My playing style really grew from the fact that I couldn’t afford a distortion pedal. I had to try to squeeze those sounds out of my guitar. The first real work I did was in my bedroom. I added pickups, because I didn’t like the sound of the originals. I couldn’t afford a router — I didn’t even know what a router was — so I started hammering away with a screwdriver. That didn’t work at all. Chunks of wood flew off and there was sawdust flying all over the place. But I was on a mission. I knew what I wanted and I just kept at it until I finally got there — via Popular Mechanics
Touch Pianist is a web toy that let’s you play famous piano pieces on your computer keyboard. No musical skill needed! The notes are there in visual form; all you have to do is hit any keys to make them play. It’s a little like Guitar Hero, except the controls don’t matter, you set the tempo, and you can’t lose
. The only skill you need is to keep the tempo going in a way that makes it sound pleasant to you. The default screen is Moonlight Sonata
, but you can pull down other choices — via Neatorama
When investigating an incident that involved domain redirection and a suspected tech support scam, I recorded my interactions with the individual posing as a help desk technician and researched the background of this scheme. It was an educational exchange, to say the least. Here’s what I learned about this person’s and his employer’s techniques and objectives — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Google has said that cutting off advertising from piracy sites is much more effective than censoring the sites from access.
The Australian government last month introduced legislation that would allow rights holders to get an injunction placed on internet service providers (ISPs) to force telcos to block specific overseas piracy websites from access by Australian users.
The rights holders would need to demonstrate that the primary purpose of a website is for the infringement of copyright before the Federal Court will order ISPs to block it. Latest Australian news
The move has been welcomed by rights holders, but faces opposition from Google, which told the parliamentary committee looking into the legislation that site blocking is not the most effective means of stopping piracy
.
A recent study of the piracy
Google said in its submission.ecosystem
in which the authors conducted a detailed analysis of the effectiveness of various anti-piracy measures found that anti-piracy efforts directed towards blocking access to pirated content have not been successful,
Google said that more effective measures include providing legitimate content that is more attractive to consumers than piracy, and cutting off advertising to piracy websites. The introduction of site blocking could have unintended consequences, Google warned.
Site blocking also has the potential to be used in ways that were unintended, included by blocking legitimate content.
Google said that legislation allowing sites that facilitate
access to infringing copyright content to be blocked could lead to virtual private network (VPN) services being blocked.
VPNs also have many other legitimate purposes, including privacy and security,
Google stated.
The court should be forced to consider the impact on freedom of speech when blocking sites, the company said — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Google has said that cutting off advertising from piracy sites is much more effective than censoring the sites from access.
The Australian government last month introduced legislation that would allow rights holders to get an injunction placed on internet service providers (ISPs) to force telcos to block specific overseas piracy websites from access by Australian users.
The rights holders would need to demonstrate that the primary purpose of a website is for the infringement of copyright before the Federal Court will order ISPs to block it. Latest Australian news
Dallas Buyers Club wants alleged infringer details by May 6 The censorship end game of the piracy site-blocking Bill Mandatory data-retention funding to be a Budget surprise Google slams Australian piracy site-blocking legislation NBN Co predicts up to 370,000 premises need work on HFC
The move has been welcomed by rights holders, but faces opposition from Google, which told the parliamentary committee looking into the legislation that site blocking “is not the most effective means of stopping piracy”.
A recent study of the piracy ‘ecosystem’ in which the authors conducted a detailed analysis of the effectiveness of various anti-piracy measures found that anti-piracy efforts directed towards blocking access to pirated content have not been successful,
Google said in its submission.
Google said that more effective measures include providing legitimate content that is more attractive to consumers than piracy, and cutting off advertising to piracy websites. The introduction of site blocking could have unintended consequences, Google warned.
Site blocking also has the potential to be used in ways that were unintended, included by blocking legitimate content.
Google said that legislation allowing sites that facilitate
access to infringing copyright content to be blocked could lead to virtual private network (VPN) services being blocked.
VPNs also have many other legitimate purposes, including privacy and security,
Google stated.
The court should be forced to consider the impact on freedom of speech when blocking sites, the company said — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Australian Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull has barely even finished introducing piracy site-blocking legislation into the parliament, and already the Helen Lovejoys of the world are trying to get it expanded into a much larger internet censorship scheme.
The legislation introduced into parliament in March would allow film studios, TV companies, and other copyright holders to apply to the court to get specific sites hosted outside of Australia and alleged to be primarily for the purpose of copyright infringement blocked by Australian internet service providers (ISPs).
The court will ideally examine the sites involved, and ensure that they meet all the conditions before ordering a block, though this is not guaranteed at this point.
If the ISPs are ordered to block a site, they can do so in a number of ways — through DNS, IP address blocking, or URL blocking. The exact method, too, has yet to be determined.
Turnbull has stressed that because the court must approve sites being blocked, it is not an internet filter.
It will be a court, not the government, that will determine which sites are blocked. Moreover, this is not an automatic process, but determined by a court with all of the normal protections of legal due process. In other words, a judge will make the decision, after hearing evidence and argument, not an algorithm in the software operating a router,
he said.
The lack of an automated process of filtering types of sites means it is not a filter, according to the minister.
Others seem to disagree, however.
Far be it for me to allow the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) to define the meaning of anything ever, but it has described the scheme as an internet piracy filter
and called on the government to look at implementing a default clean feed to protect children
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
The world’s smartest Octopus shoot humans, an octopus taking photos with the Sony Cyber-shot TX30 — via Youtube
Cisco’s suffered a legal reversal in Australia, where the nation’s Trade Marks Office has ruled the logo of Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is not an attempt to imitate or cash in on the Borg’s bridge badge.
CSIRO’s logo is supposed to be a stylised map of Australia. Cisco’s reimagining of the Golden Gate bridge and/or an graph is well known.
Cisco objected to the CSIRO’s application to trademark its logo. The Borg’s beef seems to have been that the colours and wave design in both logos are similar and therefore perhaps confusing to punters. That CSIRO’s desire to have its logo classified as pertaining to software and “telecommunications” didn’t help either.
CSIRO has form in the latter field: astronomers there did the basic work that led to the creation of WiFi and the organisation has scooped hundreds of millions in patent royalties from technology companies, including Cisco. The case therefore has an ironic element, as Cisco makes millions from WiFi kit every year — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Stanford University scientists have invented the first high-performance aluminum battery that’s fast-charging, long-lasting and inexpensive. Researchers say the new technology offers a safe alternative to many commercial batteries in wide use today.
We have developed a rechargeable aluminum battery that may replace existing storage devices, such as alkaline batteries, which are bad for the environment, and lithium-ion batteries, which occasionally burst into flames,
said Hongjie Dai, a professor of chemistry at Stanford. Our new battery won’t catch fire, even if you drill through it.
Dai and his colleagues describe their novel aluminum-ion battery in An ultrafast rechargeable aluminum-ion battery
, which will be published in the April 6 advance online edition of the journal Nature.
Aluminum has long been an attractive material for batteries, mainly because of its low cost, low flammability and high-charge storage capacity. For decades, researchers have tried unsuccessfully to develop a commercially viable aluminum-ion battery. A key challenge has been finding materials capable of producing sufficient voltage after repeated cycles of charging and discharging — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The HTML5 Drum Machine borrows its aesthetics from classic beat boxes like the TR-808 Rhythm Composer. It’s got five different sound banks: Hip hop, electro, house, techno, and acoustic. Each bank has 13 different sounds for which you can tweak the individual volume and tone. Pick your bank, hit play, and lay down your instruments on the 16-step sequencer interface that runs across the bottom. After you’ve laid down your beat, you can export it as a WAV — via Gizmodo Australia
The French Interior Ministry on Monday ordered that five websites be blocked on the grounds that they promote or advocate terrorism. I do not want to see sites that could lead people to take up arms on the Internet,
proclaimed Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve.
When the block functions properly, visitors to those banned sites, rather than accessing the content of the sites they chose to visit, will be automatically redirected to the Interior Ministry website. There, they will be greeted by a graphic of a large red hand, and text informing them that they were attempting to access a site that causes or promotes terrorism: you are being redirected to this official website since your computer was about to connect with a page that provokes terrorist acts or condones terrorism publicly
.
No judge reviews the Interior Ministry’s decisions. The minister first requests that the website owner voluntarily remove the content he deems transgressive; upon disobedience, the minister unilaterally issues the order to Internet service providers for the sites to be blocked. This censorship power is vested pursuant to a law recently enacted in France empowering the interior minister to block websites.
Forcibly taking down websites deemed to be supportive of terrorism, or criminalizing speech deemed to advocate
terrorism, is a major trend in both Europe and the West generally. Last month in Brussels, the European Union’s counter-terrorism coordinator issued a memo proclaiming that Europe is facing an unprecedented, diverse and serious terrorist threat
, and argued that increased state control over the Internet is crucial to combating it — via redwolf.newsvine.com
TPG has announced plans to purchase rival, and Australia’s third-largest internet service provider, iiNet.
The deal was announced to the Australian Securities Exchange on Friday morning. TPG will acquire 100 percent of iiNet shares, of which the company already had a significant stake.
The total value of the deal is worth AU$1.4 billion.
The agreement will see the combined TPG company become larger than Australia’s second-largest telecommunications company Optus, increasing TPG’s customer base to 1.7 million.
There will be combined revenues of AU$2.3 billion — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Concerned about the scope of the currently proposed data retention legislation currently being considered by Parliament? An ex-police officer says that one day, your metadata could be used to identify whether you’ve been downloading TV shows and movies illegitimately.
A former police officer who has previous experience with metadata and its potential applications has told ABC Radio National’s Download This Show that the oversight that currently exists over even currently retained metadata is minimal, and is ripe for abuse.
Using the example of an officer or other accredited agency user accessing metadata to check up on their ex-girlfriend
, the insider told the program that he had never seen a metadata request denied on the basis of its legitimacy, but only cost. He also said that the agency officials talking up the potential of metadata at the moment, and petitioning for more widespread access, have no hands-on experience: …mobiles weren’t invented when they walked the beat
.
The extent of even something as basic as smartphone location metadata can be extremely detailed and granular; the huge amount of data that anyone with any kind of online or digital profile generates would be exponentially more useful for any agency with access to the proposed metadata retention regime. Unless there is enough oversight baked into the legislation and restraint exercised in its scope, the potential for abuse is there — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Poor design and chaotic management by the supposedly crack team at the Cabinet Office’s Government Digital Service (GDS) left huge swathes of the British government in disarray, internal documents seen by the Register reveal. The documents confirm that GDS knew its flagship initiative to move all government websites under one roof, GOV.UK, was destroying useful online services and replacing them with trendy webpages bereft of useful information.
One internal report is particularly damning. The Home Office Visa and Immigration site transitioned [to GOV.UK] without a good understanding of users and needs … there was quickly a flood of negative feedback … coming from all directions,
an insider states for the record. The report details a breakdown in fact checking described by more than one person as
general chaos
and a total nightmare
.
The disclosures paint a picture that contradicts the public image of supremely confident digital gurus modernising the British government’s many websites, and making them more efficient. For all its vaunted skills in website design, GDS had a far poorer understanding of what the public actually needed than the relevant government departments did — this, according to GDS’ own internal analysis — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Yesterday, global internet company Buzzfeed was handed its own viral arse on a plate prepared by local top-down media. Now, if you’re a grown-up, you might not care that the publisher of omg wtf failed in its attempts to influence a radio music poll. But, if, like me, you’re an ancient twit obsessed with the last stages of a battle between terrestrial and digital values, you probably enjoyed the point scored over the International House of Lol by ABC Radio. Goodness knows, I did.
For some weeks, an internet campaign helmed by the listicles website sought to influence the annual Triple J Hottest 100 music countdown. The push to see Taylor Swift, a platinum-selling Grammy-winning New England blonde best described to the oblivious as a fusion of Grace Kelly with an applicator tampon ad jingle, on what was held as a snobbish and even sexist hit-list was the subject of a hundred feelpinion posts.
The argument for inclusion of the artist, who had never been played on the popular ABC youth network, proceeded roughly thus: many discerning young women enjoy the buoyant anti “Hater” song Shake It Off therefore, the network’s refusal to acknowledge this partiality was an act of naked sexism. Not only did the institution hold fast with rockist orthodoxy by withholding an anthem of free-and-easy feminine freedom, but it maintained top-down principles of Father Knows Best in an age of internet liberty. Omg. Wtf. No one understands millennials and their right to Upvote the Best Viral Content On The Web.
Some of the argument countering this Fuck The Gatekeepers moment missed the mark. Bondi Hipsters, apparently a comedy duo, typify the worst responses with their “open letter” published by News Corp today. Perhaps it’s a clumsy in-joke when the Hipsters characterise Swift fans as bogans — certainly, this Basic Bitch is beloved by a judicious middle class enamoured of their own catholic taste — but it nonetheless captures the nature of the meanest objection to the #Tay4Hottest100. This, in short, was one that held that the old-fashioned cultural distinction between elite and common artefacts — one that pro-Tay commentators said concealed added sexism — was valid.
Of course, this distinction is no longer valid. Frankly, it’s no longer valuable. Cultural capital was once a simple matter and acquired by the most orthodox and simple means: the bourgeoisie enjoyed literary fiction and the working class consumed comic books. It was back in the ’60s that critics decided it was all text
and that to declare something outside this category was neither plausible nor chic. Relativism is hardly a novel fucking argument and I can remember being an ’80s teen at pains to define myself through my “democratic” and “un-ironic” appreciation of both pop and politics. It ain’t new.
These days, the middle class defines itself not so much through its attachment to particular artefacts but through its attachment to a combination of artefacts. Pierre Bourdieu, the ’70s foremost critic of cultural capital, would be overwhelmed by the chore of describing the taste of the young modern who must, to maintain her value, appear equally moved by Marvel and Muarkami, by Tay-Tay and Tame Impala.
The charge of cultural stasis is an old injunction and one Triple J heeded years ago and answered with surprising force in its response to the Buzzfeed campaign yesterday. I suspect that their Buzzfeed parody site, which describes in listicles form all the reasons that Swift would not be honoured by the station, was the work of the best creative PR crisis response public money can buy. But, it was worth it. It managed to convey a subtle and brand-building message to an Upvoting demographic in a language they understand — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Effectively using the same magnetic levitation technologies employed in high-speed trains, the MULTI elevator system conveys people horizontally as well as vertically without ropes and at record speeds, all while allowing multiple elevators to traverse the same shafts.
Allowing fast vertical interior transit, the elevator has already revolutionized the shape of cities once — this breakthrough may enable a new version to do it again, not only cutting down on wait and travel times but also by enabling versatile sideways travel through structures. As illustrated above, a single car can go both up or down and then left or right, moving in a three-dimensional fashion within (and eventually perhaps even beyond) a given building — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Complex malware known as Regin is the suspected technology behind sophisticated cyberattacks conducted by US and British intelligence agencies on the European Union and a Belgian telecommunications company, according to security industry sources and technical analysis conducted by The Intercept.
Regin was found on infected internal computer systems and email servers at Belgacom, a partly state-owned Belgian phone and internet provider, following reports last year that the company was targeted in a top-secret surveillance operation carried out by British spy agency Government Communications Headquarters, industry sources told The Intercept.
The malware, which steals data from infected systems and disguises itself as legitimate Microsoft software, has also been identified on the same European Union computer systems that were targeted for surveillance by the National Security Agency.
The hacking operations against Belgacom and the European Union were first revealed last year through documents leaked by NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden. The specific malware used in the attacks has never been disclosed, however.
The Regin malware, whose existence was first reported by the security firm Symantec on Sunday, is among the most sophisticated ever discovered by researchers. Symantec compared Regin to Stuxnet, a state-sponsored malware program developed by the U.S. and Israel to sabotage computers at an Iranian nuclear facility. Sources familiar with internal investigations at Belgacom and the European Union have confirmed to The Intercept that the Regin malware was found on their systems after they were compromised, linking the spy tool to the secret GCHQ and NSA operations.
Ronald Prins, a security expert whose company Fox IT was hired to remove the malware from Belgacom’s networks, told The Intercept that it was “the most sophisticated malware” he had ever studied.
Having analysed this malware and looked at the [previously published] Snowden documents,
Prins said, I’m convinced Regin is used by British and American intelligence services
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Frank Swain has been going deaf since his 20s. Now he has hacked his hearing so he can listen in to the data that surrounds us.
I am walking through my north London neighbourhood on an unseasonably warm day in late autumn. I can hear birds tweeting in the trees, traffic prowling the back roads, children playing in gardens and Wi-Fi leaching from their homes. Against the familiar sounds of suburban life, it is somehow incongruous and appropriate at the same time.
As I approach Turnpike Lane tube station and descend to the underground platform, I catch the now familiar gurgle of the public Wi-Fi hub, as well as the staff network beside it. On board the train, these sounds fade into silence as we burrow into the tunnels leading to central London.
I have been able to hear these fields since last week. This wasn’t the result of a sudden mutation or years of transcendental meditation, but an upgrade to my hearing aids. With a grant from Nesta, the UK innovation charity, sound artist Daniel Jones and I built Phantom Terrains, an experimental tool for making Wi-Fi fields audible.
Our modern world is suffused with data. Since radio towers began climbing over towns and cities in the early 20th century, the air has grown thick with wireless communication, the platform on which radio, television, cellphones, satellite broadcasts, Wi-Fi, GPS, remote controls and hundreds of other technologies rely. And yet, despite wireless communication becoming a ubiquitous presence in modern life, the underlying infrastructure has remained largely invisible
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Like all the best cryptography, the Enigma machine is simple to describe, but infuriating to break.
Straddling the border between mechanical and electrical, Enigma looked from the outside like an oversize typewriter. Enter the first letter of your message on the keyboard and a letter lights up showing what it has replaced within the encrypted message. At the other end, the process is the same: type in the ciphertext
and the letters which light are the decoded missive.
Inside the box, the system is built around three physical rotors. Each takes in a letter and outputs it as a different one. That letter passes through all three rotors, bounces off a reflector
at the end, and passes back through all three rotors in the other direction.
The board lights up to show the encrypted output, and the first of the three rotors clicks round one position — changing the output even if the second letter input is the same as the first one.
When the first rotor has turned through all 26 positions, the second rotor clicks round, and when that’s made it round all the way, the third does the same, leading to more than 17,000 different combinations before the encryption process repeats itself. Adding to the scrambling was a plugboard, sitting between the main rotors and the input and output, which swapped pairs of letters. In the earliest machines, up to six pairs could be swapped in that way; later models pushed it to 10, and added a fourth rotor — via redwolf.newsvine.com
It’s the not knowing that’s the hardest thing, Laura Poitras tells me. Not knowing whether I’m in a private place or not.
Not knowing if someone’s watching or not. Though she’s under surveillance, she knows that. It makes working as a journalist hard but not impossible
. It’s on a personal level that it’s harder to process. I try not to let it get inside my head, but… I still am not sure that my home is private. And if I really want to make sure I’m having a private conversation or something, I’ll go outside.
Poitras’s documentary about Edward Snowden, Citizenfour, has just been released in cinemas. She was, for a time, the only person in the world who was in contact with Snowden, the only one who knew of his existence. Before she got Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian on board, it was just her — talking, electronically, to the man she knew only as Citizenfour
. Even months on, when I ask her if the memory of that time lives with her still, she hesitates and takes a deep breath: It was really very scary for a number of months. I was very aware that the risks were really high and that something bad could happen. I had this kind of responsibility to not fuck up, in terms of source protection, communication, security and all those things, I really had to be super careful in all sorts of ways.
Bad, not just for Snowden, I say? Not just for him,
she agrees. We’re having this conversation in Berlin, her adopted city, where she’d moved to make a film about surveillance before she’d ever even made contact with Snowden. Because, in 2006, after making two films about the US war on terror, she found herself on a watch list
. Every time she entered the US — and I travel a lot
— she would be questioned. It got to the point where my plane would land and they would do what’s called a hard stand, where they dispatch agents to the plane and make everyone show their passport and then I would be escorted to a room where they would question me and often times take all my electronics, my notes, my credit cards, my computer, my camera, all that stuff.
She needed somewhere else to go, somewhere she hoped would be a safe haven. And that somewhere was Berlin.
What’s remarkable is that my conversation with Poitras will be the first of a whole series of conversations I have with people in Berlin who either are under surveillance, or have been under surveillance, or who campaign against it, or are part of the German government’s inquiry into it, or who work to create technology to counter it. Poitras’s experience of understanding the sensation of what it’s like to know you’re being watched, or not to know but feel a prickle on the back of your neck and suspect you might be, is far from unique, it turns out. But then, perhaps more than any other city on earth, Berlin has a radar for surveillance and the dark places it can lead to.
There is just a very real historical awareness of how information can be used against people in really dangerous ways here,
Poitras says. There is a sensitivity to it which just doesn’t exist elsewhere. And not just because of the Stasi, the former East German secret police, but also the Nazi era. There’s a book Jake Appelbaum talks a lot about that’s called IBM and the Holocaust and it details how the Nazis used punch-cards to systemise the death camps. We’re not talking about that happening with the NSA [the US National Security Agency], but it shows how this information can be used against populations and how it poses such a danger.
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
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