Archive for July, 2013
Britain: Lawrence Family Hacks The Matrix
July 24th, 2013Via: Daily Mail: A family sold their four-bedroom house for life on a narrowboat – because they could no longer afford the cost of living. Now, the Lawrences make savings of £8,000 per year on household bills. After their property went under the hammer for £249,000, they moved on to the 65ft boat, worth £80,000, […]
Extremely Compartmentalized Information?
July 24th, 2013Update: 12 October 2014: “Exceptionally Compartmented Information,” or ECI Via: The Intercept: The National Security Agency has had agents in China, Germany, and South Korea working on programs that use “physical subversion” to infiltrate and compromise networks and devices, according to documents obtained by The Intercept. The documents, leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, also […]
Hillbilly Tracking of Low Earth Orbit Satellites
July 24th, 2013Via: Travis Goodspeed’s Blog: In this article, I’ll demonstrate a method for modifying a naval telecommunications dish to track moving targets in the sky, such as those in Low Earth Orbit. My dish happily sits in Tennessee, while I direct it using my laptop or cellphone here in Europe. It can also run unattended, tracking […]
Spain Taps Social Security Reserve Fund to Pay Pensions
July 23rd, 2013Via: Reuters: Spain tapped its social security reserve fund for the second time in a month on Monday, the Labour Ministry said, to help with extra summer pension payments as unemployment and retirement costs deplete government funds. The government turned to the fund for 3.5 billion euros ($4.6 billion) on July 1 then for a […]
The Bell Labs of Quantum Computing
July 23rd, 2013Via: MIT Technology Review: Raymond Laflamme can’t yet sell you a quantum computer. But he’ll sell you a $13,000 logic board for measuring entangled photons. It’s a start. Laflamme is head of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, a research center that’s part of a quixotic, grandiose effort by Mike Lazaridis, […]
Google Responsible for More Internet Traffic Than Facebook, Netflix, and Instagram Combined
July 23rd, 2013Via: Wired: Everyone knows Google is big. But the truth is that it’s huge. On an average day, Google accounts for about 25 percent of all consumer internet traffic running through North American ISPs. That’s a far larger slice of than previously thought, and it means that with so many consumer devices connecting to Google […]
Madness: The Raisin Administrative Committee
July 23rd, 2013Via: Reason: “They want us to pay for our own raisins that we grew,” says Raisin Valley Farms owner Marvin Horne. “We have to buy them back!” Marvin and Laura Horne, fined for the federal crime of selling their own raisins. This is but one absurdity that Marvin and his wife Laura have faced during […]
Microsoft Drove the Bus Off the Cliff, Now it Tries to Speed Up
July 23rd, 2013Via: SemiAccurate: Microsoft has driven off the cliff into the death spiral and rather than change direction they are trying to speed up their ‘momentum’. Endless reorgs, paid analyst reports, and flat-out lying to anyone who will listen won’t help, they can not succeed from their current position. Last fall SemiAccurate was one of the […]
The Eye of Sauron Is the Modern Surveillance State
July 23rd, 2013Via: Slate: What can literary fiction teach us about recent revelations that the National Security Agency has aggressively been gathering massive amounts of data on American citizens? The novel one usually turns to, of course, is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its terrifying vision of the Thought Police. Even President Obama, in response to questions […]
A Tour Inside CloudFlare’s Latest Generation Servers
July 23rd, 2013This is off topic, but possibly interesting for anyone who wants to see what balls-to-the-wall looks like in the realm of custom server hardware. In short, huge RAM cache and SSDs—lots of SSDs. Via: CloudFlare: CloudFlare operates at a significant scale, handling more than a trillion requests through our network every month. To ensure this […]
