Dmitri Popov

Jack Delano was one of the photographers who worked in Roy Stryker’s Farm Security Administration photography program in the early 1940s, traveling the American countryside, photographing people and places with the stated goal of “introducing America to Americans.” In 1942 and ’43, Delano spent time in the rail yards of Chicago, documenting the busy freight hub and the countless workers who kept the trains running 24 hours a day. Some of his most striking images were made on Kodachrome color transparencies, wonderfully preserved in the Library of Congress today. Collected below, a handful of images from Chicago as it was some 75 years ago.

Andy Greenberg (previously) is a veteran Wired security reporter who has chronicled the frightening and chaotic world of cyberwar since its earliest days; in a forthcoming book called "Sandworm," Greenberg tells the fascinating and terrible tale of Notpetya (previously), a Russian cyberweapon (built on leaked NSA cyberweapons!) that disguised itself as criminal ransomware, but which was designed to identify and destroy key Ukrainian computer systems and networks. (more…)

Facebook wants you to "engage" with its service, so they have an algorithm that plucks your most favorited images out of your past stream and adds dancing whimsical cartoon characters and then rams the resulting animation into your eyeballs, because why not? (more…)

One of my favorite things about learning Japanese and living here for over half my life is discovering all the words and phrases that have no exact equivalent in English. It’s an incredible feeling when you learn to describe an emotion, situation, or predicament that you never even realized you hadn’t previously been able to articulate. It wasn’t too long ago that the Japanese words kintsugi (repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with gold) and tsundoku (the act of piling up reading material, but not quite getting around to reading it) made the rounds. It dawned on me that maybe other people like discovering these little treasures, as well. Today I give you one of my favorite Japanese phrases: mushaburui. This one’s an oldie but a goodie. Let me explain: Musha in Japanese means warrior or samurai. While the character for burui is a different pronunciation of furu, to shiver, quiver, or shake. Thus, I give you the “shivering samurai”. But what it means is even better than that. When I was first taught this phrase, I was told to imagine the evening before a large battle. A samurai warrior is quietly making his preparations. He’s nervous, frightened, excited. Yet, despite this mix of emotions, there is a calmness and resignation at facing what might be a great victory or his inevitable death. He doesn’t know why, but as he reaches for his sword he’s trembling. It is an older Japanese term used to describe a feeling I think we’ve all had at sometime in our lives. Maybe we weren’t standing at the jaws of war. Maybe we were simply just about to do something out of our comfort zone, something we were terrified to do, but knew we had to do it. Going for an interview at our dream job. Telling our best friend that we’ve been in love with them all this time. Maybe we were submitting an article to BoingBoing. These situations, too, are mushaburui.

Operating in Tokyo in the years leading up to World War II, Soviet spy Richard Sorge conducted a stunning feat of espionage that influenced the outcome of the conflict.

Brandon Li captures the dazzling excitement and beauty of Seoul and its environs in seven minutes. The transitions and camera work are stunning. He shot two terabytes of data and spent three months, off and on, editing it.

He also made a director's commentary version of the video, which you can see here: https://youtu.be/S9kLihqA7jA

Across the vastness of Russia—the world’s largest country, at some 6.6 million square miles—and over the span of its long history, countless houses, factories, churches, villages, military bases, and other structures have been built and then left behind: imperial-era palaces, log cabins of pioneers in the Far East, Christian cathedrals, massive Soviet blocks of concrete, speculative-mining camps, and more. For years now, photographers have traveled across Russia finding and photographing these intriguing ghost towns, empty Soviet factories, toppling houses, and crumbling chapels.

If that drawer full of neglected, outdated gadgets in your desk happens to include a Kindle, Jaap Meijers has come up with a clever way to put it back into service. His girlfriend, an avid reader and English literature teacher, wanted a clock for their living room, so Meijers hacked an older model Kindle to display…

Read more...

John Oliver handily obliterates Facebook's desperate propaganda campaign to rehabilitate itself.

This is just the latest low point of Facebook. We've had to deal with controversies over everything from possibly contributing to a genocide in Myanmar to Mark Zuckerberg claiming Holocaust deniers weren't intentionally getting it wrong to the company using the disaster in Puerto Rico as a backdrop to promote their virtual reality tools.

I've been to Japan seven times, once staying for five months. Most of the facts in the video new to me (free dry ice in supermarkets!) This short video presents 50 interesting facts about modern Japanese society, and many of them are useful for people visiting.

Jason Koebler and Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai received a $100 iPhone X from China and marveled at how convincing the top-to-bottom, software-to-hardware bootleggery is. iOS is recreated down to the pixel as an Android skin; only the sluggish performance, on-screen keyboard give the game away. Even many of the apps are nearly perfect, though once they run into the bad ones, it's immediately clear what is at hand. And how very bad some of them are...

Evans also found “plenty of evidence” of a “wide range of backdoors,” perhaps written by several developers. The fake Safari app uses custom libraries that open a backdoor and allow hackers to run code on the phone remotely. Last year, Google removed 500 apps that had more than 100 million downloads combined from the Play Store because they included one of those libraries.

The fake iPhone also includes two more potential backdoors. One is the notorious ADUPS, a service made by a Chinese company that provides over-the-air firmware updates that is widely considered to be a backdoor. The other is an app called LovelyFont that looks like an “invasive backdoor” that has almost all permissions and potentially leaks data, such as the phone’s IMEI, MAC, and serial number, to a remote server, according to Evans.

Do not log into anything on a bootleg smartphone.

Leila Jeffreys photographed majestically colorful members of the Columbidae family in Australia.

Over the weekend, sustained heavy rainfall hit parts of western and central Japan, causing flash flooding, setting off landslides, submerging floodplains, and forcing more than 2 million residents to evacuate. Today, Japan’s National Police Agency announced at least 200 people had died, and dozens were still missing, in the worst weather-related disaster to hit Japan in more than 30 years. More than 70,000 rescue workers are at work in hard-hit areas searching for survivors as the damage to villages, roads, and infrastructure is being assessed. Hundreds of thousands of homes remain without power or clean water.

Cheat.sh is a curl based cheat sheet, with cheat sheets for over 50 languages, 1,000 Unix/Linux commands, and the ability to search StackOverflow that promises to remain fast (responses in 100ms).

In central Italy’s Umbria region, the small village of Castelluccio sits atop a hill overlooking a broad, flat basin surrounded by the Sibillini Mountains. In October 2016, a significant earthquake struck the area, badly damaging the village and roads—but farming still takes place in the Piano Grande below, where fields of lentils and poppies bloom every year, carpeting the landscape with a colorful quilt of blossoming flowers.