The internet is dead. Long live the internet!

“

In an urgent, important blog post, computer scientist and security expert Ed Felten lays out the case against rules requiring manufacturers to put wiretapping backdoors in their communications tools. Since the early 1990s, manufacturers of telephone switching equipment have had to follow a US law called CALEA that says that phone switches have to have a deliberate back-door that cops can use to secretly listen in on phone calls without having to physically attach anything to them. This has already been a huge security problem — through much of the 1990s, AT&T’s CALEA controls went through a Solaris machine that was thoroughly compromised by hackers, meaning that criminals could listen in on any call; during the 2005/6 Olympic bid, spies used the CALEA backdoors on the Greek phone company’s switches to listen in on the highest levels of government.

But now, thanks to the widespread adoption of cryptographically secured messaging services, law enforcement is finding that its CALEA backdoors are of declining utility — it doesn’t matter if you can intercept someone else’s phone calls or network traffic if the data you’re captured is unbreakably scrambled. In response, the FBI has floated the idea of “CALEA II”: a mandate to put wiretapping capabilities in computers, phones, and software.

—

report

(via Boing Boing)

mossonrust:

open source satellite initiative

so this guy, Song Hojun, designed, built, and launched a DIY satellite. do you even get how hot that is?

plus, he has posted instructions online, and funded the whole thing from OSSI t-shirt sales and donations.

Reblogged from Notational

austinkleon:

creativemorningsaustin:

Austin Kleon at CreativeMornings/Austin from CreativeMornings/Austin on Vimeo.

Here’s the text and slides if you don’t feel like watching it all…

Reblogged from Notational

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Earlier this year, I wrote a piece for AlterNet called “Would We Have Drugged Up Einstein?” about why anti-authoritarians are diagnosed with mental illness. I received a huge response, including many emails from people who have been diagnosed with depression and anxiety disorder who positively resonated with this particular sentence: “Often a major pain of their lives that fuels their anxiety and/or depression is fear that their contempt for illegitimate authorities will cause them to be financially and socially marginalized, but they fear that compliance with such illegitimate authorities will cause them existential death.

— ZCommunications | How Psychologists Subvert Democratic Movements by Bruce E. Levine | ZMagazine Article

“

What’s impossible to ignore is how many of the individuals diagnosed with mental disorders are essentially anti-authoritarians. This was potentially a large army of anti-authoritarian activists that mental health professionals are keeping off democracy battlefields by convincing them that their depression, anxiety, and anger are a result of their mental illnesses and not, in part, a result of their pain over being in dehumanizing environments.

— Bruce E. Levine (How psychologists subvert democratic movements)

Reblogged from Notational

shrinkrants:

thenoobyorker:

Slavoj Žižek’s talk with Charlie Rose [Part 2, Part 3]

After watching that ten minute recreation of David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech, I started watching Charlie Rose’s interview with David Foster Wallace (RIP) when I remembered all about Charlie’s amazing interview with Slavoj. It’s amazing not because I like Slavoj or Charlie, but because it comes across as just two bro’s finishing each others sentences, being real on each others level and laughing honestly at each others jokes. On an individual level they couldn’t be more different but whenever two bros are in the same room, they find a common ground. It’s a law. It’s a property also seen in the activity of fireflies in Thailand. I think it’s some form of emergence (perhaps), though a derivative known as bromergence.

I haven’t made time to watch this whole interview yet, but from what I have seen, this is the least squirmy and most solid presentation of Žižek’s self that I have yet encountered. And I am struck by what a good interviewer Charlie Rose is. He’s very much his square, straight, white self; at ease in that and full of interest and curiosity about this other human being.

Reblogged from Emergent Digital Practices

colchrishadfield:

Same land, different politics. The US - Mexican border, seen from space.

Reblogged from Col. Chris Hadfield

“

The legacy of identity politics has produced a problematic language idealism where we focus more on correct words and phrases rather than the material basis of oppression… And even in the moment where we imagine we are indeed combatting real world oppression we are, in fact, simply engaging with the level of appearance. […] This language idealism becomes nothing but a self-righteous exercise when it refuses to contemplate a praxis of mass pedagogy based on actually changing the material circumstances and instead focuses on anti-oppression training, atomized concepts of privilege, and how to speak correctly.

—

J. Moufawad-Paul (via selucha)

Finally.

(via mehreenkasana)

Fucking. Yes.

(via worsethandetroit)

(Source: moufawad-paul.blogspot.com)

Reblogged from Beware Of Unreal Things

snapdraws:

Apologies for the terrible image quality - I’m lacking scanner access at the minute so I had to take these photos on my phone

I was reading hyperbole and a half’s blog entry explaining their experience of depression and decided to make another sketchy comic based on my experiences with anxiety, which is another mental illness I think people tend to misunderstand quite frequently

Hopefully this will be of use to some people - whether they suffer from anxiety themselves or if they just want to know more about it

Reblogged from Final Boss Form

“

He became something of a womaniser, dating undergraduates and hanging out with show girls and prostitutes in Las Vegas. In a celebrated book of anecdotes about his life – Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman – the scientist recounts how he applied an experimental approach to chatting up women. Having assumed, like most men, that you had to start by offering to buy them a drink, he explains how a conversation with a master of ceremonies at a nightclub in Albuquerque one summer prompted him to change tactics. And to his surprise, an aloof persona proved far more successful than behaving like a gentleman.

—

Christopher Riley in Richard Feynman: Life, the universe and everything, The Telegraph.

In these days of frivolous entertainments and frayed attention spans, the people who become famous are not necessarily the brightest stars. One of the biggest hits on YouTube, after all, is a video of a French bulldog who can’t roll over. But in amongst all the skateboarding cats and laughing babies, a new animated video, featuring the words of a dead theoretical physicist, has gone viral. In the film, created from an original documentary made for the BBC back in the early Eighties, the late Nobel Prize-winning professor, Richard Feynman, can be heard extolling the wonders of science contained within a simple flower.

There is “beauty”, he says, not only in the flower’s appearance but also in an appreciation of its inner workings, and how it has evolved the right colours to attract insects to pollinate it. Those observations, he continues, raise further questions about the insects themselves and their perception of the world. “The science,” he concludes, “only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of the flower.” This interview was first recorded by the BBC producer Christopher Sykes, back in 1981 for an episode of Horizon called “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out”. When it was broadcast the following year the programme was a surprise hit, with the audience beguiled by the silver-haired professor chatting to them about his life and his philosophy of science.

Now, thanks to the web, Richard Feynman’s unique talents – not just as a brilliant physicist, but as an inspiring communicator – are being rediscovered by a whole new audience. As well as the flower video, which, to date, has been watched nearly a quarter of a million times, YouTube is full of other clips paying homage to Feynman’s ground-breaking theories, pithy quips and eventful personal life.

Keep Reading.