Saturday, 8 October 2011

The deathly pallor, the skeletal stance, the twangy voice, the love of good whiskey and bad women—it's eerie to look at Hank Williams III without seeing this apparition of his legendary grandfather. Elizabeth Gilbert goes on the road with Nashville's prodigal grandson and witnesses his ascent to stardom and his descent into despair.
HERE

Brion Gysin's walk (1966)

HERE

Recording on a Wire

Abstract
Today magnetic recording is used in audio and video cassette recorders, and computer disk drives. Did you know that you can also use an electromagnet to record and play back from a steel wire? In fact, this is how magnetic recording got started. This project shows you how to build a simple wire recorder. Objective
The goal of this experiment is to learn about magnetic recording heads by building and testing a wire recorder. You'll investigate the relationship between recording current and playback voltage. Other variables to investigate are the number of turns used in the coil for the recording head, and the speed of the moving wire.
Introduction
Magnetic recording has proven to be a quick, safe, and robust method for storing and retrieving information. From the first voice recordings on Poulsen's wire recorder (Figure 1), to the tape recording machines used by radio stations in the 1940's and 1950's that freed the stations from having to produce all of their programs live, to the modern hard disk drive that can store billions of bits of digital information in an area smaller than a quarter, we can see the application of the fundamental principles of magnetism...

Continue reading

Jason S. Goldberg, Walter Eppler and Tim Rauch @'Science Buddies'

:)

Via

Occupy Wall Street Ignites Political Hackathon

Amelia Marzec, 30, displays her creation called Signal Strength. The hack involves using a device to send peer-to-peer signals between mobile phones, making a traditional network unnecessary and preventing conversations from being surreptitiously monitored

Richard Peppiatt: Journalistic Practice

The devil babies have arrived...(Swanston Street Melbourne)

(Photos: TimN)

Which VPN Providers Really Take Anonymity Seriously?

Last month it became apparent that not all VPN providers live up to their marketing after an alleged member of Lulzsec was tracked down after using a supposedly anonymous service from HideMyAss. We wanted to know which VPN providers take privacy extremely seriously so we asked many of the leading providers two very straightforward questions. Their responses will be of interest to anyone concerned with anonymity issues.
As detailed in yesterday’s article, if a VPN provider carries logs of their users’ activities the chances of them not being able to live up to their claim of offering an anonymous service begins to decrease rapidly.
There are dozens of VPN providers, many of which carry marketing on their web pages which suggests that the anonymity of their subscribers is a top priority. But is it really? Do their privacy policies stand up to scrutiny? We decided to find out.
Over the past two weeks TorrentFreak contacted some of the leading, most-advertised, and most talked about VPN providers in the file-sharing and anonymity space. Rather than trying to decipher what their often-confusing marketing lingo really means, we asked them two direct questions instead:
1. Do you keep ANY logs which would allow you or a 3rd party to match an IP address and a time stamp to a user of your service? If so, exactly what information do you hold?
2. Under what jurisdictions does your company operate and under what exact circumstances will you share the information you hold with a 3rd party?
This article does not attempt to consider the actual quality of service offered by any listed provider, nor does it consider whether any service is good value for money. All we are interested in is this: Do they live up to claims that they provide a 100% anonymous service? So here we go, VPN providers in the file-sharing space first...