Author: m1k3y

SLEZSKA DADA: criminalwisdom: THE FLYING GRENADE Don’t call it a drone. Sure, it…

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criminalwisdom:

THE FLYING GRENADE

Don’t call it a drone. Sure, it looks just like a small unmanned aerial vehicle — right down to the little wings and the cameras. And yes, it’s remotely flown. But the Lethal Miniature Aerial Munition System is more like a tiny, flying…

SLEZSKA DADA: criminalwisdom: THE FLYING GRENADE Don’t call it a drone. Sure, it…

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Cairo has always been a city of informal, unsanctioned construction, and this practice is only increasing. Take what’s going on in the neglected neighborhood that runs next to Cairo’s main highway. With no paved streets and flocks of sheep clogging busy thoroughfares, 20th Street seems like an unlikely place for urbanist revolution. But with no assistance from government or any other authority, this year the working-class residents of this area built their own informal highway exit.

Nondescript mounds of dirt and sand mixed with trash, roughly 10 feet high, sit comfortably next to the highway overpass, forming entrance and exit ramps. Stray cats and dogs rummage through these homemade ramps as cars and large trucks fly by. Once the dirt highway exits were in place, residents simply moved the concrete safety barriers to create their new entry point.

from In the Traffic of Cairo’s DIY Highway Exit, an Urbanist Movement Grows – Next American City

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In a workshop Friday at the Hackers On Planet Earth conference in New York, a German hacker and security consultant who goes by the name “Ray” demonstrated a looming problem for handcuff makers hoping to restrict the distribution of the keys that open their cuffs: With plastic copies he cheaply produced with a laser-cutter and a 3D printer, he was able to open handcuffs built by the German firm Bonowi and the English manufacturer Chubb, both of which attempt to control the distribution of their keys to keep them exclusively in the hands of authorized buyers such as law enforcement.

Over the weekend, a lockpick vendor at the HOPE conference was already selling dozens of the plexiglass Chubb keys for a mere $4 each. Ray says he plans to upload the CAD files for the Chubb key to the 3D-printing Web platform Thingiverse after the annual lockpicking conference LockCon later this week.

from Hacker Opens High Security Handcuffs With 3D-Printed And Laser-Cut Keys – Forbes

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The New Aesthetic is an act of noticing, as much as anything: we are already in a machine-vision world, we are already in a world where the digital is erupting into the physical, and we just didn’t really notice it, in the entire breadth of its creeping wave, until now.

http://theverge.com/2012/11/1/3569208/warren-ellis-futurism-new-aesthetic-social-media
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Marcus Dickinson, 40, was very overweight and unhealthy when he created his EVE Online character Roc Wieler, the tough guy seen above left. Eventually, Dickinson became so inspired by Roc that he hit the gym to be more like him. Above right is Dickinson now. “I’m a role player inherently,” Dickinson says. “I take it seriously.” Virtual reality: Avatar inspires gamer to hit the gym (CNN) (via Man cultivates healthy lifestyle to be more like his avatar – Boing Boing)

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Consensus in a liberal-democratic society is — and all will always be — the expression of a hegemony and the crystallization of power relations.

Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox
 
This evokes for me Wikipedia’s emergent, ostensibly anarchistic but in actuality crypto-oligarchic decision-making process Consensus. (via varanine)
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