firehose

archimaps:

Hebrard’s design for an international world center

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CowboyRobot writes "Poul-Henning Kamp argues that the 'recent exposure of the dragnet-style surveillance of Internet traffic has provoked a number of responses that are variations of the general formula: "More encryption is the solution." This is not the case. In fact, more encryption will probably only make the privacy crisis worse than it already is.' His argument takes a few turns, but centers on a scenario that is a bit too easy to imagine: a government coercing software developers into disabling their encryption: 'There are a whole host of things one could buy to weaken encryption. I would contact providers of popular cloud and "whatever-as-service" providers and make them an offer they couldn't refuse: on all HTTPS connections out of the country, the symmetric key cannot be random; it must come from a dictionary of 100 million random-looking keys that I provide. The key from the other side? Slip that in there somewhere, and I can find it (encrypted in a Set-Cookie header?). In the long run, nobody is going to notice that the symmetric keys are not random — you would have to scrutinize the key material in many thousands of connections before you would even start to suspect something was wrong.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

nicecleanfight:

impossible

The future of comedy distribution is here and it’s coming from, of all people, Lewis Black. The 64-year old comedian’s ninth stand-up special, Lewis Black: Old Yeller-Live At The Borgata, will be the first live comedy special to air as a pay-per-view event simultaneously on all cable, satellite, and telco platforms. The show will be taped in Atlantic City on August 24th at 9:30 p.m. ET, but Black fans across the country can watch it live from the comfort of their own homes (assuming they have Xfinity, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications, DirecTV, Dish, Cablevision, Charter Communications, AT&T U-verse, or Verizon FiOS).

In a September 2012 interview with The A.V. Club, Black spoke about the difficulties of keeping his political and social comedy topical:

 “This special [In God We Rust], which I did a year and half ago and is just now seeing the ...

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evilsoutherngentleman:

girlveal:

lillyvonepic1701:

for real fabric i found at Jo-anns

I’m generally fed up of ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ inspired stuff but I can’t help but like this

Well. Fuck.

THIS IS AT JO-ANNS?! I sense a new skirt in my future. And perhaps a large applique for a jacket. 

Produced by an unknown author and illustrator, "Fechtbuch I.33" is an anonymous German manuscript from approximately 1300. It is highly significant as the earliest surviving manual of swordsmanship

loveebythemoonnn:

nezua:

habitosnotivagos:

“Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light. Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing.”

― Frida Kahlo

Remember this quote and understand why it is wrong to enshroud the memory of Frida in an aura of pain & suffering as if that’s what she were all about.

I fucking love this picture omg

the giggles!

 

Qinni: Creepshots is back. And they have migrated to Tumblr.

themanwiththebluebox:

This needs to fucking stop.  This is an absolute invasion of women, this is disgusting, and this Tumblr needs to go away.

We need to report both the Twitter and the Tumblr.

Creepshots is a website for men to take “sexy” pictures of unsuspecting women, and from their ‘About Us’ section it states: “Creepshots are CANDID pictures.  If a person is posing or aware that a picture is being taken, then it is no longer a creepshot.”  

These men take pictures of women who are unaware and post them.

 And then under their rules for getting the pictures removed?  One of the two options is to “appreciate” the fact that some fucking gross man took a picture of you.

Signal boost.

I’ve sent a report to tumblr and you should too.

To report a blog to tumblr, you need to email the full URL and name of the blog to tumblr.

Let’s get it taken down!

PLEASE SIGNAL BOOST

WE NEED TO REPORT THEM HERE’S HOW

there’s two ways-it’s more effective if you do both:

1) Block them here and then report for harassment.

2) You can also email tumblr at abuse@tumblr.com and tell them to ban creepshots. Provide them with the url to the blog (creepshots.tumblr.com) and explain why they should be banned. If you’re too lazy to write out an email, you can use mine:

Hello tumblr staff,

Please remove/ban the blog creepshots.tumblr.com. They post demeaning, humiliating and objectifying pictures of women (typically their asses and breasts and even under their skirts) that they take without their permission on the street and in public. These guys were banned and deleted from reddit. Can you really say that tumblr is less of a safe respectable place than reddit?

What they are doing is wrong. Many, many users on tumblr feel violated and unsafe by this blog’s presence in the tumblr community. These men are violating the privacy of women everywhere. They specifically state in their about me: “Creepshots are CANDID pictures. If a person is posing or aware that a picture is being taken, then it is no longer a creepshot. A true creepshot captures the natural sexy, embarrassing or funny aspect of the subject mater/person without their knowledge.” They specifically state that only accept pictures of people whose privacy has been violated (source: http://creepshots.tumblr.com/AboutUs).

Please do something to show that you care about the safety and dignity of women, particularly the women in the tumblr community. If you don’t care about that, can you at least ban/delete them in the name of protecting yourself from legal liability? because there’s a strong likelihood that some of those pictures are of underaged girls. Given that these men are taking pics of young women they don’t know, how can they know their ages for certain? All it takes is one concerned parent or adolescent seeing their picture on that site, and if you don’t take it down, legal action could be taken against you.

So please, in the name of what is ethical and right and even legally responsible and smart, delete creepshots. Thank you.

Sincerely,

________ (tumblr username/name)

If we use both methods, we’ll be more successful. LET’S FLOOD THE TUMBLR EMAIL WITH DEMANDS THESE FUCKERS GET TAKEN DOWN. WE CAN DO THIS.

I know this is not much related to RHA, but this disturbs me way too much. I figured if I share it here, more people will know about it. Signal boost! (Also I bolded the text, I hope no one minds)

It’s extremely sad that this isn’t down yet. It has been one month since I last reblogged this, but it’s still not down. Please tell them that that not only is this wrong in so many levels, but these are also pictures of underage girls.

(Note: Don’t reblog as a Link)

Portland is considered something of a Mecca for the comic book industry. Neither of the big two publishers (DC/Marvel) live here, but plenty of writers and artists who work for those companies do. The Northwest is home to imprints like Top Shelf, Dark Horse, Oni, and multiple Eisner-nominated comic book shops.

As such, there are a lot of people living here who think "making comics" is a legitimate career pursuit. Not a risky one, not an iffy one: legit. There are enough residents with their name printed on the cover of various floppies and trade paperbacks that it seems completely plausible, if not probable, that "comic books" could be a a valid career choice.

Considering the names on those covers printed in the largest font do tend to be the writers', a lot of people think the best way into comics is via the side that doesn't do so much of the sketching, or tracing, or whatever they do. Inking. That shit. And since most of the biggest stars in the industry are the writers, it really does seem like that's the best bet.

Today, Leia Weathington, creator of The Legend of Bold Riley and winner of the 2013 Stumptown Comics Fest award for Best Writer (conflict-of-interest alert: I produce her podcast) lit up Twitter like Colonel Kilgore calling in an airstrike. The truth-infused napalm came in response to a conversation started by this tweet from After Houdini creator Jeremy Holt.

Weathington's response, collected and storified by friend/colleague Erika Moen (Bucko, Oh Joy, Sex Toy) not only puts paid to the notion that artists exist in comics solely to execute the vision of the almighty writer, but sheds light on just how "easy" it is to break into comics, even in a Mecca like Portland:

There's a lot more to read, and thanks to Erika Moen, the whole thing is available here. And if you were considering a career in the industry, click that link, and take a minute or two to think on whether or not you really want to break into comics if you're not willing to regard an artist as "your people."

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Twitter, which has apparently been much better about saying no to the NSA than the other tech giants, says that more and more governments want to get a hold of your private information:

The company's latest transparency report, now a biannual affair, shows a steady increase in information requests from governments around the world, including those for user account information, which Twitter said typically are made in connection with criminal investigations or cases. For the first six months of 2013, Twitter received 1,157 requests, up from 1,009 in the second half of 2012 and 849 in the first half of 2012.

Whenever I write about Twitter and privacy, people tend to respond with something like, "isn't Twitter for narcissistic over-sharers anyway?" And, you know, sure, kinda. Partially. But governments aren't interested in your public posts about what you ate for lunch. They're interested in the identities behind anonymous Twitter accounts. They're interested in Twitter's private messaging system, which has become a preferred way for protesters to keep in touch when they're planning and undertaking actions. There's a lot of very damaging private information on the site, even though it has a reputation as being too public.

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Politico

Congress finally votes to cut student loan interest rates Reuters By Elvina Nawaguna. WASHINGTON | Wed Jul 31, 2013 7:27pm EDT. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. college students will likely pay a reduced interest rate of 3.86 percent on their student loans for the new school year, after lawmakers on Wednesday finally ... House approves lower rates on student loansUSA TODAY House passes student loan deal, sends to Obama's deskNBCNews.com After delays, student loan fix clears CongressCBS News Washington Post -Wall Street Journal -Politico all 162 news articles »

with hideo kojima and guillermo del toro

barleytea:

so knifehead-kun exists. he ends his sentences with "-rimu", uses emotes like ψ(｀口´)ψ, tags his tweets with #worldinvasion, and calls guillermo del toro daddy

i cannot believe

This makes me so ridiculously happy, I can’t express it without flailyhands. 

(Pacific Rim was a lot of fun, and I might be idly considering some fic ideas. Just maybe. We’ll see what my brain does.)

mapsontheweb:

Before there was BART or AC Transit, there was the Key System. Key trains rode on the lower deck of the Bay Bridge.

“

It reminds me of the “bike to work” movement. That is also portrayed as white, but in my city more than half of the people on bike are not white. I was once talking to a white activist who was photographing “bike commuters” and had only pictures of white people with the occasional “black professional” I asked her why she didn’t photograph the delivery people, construction workers etc. … ie. the black and Hispanic and Asian people… and she mumbled something about trying to “improve the image of biking” then admitted that she didn’t really see them as part of the “green movement” since they “probably have no choice” –

I was so mad I wanted to quit working on the project she and I were collaborating on.

So, in the same way when people in a poor neighborhood grow food in their yards … it’s just being poor– but when white people do it they are saving the earth or something.

”

- comment left on the Racialious blog post “Sustainable Food & Priviledge: Why is Green always White (and Male and Upper-Class)

Shadowrun Returns brings the wayward cyberpunk universe back to its roots.

Good article by Elia Freedman, but then it ends with this footnote:

Listening to Marco Arment talk about this problem is frustrating. The guy has an incredible personal brand, like [Loren] Brichter, and the things he touch get instant echo in the iOS chamber. Would The Magazine had been such a success if I had built it? No way. His personal echo chamber made that happen. (Note that I am not complaining in the least about his ability to do this. If anything I’m a little jealous.)

I’ve heard things like this a lot, but I think you’d be surprised at the reality.

A very popular article on this site might get 50,000 hits. Most get more like 20,000. Sponsors have reported getting 1,500–2,500 clickthroughs on sponsored link-posts.

In the App Store, I’m competing with hundreds of thousands of other developers for the attention and money of hundreds of millions of customers, most of whom don’t know or care who I am.

I released a new app a few weeks ago. Here’s its sales graph:

To date, I’ve invested about two weeks of time into Bugshot and it has made a total of $3,531.89. That’s not bad at all, but it’s not going to go very far, especially considering that the average for the last 5 days is just $47 per day, and the trend is clearly falling quickly.

Bugshot got great press, but that’s also most of the press that it’s ever going to get.

You can see the sales bump on July 22 when I invested another few days into it, polishing it more and adding two major features (Blur and “Open In…”). But you can also see that the bump was small and temporary, and further investment in any major features is probably not a responsible use of my time.

My audience gives me an advantage on day one, and that’s certainly significant. But after that, I’m in the same boat as everyone else.¹

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Minor Threat frontman Ian MacKaye says he’s absolutely fine with Urban Outfitters selling $28 T-shirts featuring his former band’s logo. Turns out that, unlike the Forever 21 shirt from 2009, the current model is legit and licensed. Because so many Minor Threat bootlegs had been popping up in the marketplace, MacKaye and Co. hired California-based Tsurt to produce and oversee sales of some T-shirts for the band. Though MacKaye is careful to clarify to the Washington City Paper that Dischord “doesn’t make T-shirts,” he said hiring Tsurt lets him spend his valuable time doing other things besides tracking down bootleggers, something he says is “a complete waste of time.”

MacKaye goes on to say that he doesn’t “give a fuck about T-shirts” and that hiring a company wasn’t a “political thing” for him. He says he’s aware of Urban Outfitters’ questionable ethics and absolutely ...

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Cottonwood, Idaho is home to Dog Bark Park Inn, a bed and breakfast-style guesthouse shaped like a giant beagle. Its unique shape, created by its wood-carving owners Dennis and Frances, is reminiscent of roadside tourist attractions from early car travel days. The artistic couple makes and sells chainsaw sculptures on site and the “World’s Biggest Beagle” guesthouse can be reserved for up to 4 people from April 1st to October 31st.

images via Dog Bark Park Inn

via Faith is Torment

“Bowties are cool now, even for your cat.”

Dayton, Ohio-based print designer Crystal Dennis of the Real Art creative studio made a wonderful “Doctor Meow” collection of bow ties for cats that are each inspired by the BBC sci-fi television series Doctor Who. They are available to purchase online at Real Mart.

Question for artist: Does your product have a fun story behind it? If so, what is it?

Answer: The 11th Doctor Who is a bowtie-wearing Time Lord from Gallifrey. If he’s getting flack on his style choices he’s like, “What? Bowties are cool!” (…or a Stetson, or a fez).

Here is a cute hairless cat, named Applesauce, wearing a “Doctor Meow” bow tie:

images via Real Mart

Thanks Mary Page!

Like a chronic yet mysterious pathological affliction—say, one that causes auditory hallucinations in which a snarky Brit pretends to be American and plays the blues—Hugh Laurie has returned to U.S. shores. He won’t be reprising his titular role as the irascible main character of House, though. He’ll be doing that playing-the-blues thing, which he's done on record and also sometimes on House.

Laurie will be touring the U.S. and Canada with his group The Copper Bottom Band in support of his sophomore blues album, Didn’t It Rain. The disc comes out August 6 and will feature renditions of classics by everyone from Jellyroll Morton to Dr. John (sadly, though, no cover of “Rockin Pneumonia And The Boogie Woogie Flu”). Tour dates are below.

Oct. 13—Schermerhorn Symphony Center—Nashville, Tennessee
Oct. 15—Pantages Theatre—Minneapolis, Minnesota           
Oct. 16—Vic Theatre—Chicago, Illinois ...

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Daily Mail

The moment George Zimmerman was pulled over with a GUN and told officers ... Daily Mail Dash-cam footage emerged today showing the moment that George Zimmerman was pulled over by a police officer in Texas for speeding and told them he was carrying a gun. Just over two weeks since his dramatic acquittal for the murder of Trayvon Martin, ... Verdict begs: What happened to civility?Springfield News-Leader all 298 news articles »

Tasul, a polar bear who lives at the Oregon Zoo, wears a special collar equipped with an accelerometer as part of a research project with the U.S. Geological Survey. The collar allows researchers to study how Tasul’s behavior coincides with accelerometer readings so USGS can study polar bears in the wild with a similar device. Oregon Zoo has also outfitted the collar with a Go Pro camera to provide unique video from the view of a polar bear.

video via Oregon Zoo

via Viral Viral Videos

Beat-'em-ups have been through a bit of a rough patch lately. The arcade-style brawler suffered a decline that coincided with the downfall of arcades themselves, and aside from standout efforts like Castle Crashers and Double Dragon Neon, little has been done in recent years to progress or revitalize the genre.

Vanillaware breathes new life into a worthwhile but rarely attempted style of gameplay with Dragon's Crown, a brilliantly executed tribute to arcade gaming's past that offers up an endlessly satisfying loop of questing, looting, and character progression.

In comparison to its Vanillaware-developed predecessors Odin Sphere and Muramasa: The Demon Blade, Dragon's Crown forgoes in-depth RPG elements in favor of traditional beat-em-up gameplay. Combat in Dragon's Crown is fluid, satisfying, and intense, and represents a major, necessary evolution of the style introduced in Capcom's Dungeons & Dragons series.

Continue reading Dragon's Crown review: King of brawlers

Dragon's Crown review: King of brawlers originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 31 Jul 2013 15:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Last week, after the Nexus 7 launch event in San Francisco, Sundar Pichai of Google, head of both the Android and Chrome teams, dropped a particularly interesting aside into one of his comments to the assembled press: “Our goal is to put computing everywhere.”

That’s a subtle but important additional goal for a company that is explicitly built to “organize the world’s information.” It indicates, among other things, that creating hardware, or at least partnering with companies that do, is now an essential part of gathering, processing and distributing that information.

In other words, Google is a company that is already well aware that to survive the coming decade, it must outgrow the web.

Multiplying the number of microchips in our lives

Pichai was answering a question about whether or not Google would ever create a super-phone that could replace a desktop PC, like Ubuntu’s Edge. And it was clear from his answer, not to mention the presentation that had just concluded, which included Google’s new Nexus 7 tablet and the Chromecast smart television device, that Google is pushing in the opposite direction: getting microprocessors into any place they might possibly be useful.

Google CEO Larry Page, who has made great strides in recent years in terms of focusing Google on just a handful of core projects, is clearly also pushing for the company to move further into making hardware. Here’s what he said about it on the company’s most recent earnings call:

I think it’s always a mistake to assume that technology will be static. So, I think certainly over the long term, we’re going to have new kinds of devices and ways of interacting with computing and the Internet.

We’re obviously excited about Google Glass and new ways of interacting with hardware and new types of hardware. With any technological change you probably overestimate the short-term and underestimate the long-term. So, I think ou—we’re really excited about making those investments and making sure we’re positioned to the future.

Prototyping an internet of things

Now that Google’s Android mobile operating system is in at least one example of practically every “embedded” device on the market, it’s becoming the default operating system for the “Internet of Things,” which refers to a future in which all of our devices have the computing brains to sense, communicate and even interact with their environments.

“We used to make the joke that people could build refrigerators with Android in it, and then it happened,” says Hiroshi Lockheimer, head of Android engineering at Google.

Lockheimer says that Android engineers at Google don’t focus on embedded devices, but because Android is open source and any other company can use it, many repurpose it for that. That translates into a huge amount of free engineering talent that is constantly working to make Android better, fix bugs and adapt it to new gadgets. That means contributions of code from programmers outside Google, as well as a much larger base of engineers who are familiar with Android, says Lockheimer, which leads to even more Android-powered devices.

Google still makes nine out of every ten of its dollars of revenue from advertisements it places alongside our search results and emails, but the increasing visibility and influence of Google’s Android team, which now includes both hardware and software engineers, shows how far the company has come, and how it’s shaping a future in which data flows into and out of Google’s hive mind from devices. Those include Google Glass and sensor-studded personal location devices, which are alien to our current conception of personal computing.

Interceptor Entertainment's bang-up job of recreating Rise of the Triad for the modern era unavoidably highlights some of the original's flaws, and serves as a stark reminder that certain relics just can't live up to our warm, fuzzy memories.

Rise of the Triad starts off fabulously well. A stylized comic book opening introduces us to the five members of H.U.N.T. - the High-risk United Nations Task force - after which we're dropped into a top-down map of San Nicolas, an island that's been taken over by a mysterious organization known only as the Triad. The name of the game: Infiltrate, investigate and blast the holy hell out of everything that moves.

Continue reading Rise of the Triad review: Everything old is still old

Rise of the Triad review: Everything old is still old originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 31 Jul 2013 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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