there are carried out in a more modern fashion: in a mobile execution chamber inside a “death van” that shuttles from town to town.

Makers of the death vans say the vehicles and injections are a civilized alternative to the firing squad, ending the life of the condemned more quickly, clinically and safely. The switch from gunshots to injections is a sign that China “promotes human rights now,” says Kang Zhongwen, who designed the Jinguan Automobile death van …

From the outside, the vans resemble the police vehicles seen daily on China’s roads. A look inside reveals their function.

“I’m most proud of the bed. It’s very humane, like an ambulance,” Kang says. He points to the power-driven metal stretcher that glides out at an incline. “It’s too brutal to haul a person aboard,” he says. “This makes it convenient for the criminal and the guards.”

Link

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this…. in my mind is going one step too far with the administration of ‘justice’ . the death penalty in the back of a van. i am way of course that this could be fiction… but conceptually it smells of the efficiency run amok and the transition of any pretense of humanitarian values toward the thanatosian .

In a purr-fect world…:
My friend Kambri just alerted me to a project she worked on called the Meow Mix House, where apparently 10 cats are living right now in complete and utter luxury. I hate to sat it, but I noticed that there are NO BLACK CATS in the house. The reason why I bring this up is because my cat Smitty often protests that most cat food commercials are racist, saying, “Yo, how come that big fluffy WHITE cat gets all the ching-ching and the bling-bling? Where my Fancy Feast at? Oh – is it CUZ I’M BLACK? It’s cuz I’m black!” I always tell him no, it’s because you’re lazy and maybe if you’d start killing some of the cockraoches around here you’d get some wet food as a reward, but he usually just sulks away and starts drinking again…
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cats like beer? my cat doesn’t….

A New Internet2:
The Internet2 high-speed-networking consortium announced today that its new nationwide fiber-optic network will be built by Level 3 Communications Inc. and will be operational in about a year.

Internet2 decided earlier this year not to renew a contract with the telecommunications company Qwest to lease high-speed lines for use in Abilene, the conventional network that Internet2 now provides to colleges. The contract will be allowed to expire in 2007.

The new network, which has the working name of NewNet, would be a competitor to National LambdaRail, a national fiber-optic network operated by a consortium of research-oriented institutions. Merger talks between the two groups collapsed this spring.

NewNet would significantly expand the networking capacity available to scholars and would enable them to set up temporary, high-capacity networking links with ease. (The Chronicle)

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actually to say that it will be a competitor of lamdarail is false. Lambdarail is for experimentation and testing. I2 is the university-research internet. the difference is that occasionally you won’t be able to use lamdarail because someone will be using it for other things. I2 though is generally less research oriented these days and never seems to have experiments outside of normal operations.

Wired 14.06: START:
Day 18: I take the Dell to Best Buy’s Geek Squad and tell a technician that I’m having a bit of trouble with it. Less than four hours later I get a call back from Carla. She declares it a total loss and advises wiping the hard drive and restoring it with system disks. “The tech ran a couple of virus scans,” she says. “One kept beeping so much that he had to just turn it off.” Ah, that’s the stuff.
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this is what happens when you try to infect your computer… if you don’t try it takes less time… the zen of windows…..

science on a sphere – data visualization & visual culture – information aesthetics:
a 4-projector system that displays images on a spherical screen. the Science on a Sphere system can display & animate vast amounts of visual data from the Earth, Moon, Sun & the other planets. the sphere is suspended by thin wires, so that animating the image data gives the illusion of a free-floating, rotating world.
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I helped a bit with the secondlife simulation of this. it is a great project.