m1k3y

brucesterling:

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Pre-Announcing: Yahoo! Tumblickr GLASS!

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Dear Yahoo! user-base:

I have now accumulated 40,000 of you. That sure didn’t take y’all long.

So, you ten thousand new guys must have caught on about my exciting role at the new Yahoo! combined Flickr-Tumblr service: Yahoo! Tumblickr. Yep, things have been lively at the Tumblickr R&D lab.

I bet you’re not surprised to learn this: we’ve been way-busy with our new Tumblickr Glass! head-mounted display.

I happen to be a widely-known expert on “Google Glass” (because I’ve been seen wearing one in my Flickr set). Of course I was quickly recruited for the crash Yahoo! development of our awesome Tumblr head-wearable.

   Once again, my horde of followers will be the first to know about it. Pretty convenient, eh?

   Obviously, “Google Glass” is light years ahead of any similar face-grabber gizmo that Microsoft, Amazon, Apple or Facebook are cooking up. However, luckily for Tumblr, our Yahoo chieftainette, MarissaMayr.tumblr.com, is an ex-Googler. Those absent-minded Moonshot geniuses over at the Mountain View Chocolate Factory, well, they forgot to confiscate Marissa’s house keys, wink wink. (Please don’t go forwarding or hearting that.)

Anyhow, our ultra-cool if slightly-purloined knock-off of Glass works pretty good — almost as good as Google Glass itself, almost, kind of, sorta works. It’s even better, in some ways, since it’s much cuter. Also, Tumblickr Glass! has exciting new Yahoo! features, such as the Yahoo! exclamation point on our Glass!, which neatly avoids Google’s trademarks.

   Google Glass merely pipes a chain of images over your right eyeball — basically, they look like old-skool 8bit screens hanging in midair. Here at the Yahoo! Tumblickr Glass! lab, we have *reversed this process.* How? We turn the camera toward your eyeball, and we take pictures of whatever image is reflected on the surface of your eye!

That’s right! Instead of clumsily snapping pictures whenever the userbase talks to the device — “OK Glass take a picture” — Yahoo! Tumblickr Glass! inverts that process, and turns *everything you see* into a nifty Tumblr-style jiff or jaypeg!

   Then we store those pix for you, in the cloud, forever! If you figure out later that you want to upload something to Tumblr, fine, go ahead, that’s your lookout. You can just pick it out of the colossal database of everything that you ever saw.

   “But where on Earth do you get the battery, bandwidth and storage to obtain millions of pictures from every Glass! user?” — you may ask me. I mean, you’ll ask me that if you’re some weirdo techno-geek — if you’re the usual Tumblr newbie, teen or cat-fancier, you (a) won’t ask and (b) wouldn’t understand if I told you.

   The cool part is that I’m LEGALLY FORBIDDEN to tell you how it works. Yup, we can do it all right — but I can’t tell you how. Because my lips are sealed by federal secret court order! You may have heard of the “National Security Agency” (kids, if you haven’t, look them up on Yahoo! Search (because it’ll be the first time you ever used that service)).

Anyway, the NSA, our cool new business allies, are some super-smart PhD computer-science and crypto dudes who live under a hill in Fort Meade. Man, do they ever have cloud storage in there. Anybody who can store a “cloud” under a “hill” can solve minor tech issues like bandwidth and battery life.

   “But — but why would I want to become a spy for the NSA whose every waking moment is uploaded straight to Yahoo!?” Sure — that’s a natural question — but if you’re me asking that, you’re too damn old! That’s right, geezer! Wake up! Your day is over! The native Tumblr demographic is tattooed emo teen chicks stripping off their tops at the Skrillex gig!

   Tumblr teen girls — the coolest chicks on the Internet, bar none — they’re gonna be the early adopters for Tumblickr Glass. Them, grandpa. Not you, all gray-haired and indignant, still muttering about the Fourth Amendment like some kind of right-wing crank!

   These inventive, adaptable young women with unusual haircuts — tomorrow’s voters — they already know that the NSA is gonna crush all opposition underfoot, just like the NRA did. They may be high as kites on blunts, but they’re not stupid. Just wait till you see the awesome packaging we’ve created for their big sexy plastic Glass! frames — dolphins, seagulls, squids, bacon, unicorns, spangles, thongs, pug-dogs, everything that Tumblr chicks really dig.

Once they get into it, you’ll come around. You sure don’t want to be the only guy around who *ISN’T* a spy for the NSA — any more than you want to be the last guy on your block with an unregistered assault weapon. So it’ll take us a while, but as soon as the user-base catches on to the New Normal, man, these headmounted spy displays are gonna sell themselves. Just like you will. When you venture out in public without your Glass! exposed, you’ll feel even nakeder than the naked people on Tumblr.

   Forward to 50,000!

LIVE 10,000 YEARS CHAIRMAN BRUCES

prostheticknowledge:

ZXX

A font designed to be unable to be read via OCR (Optical Character Recognition):

The name ZXX comes from the Library of Congress’ Alpha-3 ISO 639-2 — codes for the representation of names of languages. ZXX is used to declare No linguistic content; Not applicable.

Free Open Type Font to open up governments.

You can find out more (and download the font yourself) at the project’s page here

Last month, a group of gentrification protesters unleashed their rage on a piñata of a Google Bus, an act that seemed at once sadly impotent and uncomfortably close to violence.

http://www.sfgate.com/technology/dotcommentary/article/In-defense-of-San-Francisco-s-techies-4616783.php

She said the interpreter translating Welsh’s testimony for the defendants had identified the contraband publication to them as Esquire. That magazine describes its focus as “beautiful women, men’s fashion, best music, drink recipes.”

Inspire magazine bills itself as the publication of Yemeni-based group al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and famously published an article titled, “Make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom.” The United States considers it a propaganda and recruitment vehicle for the group, and killed its editor in a drone strike in Yemen last year.

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE95L00O20130622?irpc=932

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The ‘brand’ value of groups like GIMF and the al-Mahalem Media Foundation benefit from disseminating these tools. While the tools are less secure than their more popular, mainstream counterparts, actions like blatantly tagging all public keys with ‘#—Begin Al-Ekhlaas Network ASRAR El Moujahedeen V2.0 Public Key 2048 bit—’ and the group branding on the program itself promote the associated al-Qaeda media brands. Despite the fact that using these tools clearly increases the attack surface for these groups through easily identifiable and unique methods, the propaganda value seems to be worth it. In the online jihadist world there are continually competing tiers of forums, release groups, and actors, but less than a handful of encryption programs.

Taking the jihadist point of view, another reason for the development and use of these tools could be heightened mistrust. Anything outside the relatively small ecosystem of online jihadist circles is seen as suspect. Many take the ‘Leviathan’ view of the US and Israel, and continue to apply it towards the cynical views that any Western developed software could contain government backdoors. Even with the popularity of open source security programs, those less technically capable would have a much easier time trusting what’s known to be used by Anwar al-Awlaki, what’s promoted in Inspire, and by prominent jihadist hackers online.

Therefore, factors like attention and mistrust explain the divergence between indicators of technical expertise, like choosing AES finalists, and avoidance, like forgoing PGP or similar programs. These programs are less secure, but allow groups like GIMF to maintain their high profile and feed a confirmation bias of an all-powerful U.S. government. As for now, the programs may arguably protect against ‘backdoors’, but provide easily recognizable data to identify terrorist communications, organizations, and users online.

”

http://www.rbijou.com/2013/03/18/an-overview-of-jihadist-encryption-programs/

Chinese inventor Tao Xiangli manufactured a robot in the yard of his house in Beijing. He spent almost a year and about 150,000 Yuan, corresponding to $24,500 dollars, to build the robot. His “newborn” is 6.8 feet tall and around 529 pounds in weight. It is made out of recycled scrap metals and electric wires bought from a second-hand market.