The Tor Project, a system to enable online anonymity, has been crucial in aiding activists around the world. Thanks to this week’s fundraiser to help Tor fight the blackout in Egypt , Tor has begun experimenting with ways to improve performance over satellite and mesh networks, VSAT and BGAN connections. The results of this research, Tor reports, will “benefit those with little to no Internet access, whether due to political unrest, natural disasters, or remote locations, who nonetheless seek to keep their online activities safe.”

Coilhouse » Blog Archive » Issue 01 Auction to Benefit the Tor Project

The super-strong space net is being developed with a 100-year-old Japanese fishing net company and is designed to catch small particles as well as larger objects such as spent rocket stages.

Japan’s giant net to trawl for space junk – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

http://www.youtube.com/e/c1xvMhYmr8g

Rastamouse Clip (via funradiokids)

(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)

Incidental Media vs Invasive Advertising

As the information we’re leaving and using on the internet leaks out into the world, there’s many ways it can do so.

A subtle approach, making it an ambient part of the background, popping up on…

What you need to know is that your city – pretty much wherever it is – was built for a climate that it may no longer have. That’s going to mean tough commutes during the winter and spending more money on air conditioning in the summer. It’s going to mean that your city shuts down more often because some freaky thing happened that no one can remember happening in their lifetimes. It’s going to mean the power’s going to go out because the electric system in your area wasn’t designed to handle the stresses it will be put under. Cities will have to get less efficient and more resilient. Redundancies will have to be built into systems that previously seemed to work just fine.

This is how climate change will cost us all money. Maybe more importantly, these kinds of storms can cost politicians elections, which might be the only thing that will start pushing them to make the hard, long-term decisions to adapt to a changing climate. And when the costs of those changes become apparent maybe climate legislation won’t seem like a strange, extraneous tax but like the necessary corrective that it is.

Or maybe we’ll just stop carping about the overwhelmed mayor and all just get used to scenes like this (above)

from Cities and Resilience: The Year Climate Started Hurting Politicians – Alexis Madrigal – Technology – The Atlantic

HD FPV – “Hunting Hydrogen Ballons with Fireworks” (via dadde87)

Full details: http://rcexplorer.se/files/ba11c31bb018b71fbf14995bce5af236-246.html

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Ikea Robotics – Animals (by adam lassy)

(Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)

“People here are suffering much more than Egypt or Tunisia but you don’t see it. They keep their mouths shut because they don’t want to be locked up for 10 years,” said a graduate medical student, surfing the web at an internet cafe.

Sitting next to him, a young lady finished updating her Facebook page and chatting with friends online – one of thousands of young Syrians adept at using proxy servers to get around the official ban on Facebook.

Although internet users must register their names with the cafe on a list that can be collected by the police, when asked if she had any concerns over breaking the ban on Facebook the young woman said all her friends do the same thing.

The Syrians are watching – Features – Al Jazeera English