Gregor Czaykowski at the webcomic Loading Artist did a makeover of the website and did several comics about the process. This one should be familiar to anyone who ever launched a new website. It’s one of the reasons why millions of bloggers don’t stick with it more than a few weeks — via Neatorama
3D WEAVER from Zuzanna Weiss on Vimeo.
The 3D Weaver is a loom designed specifically to weave three dimensional structures using the x y and z coordinates. Film is showcasing structures and footwear.
Film by Zuzanna Weiss
Project by Oluwaseyi Sosanya
Quora’s misogyny problem
is a tempest out of the teapot, and it’s a perfect example of why user based websites need to change the way they think about targeted users.
What women have been going through on Quora is harrowing: Harassment and threats, stalking on and off the site, and an atmosphere that enables ongoing targeting with moderators that don’t understand, or help.
That’s because Quora’s baseline of normal
behavior around gender is all screwed up — and it was made that way — via redwolf.newsvine.com
In an unusual partnership, The Washington Post, the New York Times and software developer Mozilla will team up to create digital tools that will make it easier for readers to post comments and photos on news sites and to interact with journalists and each other.
The two-year development project will be funded by a $3.89 million grant from the John S and James L Knight Foundation, the Miami-based philanthropic organization that specialises in media and the arts.
As described by its developers, the as-yet-unnamed system aims to standardize the many different community engagement
systems that Web sites now use to collect and publish outside contributions, especially reader comments and photos — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Eric Meyer is an expert on the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) system used to control the appearance of web documents. He’s the author of multiple books on CSS, and the chaperone
of the css-discuss mailing list. His daughter, Rebecca, passed away, and her family asked that those attending memorial services wear purple, her favourite color. Dominique Hazaël-Massieux requested that a purple be added to the CSS color list be named Becca Purple
in her memory. Eric suggested that it be named rebeccapurple because his daughter wanted everyone to call her Rebecca after she turned six, and she was six for almost twelve hours. Today, a co-chair of the CSS Working Group announced approval of the change. From now on, rebeccapurple means #663399 — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Electrical engineer Bruce Campbell lives in a retired Boeing 727-200 that he has parked on his rural property in Hillsboro, Oregon. Campbell bought the plane back in 1999 for $100,000, and has spent the intervening years converting it to a modest living space. The plane-home features one working lavatory, a futon, a simple kitchen, and nine emergency exits. He estimates he has spent a total of $220,000 on the project — via Laughing Squid
Photo: John Brecher/MSNBC
Small wind turbines scaled to the right size for residential and urban areas have so far lived in the shadows of their larger wind-farm-sized counterparts. The power output has been too low for a reasonable return on investment through energy savings and the noise they produce is louder than most homeowners can deal with.
A Dutch renewable energy start-up called The Archimedes is working to solve both of those problems in a new class of small-scale wind turbine — one that is almost silent and is far more efficient at converting wind into energy. The company states that the Liam F1 turbine could generate 1,500 kWh of energy per year at wind speeds of 5m/s, enough to cover half of an average household’s energy use.
When used in combination with rooftop solar panels, a house could run off grid. When there is wind you use the energy produced by the wind turbine; when the sun is shining you use the solar cells to produce the energy,
The Archimedes CEO Richard Ruijtenbeek said.
The Liam’s blades are shaped like a Nautilus shell. The design allows it to point into the wind to capture the most amount of energy, while also producing very little sound. The inventor of the turbine Marinus Mieremet says that the power output is 80 percent of the theoretical maximum energy that could be harnessed from the wind — via treehugger
Last month Australia’s Attorney-General George Brandis labeled his citizens the worst pirates on the planet and vowed to help content holders turn that position around. But Brandis’ industry-leaning position soon became clear as he repeatedly refused to answer questions as to whether he’d properly consulted with consumer groups.
Brandis has, however, consulted deeply with the entertainment industries. His proposals for solving the piracy issue are straight out of the MPAA and RIAA cookbook – three strikes and account terminations for errant Internet users plus ISP blockades of torrent and similar sites.
The reason why the debate over these measures has dragged on so long is down to the defeat of the studios in their legal battle against ISP iiNet. That case failed to render the ISP responsible for the actions of its subscribers and ever since iiNet has provided the most vocal opposition to tough anti-piracy proposals. Today, iiNet Chief Regulatory Officer Steve Dalby underlined that stance with a call for consumers to fight back against foreign interests
.
The Hollywood Studios have been relentlessly lobbying the Australian Government on a range of heavy-handed solutions, from a
Dalby explains.three strikes
proposal, through to website filtering — none of which take consumers’ interests into account,
On three strikes, Dalby notes that even though customers will be expected to pick up the bill for its introduction, there’s no evidence that these schemes have curtailed piracy or increased sales in any other country — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A recent ATM skimming attack in which thieves used a specialized device to physically insert malicious software into a cash machine may be a harbinger of more sophisticated scams to come.
Authorities in Macau — a Chinese territory approximately 40 miles west of Hong Kong — this week announced the arrest of two Ukrainian men accused of participating in a skimming ring that stole approximately $100,000 from at least seven ATMs. Local police said the men used a device that was connected to a small laptop, and inserted the device into the card acceptance slot on the ATMs.
Armed with this toolset, the authorities said, the men were able to install malware capable of siphoning the customer’s card data and PINs. The device appears to be a rigid green circuit board that is approximately four or five times the length of an ATM card.
According to local press reports (and supplemented by an interview with an employee at one of the local banks who asked not to be named), the insertion of the circuit board caused the software running on the ATMs to crash, temporarily leaving the cash machine with a black, empty screen. The thieves would then remove the device. Soon after, the machine would restart, and begin recording the card and PINs entered by customers who used the compromised machines.
The Macau government alleges that the accused would return a few days after infecting the ATMs to collect the stolen card numbers and PINs. To do this, the thieves would reinsert the specialized chip card to retrieve the purloined data, and then a separate chip card to destroy evidence of the malware — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The world’s second largest mobile phone company, Vodafone, says at least six unnamed governments can use its phone system to monitor customers whenever they want.
The company’s Disclosure Report says most governments need legal notices
to access its networks, but there are six nations — which is says it cannot name for legal reasons — that have direct access.
It says in those countries authorities have inserted their own equipment into the network or have diverted all data through government systems so they can permanently access customers’ communications.
In a small number of countries the law dictates that specific agencies and authorities must have direct access to an operator’s network, bypassing any form of operational control over lawful interception on the part of the operator,
the company said.
It added that in Albania, Egypt, Hungary, India, Malta, Qatar, Romania, South Africa and Turkey it could not disclose any information related to wiretapping or interception — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Most people in the UK may not have realised it, but every time they backed up an MP3 or made a copy of a CD or DVD for personal use, they were breaking the law.
Starting today this is no longer the case for the disabled, thanks to a revision of copyright law that just went into effect. Disabled citizens can now copy and publish copyrighted material if there’s no commercial alternative available.
Disabled people and disability groups can now make accessible copies of copyright material (eg music, film, books) when no commercial alternative exists,
the Government announced today.
Previously the Government also said that all private copying for personal use would be legal starting in June, but this has apparently been delayed pending Parliament approval.
However, following a thorough inspection of local copyright legislation the UK Government has already committed to change current laws in favor of consumers — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The main motivation behind rising online security attacks in Australia is competitors seeking commercial information and advantage, according to the latest Cyber Crime and Security Survey Report by Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) — part of the Attorney-General’s Department.
The main motivation for cyber-attacks is considered to be competitors seeking commercial advantage,
said George Brandis, Australia’s Attorney General and Minister for the Arts. This aligns with the cyber threat of most concern to businesses, which is theft or breach of confidential information or intellectual property.
This of course has recently come to prominence through the US indicting Chinese officials for the theft of IP from US companies by cyber means.
While many of the companies surveyed reported the computer security incidents, others didn’t, raising concerns they don’t know what’s really happening on their networks — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Utility Graffiti, originally uploaded by Red Wolf
Like it or not, a new era of DRM began on the internet overnight. Mozilla, the last major holdout to the W3C’s endorsed DRM extensions known as Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), reluctantly decided to reverse its previous position and implement EME in the desktop versions of Firefox.
We have come to the point where Mozilla is not implementing the W3C EME specification means that Firefox users have to switch to other browsers to watch content restricted by DRM,
wrote Mozilla’s new CTO Andreas Gal in a blog post.
Mozilla would have preferred to see the content industry move away from locking content to a specific device (so called node-locking), and worked to provide alternatives.
To implement its DRM solution, the browser maker has teamed up with Adobe to provide a Content Decryption Module (CDM) — unlike the rest of Mozilla’s codebase, the CDM has a proprietary licence. Rather than directly loading the CDM, Mozilla have decided to place the CDM in an open source sandbox, and removed permissions for the CDM to access a user’s hard drive or network. The only data passed to the CDM will be decoding DRM-wrapped data, with the CDM returning its frame results for display to the user — via redwolf.newsvine.com
But while American companies were being warned away from supposedly untrustworthy Chinese routers, foreign organisations would have been well advised to beware of American-made ones. A June 2010 report from the head of the NSA’s Access and Target Development department is shockingly explicit. The NSA routinely receives — or intercepts — routers, servers and other computer network devices being exported from the US before they are delivered to the international customers.
The agency then implants backdoor surveillance tools, repackages the devices with a factory seal and sends them on. The NSA thus gains access to entire networks and all their users. The document gleefully observes that some SIGINT tradecraft … is very hands-on (literally!)
.
Eventually, the implanted device connects back to the NSA. The report continues: In one recent case, after several months a beacon implanted through supply-chain interdiction called back to the NSA covert infrastructure. This call back provided us access to further exploit the device and survey the network.
It is quite possible that Chinese firms are implanting surveillance mechanisms in their network devices. But the US is certainly doing the same — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The federal government is eyeing the introduction of a government-wide content-management system. The Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) has indicated its preference is to use the open-source Drupal Web platform and to have the CMS delivered as a cloud service.
The Government Content Management System (GovCMS) is envisaged as an important service offering for Australian Commonwealth Government agencies,
the Australian government CTO, John Sheridan, wrote in a blog entry.
GovCMS is intended to support more effective web channel delivery functions within Government, and enable agencies to redirect effort from non-core transactional activities, towards higher-value activities that are more aligned with core agency missions,
a draft statement of requirements issued by AGIMO states.
An analysis by AGIMO found that between 182 and 450 websites could be transitioned to GovCMS over four years. The use of an open source solution means that Drupal modules could be shared between public sector agencies and the community, the draft states.
A transition to GovCMS will begin with Australia.gov.au and Finance.gov.au, the document states. The target go-live date is September this year — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Every friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: Bro,1 you don’t work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver.
They have a point. Mordor sucks, and it’s certainly more physically taxing to dig a tunnel than poke at a keyboard unless you’re an ant. But, for the sake of the argument, can we agree that stress and insanity are bad things? Awesome. Welcome to programming — via Still Drinking
You’d probably expect to encounter all sorts of crazy technology in a US Air Force nuclear silo. One you might not expect: floppy disks.
Leslie Stahl of CBS’s 60 Minutes reported from a Wyoming nuclear control center for a segment that aired on Sunday, and the Cold War-era tech she found is pretty amazing. But it also makes sense. The government built facilities for the Minuteman missiles in the 1960s and 1970s, and though the missiles have been upgraded numerous times to make them safer and more reliable, the bases themselves haven’t changed much. And there isn’t a lot of incentive to upgrade them. ICBM forces commander Major General Jack Weinstein told Stahl that the bases have extremely tight IT and cyber security, because they’re not Internet-connected and they use such old hardware and software — via redwolf.newsvine.com
People charged with the murders of almost 100 people can be linked to a single far-right website, according to a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
The White Nationalist web forum Stormfront.org says it promotes values of the embattled white minority
, and its users include Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in a 2011 massacre in Norway, and Wade Michael Page, who shot and killed six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012.
After a two-year investigation, the SPLC said (pdf) that since Stormfront became one of the first hate sites on the internet in 1995, its registered users have been disproportionately responsible for major killings. The report was released a month early after white supremacist Frazier Glenn Miller, also known as Frazier Glenn Cross, was accused of killing three people at a Jewish center in Kansas City on Sunday.
We know that the people who are going to commit the kinds of crimes, like the kinds of crimes Miller committed last weekend, this is where they live,
said Heidi Beirich, report author and a director at the SPLC’s Intelligence Project. The report, released on Thursday, calls Stormfront the largest hate site in the world
and
a magnet and breeding ground for the deadly and deranged
.
Of the site’s more than 286,000 users, only a small sliver are highly active, the report found, with fewer than 1,800 people logging in each day. While the SPLC only identified 10 murderers out of this large user base, researchers think the murderers’ connection to the site is important because it shows how the website offers a community for people who commit these crimes — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Researchers have uncovered an extremely critical vulnerability in recent versions of OpenSSL, a technology that allows millions of Web sites to encrypt communications with visitors. Complicating matters further is the release of a simple exploit that can be used to steal usernames and passwords from vulnerable sites, as well as private keys that sites use to encrypt and decrypt sensitive data.
From Heartbleed.com:
The Heartbleed bug allows anyone on the Internet to read the memory of the systems protected by the vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL software. This compromises the secret keys used to identify the service providers and to encrypt the traffic, the names and passwords of the users and the actual content. This allows attackers to eavesdrop communications, steal data directly from the services and users and to impersonate services and users
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
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