Network Realism – a new term for a new era

“We can only transform ourselves as fast as we can transform our language.” –Terrence McKenna

I have been processing this post by James Bridle, Network Realism: William Gibson and new forms…

Q Sensor – new wrist device to monitor stress

As reader Tzagash Shal-Goram said, on sending this in, File this one under “shriekyware“. I have to agree.

Developed to help caregivers monitor the mood of autistic children, it’s easy to see…

Q Sensor – new wrist device to monitor stress

seanbonner:

ZOMG BoingBoing Hacked!

what would a steampunk novel that took the taproot history of the period seriously look like?

Forget wealthy aristocrats sipping tea in sophisticated London parlours; forget airship smugglers in the weird wild west. A revisionist mundane SF steampunk epic — mundane SF is the socialist realist movement within our tired post-revolutionary genre — would reflect the travails of the colonial peasants forced to labour under the guns of the white Europeans’ Zeppelins, in a tropical paradise where severed human hands are currency and even suicide doesn’t bring release from bondage. (Hey, this is steampunk — it needs zombies and zeppelins, right? Might as well pick Zombies for our single one impossible ingredient.) It would share the empty-stomached anguish of a young prostitute on the streets of a northern town during a recession, unwanted children (contraception is a crime) offloaded on a baby farm with a guaranteed 90% mortality rate through neglect. The casual boiled-beef brutality of the soldiers who take the King’s shilling to break the heads of union members organizing for a 60 hour work week. The fading eyesight and mangled fingers of nine year olds forced to labour on steam-powered looms, weaving cloth for the rich. The empty-headed graces of debutantes raised from birth to be bargaining chips and breeding stock for their fathers’ fortunes.

The hard edge of empire – Charlie’s Diary

– i would *so* watch that show

This hearing aid consists of a round carbon microphone (with no volume control), and an earphone with a detachable metal headband and an on-off switch on the back. The model shown at the right is signed General Acoustic Co. and was made sometime after 1906. (via Acousticon Model “A” Carbon Hearing Aid)

Here are some of the things the U.S. could do:

1. Indict Mr. Assange and his colleagues for espionage, regardless of whether he is presently in a U.S. jurisdiction, and ask our allies to do the same.

2. Explore opportunities for the president to designate WikiLeaks and its officers as enemy combatants, paving the way for non-judicial actions against them.

3. Freeze the assets of the WikiLeaks organization and its supporters, and sanction financial organizations working with this terrorist-enabling organization so they cannot clear transactions denominated in U.S. dollars.

4. Give the new U.S. Cyber-Command a chance to prove its worth by ordering it to electronically assault WikiLeaks and any telecommunications company offering its services to this organization.

5. Holding meaningful congressional hearings to look into how this much classified information could ever be compromised and how the U.S. can better identify and combat political warfare organizations like WikiLeaks.

FoxNews.com – Why Do We Keep Ignoring the WikiLeaks Threat?

Nobody knows how many file sharers are getting warnings from France’s new P2P infringement authority, but Billboard.biz says that French labels are sending 25,000 complaints a day to Hadopi, the agency enforcing that country’s “three strikes” law.

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We’re presuming that rights holders hope that legal digital sales will go up, and alleged infringements will go down. Maybe so, but a study released just after the law’s passage last year suggested an uptick in areas the legislation doesn’t cover, like one-click downloading sites such as Rapidshare.

French three strikes agency getting 25,000 complaints a day

Thus far SmartVPN has been an overwhelming success. Clever told TorrentFreak that nearly 2,500 Smartorrent users have already signed up since they started in September, and dozens of new accounts are being made each day. The torrent site run VPN, which costs 5 euros a month, ironically owes much of its success to France’s anti-piracy law.

Clever further said that he doesn’t understand why the French Government voted for the tougher laws, and calls them “insane”. “In my point of view, they have more important things to take care of in France than hunting downloaders, as every week there is a strike somewhere,” he added.

The success of SmartVPN follows the global trend where file-sharers increasingly use anonymizing services to avoid being spied on. The SmartVPN service is mainly targeted at French users, but for people from other countries there are plenty of alternatives to torrent anonymously.

Torrent Site Launches VPN to Counter France’s Anti-Piracy Law | TorrentFreak