All Google services inaccessible in Syria, “indicating complete shut down of the internet.” - @NMSyria, via Warren E., image via Google Transparency Report.
(Follow-up, from @NMSyria: “Your priorities must really be fucked up if the internet blackout upsets you more than the massacre in Banyas, and the countless others.”)
There is an aesthetic crisis in writing, which is this: how do we write emotionally of scenes involving computers? How do we make concrete, or at least reconstructable in the minds of our readers, the terrible, true passions that cross telephony lines? Right now my field must tackle describing a world where falling in love, going to war and filling out tax forms looks the same; it looks like typing.
![“Dewey-Hagborg […] extracts DNA from each piece of evidence she collects and enters this data into a computer program, which churns out a model of the face of the person who left the hair, fingernail, cigarette or gum behind. […] From those facial models, she then produces actual sculptures using a 3D printer.”
Creepy or Cool? Portraits Derived From the DNA in Hair and Gum Found in Public Places | Collage of Arts and Sciences](http://24.media.tumblr.com/58bbb0c8d1b9d18c21d846b988084cb5/tumblr_mmaavzBbfl1qjjis9o1_500.jpg)
“Dewey-Hagborg […] extracts DNA from each piece of evidence she collects and enters this data into a computer program, which churns out a model of the face of the person who left the hair, fingernail, cigarette or gum behind. […] From those facial models, she then produces actual sculptures using a 3D printer.”
Does cloud computing have weather? - rodcorp
“There is weather, too, beyond the physical infrastructure. Our “likes” and “favourites” are small prayers to the social network gods to keep safe the photos, spreadsheets and status updates we entrust to their cloudy crypts. (Not all precipitation makes it back to the ground: virga is rain that evaporates (or hail that sublimes) before reaching the ground - the observable spinning bar that never results in a file being displayed on our screens. Our status updates may not suffice as offerings: if we didn’t pay for the cloud service, we’re making a wish.) Service uptime websites are the weather charts. A database fails, creating a ripple of low data pressure.”
“When your car sports fashionable technology you can experience first-hand what it is like to be a leader in innovation. Everywhere you go people will stop dead in their tracks in wonder and admiration. Children will look back and remember the day they first encountered a self-driving car — your self-driving car! Overnight you can go from merely being a terrible driver to a well-respected and beloved ambassador of the future.”
LieDar, a fake self-driving car, via Thomas A.
“Sam Bland has spent a lot of time with Google Goggles. He’s learned how it sees the world and how it communicates — they play games together. Goggles is the image search feature in the Google mobile app, and by layering the app’s best attempts to match his photos, Bland has created an artistic view of the world as seen through Google’s eyes. His first experiment with it, for example, was a picture he took of a tennis racket. Google sent back a series of pictures that, while similar in tone and shape, had nothing to do with tennis. There was a polar bear, a nuclear missile launch and stock photo of a box of pills, among other things. Instead of being disappointed, Bland was fascinated. He liked that Google was confused.”
Google Is Alive, It Has Eyes, and This Is What It Sees | Raw File | Wired.com
Changing aesthetics: Shopping online for clothes typically involves scrolling through pages and pages of images. Mary Kantrantzou believes that this has lead to shoppers paying more attention to designs that stand out - in particular unusual colours or prints. She believes this has been a factor in the resurgence of print.
“U.S. Soldiers with Bravo Company, 3rd Battalion, 66th Armor Regiment, 172nd Infantry Brigade prepare for a simulated training scenario using the Dismounted Soldier Training System (DSTS) at Grafenwoehr, Germany, Feb. 21, 2013. The DSTS is the first fully-immersive virtual training environment to conduct dismounted Soldier operations. (DoD photo by Staff Sgt. Pablo N. Piedra, U.S. Army/Released)”
130221-A-KG432-036 (by U.S. Department of Defense Current Photos), via Dan W.
Wall Street collided with social media on Tuesday, when a false tweet from a trusted news organization sent the US stock market into freefall.
The 143-point fall in the Dow Jones industrial average came after hackers sent a message from the Twitter feed of the Associated Press, saying the White House had been hit by two explosions and that Barack Obama was injured. The fake tweet, which was immediately corrected by Associated Press employees, caused a sensation on Twitter and in the stock market.
“Designed and built for the launch of COLORS #86 - Making the News, the COLORS News Machine churns your tweets through different media filters and into print, simulating the contemporary 24-hour news cycle.”
The COLORS #86 News Machine (by COLORS Magazine)
What? You expected the CIA to put its secrets on the Amazon EC2? I don’t think so!
But get this: One reason the CIA started moving to cloud-based computing in 2009 was that it saw the cloud as being more secure than conventional IT systems. Back then, Jill Tummler Singer, who was the CIA’s deputy CIO at the time, said, “By keeping the cloud inside your firewalls, you can focus your strongest intrusion-detection and -prevention sensors on your perimeter, thus gaining significant advantage over the most common attack vector — the Internet.”
While we don’t know exactly how the CIA will be using Amazon’s services, it’s a safe bet that it will be creating its own private clouds. But the hardware used for those clouds might not be hosted on the grounds of the CIA’s Langley, Va., headquarters. Instead, the agency’s cloud hardware may well end up hiding out somewhere in Amazon’s mammoth U.S. East data center, located in nearby Ashburn, Va. Why? Well, just like any other government agency or private business, the CIA wants to save money in its IT budget.
{I have|I’ve} been {surfing|browsing} online more than {three|3|2|4} hours today, yet I never found any interesting article like yours. {It’s|It
is} pretty worth enough for me. {In my opinion|Personally|In my view}, if all {webmasters|site owners|website owners|web owners} and bloggers made good content as
you did, the {internet|net|web} will be {much more|a lot more}
useful than ever before.|
I {couldn’t|could not} {resist|refrain from} commenting. {Very well|Perfectly|Well|Exceptionally well} written!|
{I will|I’ll} {right away|immediately} {take hold of|grab|clutch|grasp|seize|snatch}
your {rss|rss feed} as I {can not|can’t} {in finding|find|to find} your {email|e-mail} subscription {link|hyperlink} or {newsletter|e-newsletter} service. Do {you have|you’ve} any?
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![We know when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sleeps – Quartz
“Less than 12 hours ago, we had never heard of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Now we know that he did not like haircuts but did like Game of Thrones. We know he was a wrestler and that he won a $2,500 scholarship while at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. We know he liked fast cars, ate lots of waffles, and probably used an iPhone from AT&T (but it broke in December).” […]
“Where it was once only reporters and the police who dug up information about people of interest, a whole nation is at it today. And for all the myriad concerns about privacy settings, cookies, data protection, automated surveillance, and Facebook, we reveal immense amounts of information about ourselves publicly, unthinkingly, and sometimes involuntarily.”](http://24.media.tumblr.com/0015a33a4d5314aa69b52a1acf92e232/tumblr_mlohzm6HiE1qjjis9o1_500.png)
We know when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sleeps – Quartz
“Less than 12 hours ago, we had never heard of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Now we know that he did not like haircuts but did like Game of Thrones. We know he was a wrestler and that he won a $2,500 scholarship while at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. We know he liked fast cars, ate lots of waffles, and probably used an iPhone from AT&T (but it broke in December).” […]
“Where it was once only reporters and the police who dug up information about people of interest, a whole nation is at it today. And for all the myriad concerns about privacy settings, cookies, data protection, automated surveillance, and Facebook, we reveal immense amounts of information about ourselves publicly, unthinkingly, and sometimes involuntarily.”
