Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom
January 21st, 2014A buddy of mine did damn near the same thing, except he slept in his lab at the university, as well as his vehicle. He had a Toyota pickup with a shell on the back. This was at a university with a very heavy cop presence. They would have definitely busted someone in a van. That lone van in the parking lot at night screams, “RED ALERT! RED ALERT! Someone not paying rent.”
But that pickup… He never got busted.
Via: Amazon:
In this frank and witty memoir, Ken Ilgunas lays bare the existential terror of graduating from the University of Buffalo with $32,000 of student debt. Ilgunas set himself an ambitious mission: get out of debt as quickly as possible. Inspired by the frugality and philosophy of Henry David Thoreau, Ilgunas undertook a 3-year transcontinental jour¬ney, working in Alaska as a tour guide, garbage picker, and night cook to pay off his student loans before hitchhiking home to New York.
Debt-free, Ilgunas then enrolled in a master’s program at Duke University, determined not to borrow against his future again. He used the last of his savings to buy himself a used Econoline van and outfitted it as his new dorm. The van, stationed in a campus parking lot, would be more than an adventure—it would be his very own “Walden on Wheels.”
Freezing winters, near-discovery by campus police, and the constant challenge of living in a confined space would test Ilgunas’s limits and resolve in the two years that followed. What had begun as a simple mission would become an enlightening and life-changing social experiment. Walden on Wheels offers a spirited and pointed perspective on the dilemma faced by those who seek an education but who also want to, as Thoreau wrote, “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”
Ukraine Tracks Protesters Through Cellphones
January 21st, 2014Via: New York Times:
The Ukrainian government used telephone technology to pinpoint the locations of cellphones in use near clashes between riot police officers and protesters early on Tuesday, illustrating that techniques that can be used to target commercial information can serve law enforcement as well.
People near the fighting between riot police and protesters received a text message shortly after midnight saying “Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.”
The phrasing echoed language in a new law making participation in a protest deemed violent a crime punishable by imprisonment. The law took effect on Tuesday.
Syria: Senior War Crimes Prosecutors Say Photographs and Documents Provide ‘Clear Evidence’ of Systematic Killing of 11,000 Detainees
January 21st, 2014Via: Guardian:
Syrian government officials could face war crimes charges in the light of a huge cache of evidence smuggled out of the country showing the “systematic killing” of about 11,000 detainees, according to three eminent international lawyers.
The three, former prosecutors at the criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone, examined thousands of Syrian government photographs and files recording deaths in the custody of regime security forces from March 2011 to last August.
Most of the victims were young men and many corpses were emaciated, bloodstained and bore signs of torture. Some had no eyes; others showed signs of strangulation or electrocution.
The UN and independent human rights groups have documented abuses by both Bashar al-Assad’s government and rebels, but experts say this evidence is more detailed and on a far larger scale than anything else that has yet emerged from the 34-month crisis.
Botnet Made Up of Hacked Refrigerators and Other Appliances Sent Hundreds of Thousands of Spam Emails
January 21st, 2014Via: The Age:
Call it the attack of the zombie refrigerators.
Computer security researchers say they have discovered a large “botnet” which infected internet-connected home appliances and then delivered more than 750,000 malicious emails.
The California security firm Proofpoint, which announced its findings, said this may be the first proven “internet of things” based cyber attack involving “smart” appliances.
Proofpoint said hackers managed to penetrate home-networking routers, connected multimedia centres, televisions and at least one refrigerator to create a botnet — or platform to deliver malicious spam or phishing emails from a device, usually without the owner’s knowledge.
Security experts previously spoke of such attacks as theoretical.
But Proofpoint said the case “has significant security implications for device owners and enterprise targets” because of massive growth expected in the use of smart and connected devices, from clothing to appliances.
Tesla Motors Does Over-the-Air Repairs
January 21st, 2014Wow. I wonder what else they can do to those cars from remote? I wonder if they have disabled one for any reason?
Via: MIT Technology Review:
Tesla and GM have both issued fire-related recalls, but Tesla’s fix doesn’t require owners to bring their cars in.
Tesla Motors is using over-the-air software updates to quickly fix the sort of problems that often arise when bringing a new car to market.
…
Expect over-the-air updates to become more common, although companies will need to work to make sure they can be done securely.
Spoiled Onions: Exposing Bad Tor Exit Relays
January 21st, 2014Via: Spoiled Onions:
As of January 2014, the Tor anonymity network consists of 5,000 relays of which almost 1,000 are exit relays. As the diagram to the right illustrates, exit relays bridge the gap between the Tor network and the “open” Internet. As a result, exit relays are able to see anonymised network traffic as it is sent by Tor clients.
While most exit relays are innocuous and run by well-meaning volunteers, there are exceptions: In the past, some exit relays were documented to have sniffed and tampered with relayed traffic. The exposed attacks included mostly HTTPS man-in-the-middle (MitM) and SSL stripping.
In this research project, we are monitoring all exit relays for several months in order to expose, document, and thwart malicious or misconfigured relays. In particular, we monitor exit relays with a fast and modular scanner we developed specifically for that purpose. Since September 2013, we discovered several malicious or misconfigured exit relays which are listed below. These exit relays engaged in various attacks such as SSH and HTTPS MitM, HTML injection, and SSL stripping. We also found exit relays which were unintentionally interfering with network traffic because they were subject to DNS censorship.
This project is funded by a research grant provided by Internetfonden. Previous work of ours investigated how Tor is blocked and how censorship can be circumvented.
Britain: 26% of Young Adults Live with Parents
January 21st, 2014Via: BBC:
A quarter of young people in the UK now live with their parents, official figures show.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said more than 3.3 million adults between the ages of 20 and 34 were living with parents in 2013, 26% of that age group.
World’s 85 Richest People Have as Much Wealth as Poorest 3.5 Billion
January 21st, 2014Via: Independent:
The 85 richest people on the planet have accumulated as much wealth between them as half of the world’s population, political and financial leaders have been warned ahead of their annual gathering in the Swiss resort of Davos.
The tiny elite of multibillionaires, who could fit into a double-decker bus, have piled up fortunes equivalent to the wealth of the world’s poorest 3.5bn people, according to a new analysis by Oxfam. The charity condemned the “pernicious” impact of the steadily growing gap between a small group of the super-rich and hundreds of millions of their fellow citizens, arguing it could trigger social unrest.
It released the research on the eve of the World Economic Forum, starting on Wednesday, which brings together many of the most influential figures in international trade, business, finance and politics including David Cameron and George Osborne. Disparities in income and wealth will be high on its agenda, along with driving up international health standards and mitigating the impact of climate change.
Oxfam said the world’s richest 85 people boast a collective worth of $1.7trn (£1trn). Top of the pile is Carlos Slim Helu, the Mexican telecommunications mogul, whose family’s net wealth is estimated by Forbes business magazine at $73bn. He is followed by Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder and philanthropist, whose worth is put at $67bn and is one of 31 Americans on the list.
Other well known names include the business magnate Warren Buffett, whose estimated worth is $53.5bn, and Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, with $23bn.
The world’s richest woman, Liliane Bettencourt, sits on a family fortune of $30bn derived from L’Oréal, the cosmetics company. According to Forbes, the richest person in the UK (and 89th in the world) is the Duke of Westminster, whose property empire has boosted his wealth to $11.4bn.
Night Work ‘Throws Body Into Chaos’
January 21st, 2014How about sitting for hours, at night!?!?! *shrill screams of horror*
Via: BBC:
Doing the night shift throws the body “into chaos” and could cause long-term damage, warn researchers.
Shift work has been linked to higher rates of type 2 diabetes, heart attacks and cancer.
Now scientists at the Sleep Research Centre in Surrey have uncovered the disruption shift work causes at the deepest molecular level.
Experts said the scale, speed and severity of damage caused by being awake at night was a surprise.
The human body has its own natural rhythm or body clock tuned to sleep at night and be active during the day.
It has profound effects on the body, altering everything from hormones and body temperature to athletic ability, mood and brain function.
The Brazilian Ranch Where Nazis Kept Slaves
January 21st, 2014Via: BBC:
It’s well known that pre-war Brazil had strong links with Nazi Germany – the two were economic partners and Brazil had the biggest fascist party outside Europe, with more than 40,000 members.
But it was years before Maciel – thanks to detective work by history professor Sidney Aguilar Filho – learned the grim story of his farm’s links to Brazil’s fascists.
Filho established that the farm had once been owned by the Rocha Mirandas, a family of wealthy industrialists from Rio de Janeiro. Three of them – father Renato and two of his sons, Otavio and Osvaldo – were members of the Acao Integralista Brasileira, an extreme right-wing organisation, sympathetic to the Nazis.
The family sometimes held rallies on the farm, hosting thousands of the organisation’s members. But it was also a brutal work-camp for abandoned – and non-white – children.
