How Joe Biden Stages Those Average-Joe Pictures
November 30th, 2012Via: The Atlantic Wire:
Only in a few shots can you see just how many people were recording Biden as he, for example, looks at pies.
Related: Vladimir Putin, Action Man
The Secret to Iranian Drone Technology? Just Add Photoshop
November 30th, 2012Via: The Atlantic Wire:
Earlier this month, Iran’s news agency provided visual evidence that its government had figured out to make a fancy new drone that could take off and land vertically. What they didn’t tell us is that they used Photoshop to make it stop taking off from the roof of Japan’s Chiba University, which built the aircraft and never had anything to do with Iran’s alleged version of it.
How Amazon Followed Google Into the World of Secret Servers
November 30th, 2012Via: Wired:
Chris Pinkham was walking through a data center that would one day house Amazon’s seminal cloud computing service — the Elastic Compute Cloud — when he came face to face with a cage of Google machines.
This was a decade ago, when Pinkham oversaw the hardware and software that ran Amazon, and the company was considering a spot in the data center, which housed machines for many web operations and other businesses. Google would later pull a curtain around its data-center hardware, moving much of it into private facilities, but in those days, it was easier for competitors like Pinkham to lay their eyes on Google machines.
Pinkham was struck by how different the machines looked — and how hot they were. Even then, Google was running its website on dirt-cheap, stripped-down servers slotted into extremely tight spaces. They didn’t even have plastic cases.
“They were clearly not your average Dell, HP, IBM servers. They were white box machines, very densely packed. They weren’t in containers. They were just blades jammed into these custom racks,” remembers Pinkham, who went on to lead the team that built the Elastic Compute Cloud and now runs a cloud software startup called Nimbula. “And I remember a lot of heat coming off them — an indication of a lot of concentrated power.”
…
And now, according to James Hamilton, the man who oversees Amazon’s current data centers, the company is building its own servers in tandem with Asian manufacturers along the lines of Quanta and Foxconn, the outfit that famously builds Apple iPhones and iPads. Hamilton tells Wired that Amazon buys its server processors and memory directly from Intel, doing an end-run around middle men such as HP and Dell and other original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs.
Once you reach a certain size, says Hamilton, it only makes sense to build your own gear. Buying traditional servers gets too expensive. If you’re buying enough hardware to negotiate favorable deals with the likes of Intel — and you’ve got the means to hire people who can run this kind hardware operation — you can significantly cut costs by going straight to Asia.
The result is an enormous shadow market for servers and other data-center hardware that’s hidden from those who traditionally track hardware sales. Google goes straight to Asia. So does Facebook. And according to a former Quanta employee who spoke to Wired earlier this year, even Microsoft is purchasing data-center hardware straight from Asian companies that the average American has never heard of.
Cryptogon Is Now a BookDepository Affiliate
November 30th, 2012Your BookDepository purchases now support Cryptogon.
Staples to Offer 3D Printing Services in Copy Centers
November 30th, 2012Via: Fabbaloo:
In a blockbuster announcement, Mcor, the makers of the IRIS color 3D printing system based on plain old paper, say they’ve struck a huge deal with print services giant Staples to supply 3D printing equipment for their numerous print and copy centers.
This will obviously take a while to implement, so Staples Printing Division is starting the process by rolling it out in Belgium and the Netherlands in Q1 2013 and then “will be rolled out quickly to other countries” according to Staples.
How does it work? Those with printable 3D models can merely upload them to Staples’ web site, where they will be transformed into full color 3D objects with Mcor’s new IRIS paper-based 3D printers. Printed models will be sent to your local Staples or directly to your address. It’s not entirely clear from the announcement, but we suspect the 3D printers will not be located initially in all Staples print shops, but instead centralized in some efficient fashion. Nevertheless, we also suspect the long-term intention is indeed to equip every Staples print center with this 3D printing equipment.
Sentry System Combines a Human Brain with Computer Vision
November 30th, 2012I’ve posted this one at least a couple of time over the years, but in case you missed it…
Via: MIT Technology Review:
Sentry duty is a tough assignment. Most of the time there’s nothing to see, and when a threat does pop up, it can be hard to spot. In some military studies, humans are shown to detect only 47 percent of visible dangers.
A project run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) suggests that combining the abilities of human sentries with those of machine-vision systems could be a better way to identify danger. It also uses electroencephalography to identify spikes in brain activity that can correspond to subconscious recognition of an object.
An experimental system developed by DARPA sandwiches a human observer between layers of computer vision and has been shown to outperform either machines or humans used in isolation.
The so-called Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System consists of a wide-angle camera and radar, which collects imagery for humans to review on a screen, and a wearable electroencephalogram device that measures the reviewer’s brain activity. This allows the system to detect unconscious recognition of changes in a scene—called a P300 event.
In experiments, a participant was asked to review test footage shot at military test sites in the desert and rain forest. The system caught 91 percent of incidents (such as humans on foot or approaching vehicles) in the simulation. It also widened the field of view that could effectively be monitored. False alarms were raised only 0.2 percent of the time, down from 35 percent when a computer vision system was used on its own. When combined with radar, which detects things invisible to the naked eye, the accuracy of the system was close to 100 percent, DARPA says.
“The DARPA project is different from other ‘human-in-the-loop’ projects because it takes advantage of the human visual system without having the humans do any ‘work,’ ” says computer scientist Devi Parikh of the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. Parikh researches vision systems that combine human and machine expertise.
MexicaNZ Three Amigos: Mexican Food in Mangonui, Coopers Beach, Cable Bay, Northland New Zealand
November 30th, 2012As you may or may not know, besides an affordable and good Internet connection, Mexican food is the only thing I miss about California. Sure, we can make our own Mexican food, but it’s nice to be able to go out sometimes with our children.
Now, look what I found today: MexicaNZ Three Amigos (Facebook link)
Yes, that’s a tiny Mexican food takeout place in Mangonui. They’re at 112 Waterfront Dr. in the pub patio. There’s no phone number, cash only, open late.
Three girls from Texas, living in the Far North of New Zealand, missed having Mexican food, and they thought that they weren’t the only ones.
They have been open for four months, but I didn’t even know they were there and I’ve been driving past a couple of times per week. I happened to see their sign on the highway and then I hunted them down, drooling for a burrito. Business is a bit slow for them, so I’m hoping that people traveling in Northland will start to crave Mexican food up here and find this post.
Please visit, and request that chicken burritos be added to the menu. 🙂 They made one for me, I suppose because I whimpered about wanting one so badly, and because they happened to have some chicken there, and it was damn good.
Delicious food, VERY reasonable prices. Well done, ladies! We’ll be back.
Syria: Internet Taken Down
November 30th, 2012My guess is that U.S. Special Forces are restoring “Internet” access right now. *wink*
Well, what this probably means is that, when you’re connected to .mil’s PSYOP ISP, you may get a ‘special’ version of the Internet. For example, when you type in cnn.com or google.com, what you see may be quite different from what the rest of the world sees. The military could be running proxies that make sites appear any way PSYOP planners want them to appear. They could load content from the actual sites, but, on the fly, add PSYOP payloads to what is sent to the target population.
So, while regular visitors to cnn.com see the usual cnn.com page, those who connect to .mil’s PSYOP ISP might see extra stories that have been created specifically for the mission at hand. Or, other stories might not appear at all.
Maybe search results for various topics are packed with totally bogus results.
How about a special version of YouTube with videos and users completely fabricated by .mil and not at all visible by people on the regular Internet?
A proxy server is like one of those food processors you see on TV infomercials at 4am. It slices. It dices. It minces. A carrot goes in one side as a carrot, but it could come out the other side a dozen different ways.
Via: Parity News:
Amidst the ongoing civil war, Syria has gone off the Internet a few hours ago with all the 84 IP block within the country unreachable from the outside.
Renesys, a research firm, keeping tabs on the health of the Internet reported at about 5:25 ET that Syria’s Internet connectivity has been shut. The internet traffic from outside to Syrian IP addresses is going undelivered and anything coming out from within the country is not reaching the Internet.
There have been no reports as to why the connectivity was shut but, it won’t be too farfetched to assume that this disconnection may be a way to control the information flow from Syria to the outside.
‘The Cashless Society is Almost Here’
November 30th, 2012I first heard about the cashless society back around 1988. By 2000, cash would be gone, or so the stories went. haha.
Now, in 2012, the cashless society is almost here…
I’d say that it’s closer to being here than it was in 1988, but I wouldn’t be surprised if people who are waiting for this to happen will be using walking frames and wondering, “Is it here yet?”
Why isn’t the cashless system in place yet?
Drugs.
The illicit drug trade runs mostly on cash, which is then laundered through the banking system. If someone can explain to me how the usual suspects will continue to profit from the illicit drug trade in a cashless system, I’d be all ears. And no, a few pot heads paying for their stuff with Bitcoin in the San Francisco Bay Area doesn’t cut it as an explanation.
We currently have institutionalized money laundering of (potentially) hundreds of billions of dollars per year. How does that happen when every single transaction, no matter how small, goes into a permanent database?
There have been no technological barriers to establishing a cashless system for at least 20 years. And in practice, most people function as if they are in a cashless system already. So, what’s the hang up?
It’s drugs.
Via: 21stCenturyWire:
Among the long list of items bundled by consensus reality merchants under the banner of ‘conspiracy theory’, is a world without cash – where technocrats rule over the populace, and everything and anything is exchanged via plastic and RFID chips.
In this sterile and controlled Orwellian hi-tech society, the idea of cash being passed from hand to hand would be as archaic as the thought of carrying around a rucksack of tally sticks today.
Still, despite the incredible penetration of credit and debit card transactions into economic aggregate, and the boom in internet shopping, few will comfortably admit that a cashless society is nearly upon us. In part, it’s a natural denial by many fueled by the idea of our society is indeed on a collision course with the sort of dystopic impersonal future like that depicted in the 1970?s sci-fi film classic, ‘Logan’s Run’.
Research Credit: HB
DuPont Sends in Former Cops to Enforce Seed Patents
November 29th, 2012Via: Bloomberg:
DuPont Co. (DD), the world’s second- biggest seed company, is sending dozens of former police officers across North America to prevent a practice generations of farmers once took for granted.
The provider of the best-selling genetically modified soybean seed is looking for evidence of farmers illegally saving them from harvests for replanting next season, which is not allowed under sales contracts. The Wilmington, Delaware-based company is inspecting Canadian fields and will begin in the U.S. next year, said Randy Schlatter, a DuPont senior manager.
Research Credit: GP
