Monday, 10 October 2011
The Psychogeography of Loose Associations
Perhaps the most prominent characteristic of psychogeography is the activity of walking. The act of walking is an urban affair, and in cities that are increasingly hostile to pedestrians, walking tends to become a subversive act.
The psychogeographer is a “non-scientific researcher” who encounters the urban landscape through aimless drifting, experiencing the effects of geographical settings ignored by city maps, and often documenting these processes using film, photography, script writing, or tape. In this way, the wanderer becomes alert to the metaphors, visual rhymes, coincidences, analogies, and changing moods of the street.
The Cairo Psychogeographical Society was formed in 1989. It is an independent collective of ever changing members. Unlike official scientific or cultural entities, whether governmental or non-governmental, the Cairo Psychogeographical Society is not networked, nor does it communicate with other research centers dealing with architecture, urban planning, or geography at large. Neither is it an organization that receives financial support from development funds, commercial companies, or individuals.
The Society also does not announce its existence publicly by any means.
This extreme isolation is partly due to the criticisms the Society received regularly in conferences as well as in the press.
Critics constantly attack the Society for “a lack of validity due to its inability to produce any scientific discussion or actual discoveries.”
A more severe criticism states that “the so called ‘society’ is a collective of rich, bored, leisurely hobbyists who crave the construction of their own myths — myths that in the end only satisfy the members’ own vanity and ambitions for infamy...”
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How NOT to redact a PDF - Military radar secrets spilled
As Naked Security has explained before, if you're an organisation that is making public an internal document, you best make sure that you have deleted or blacked out any personal, confidential or actionable information.
The act of obscuring the sensitive information is known as "redaction", and it needs to be done properly if you want to keep something secret.
For instance, simply putting black text on a black background does not stop people from cutting-and-pasting the contents.
When a 22 page PDF document called "Air Defence And Air Traffic Systems Radar Transportation Study – Part 2" was published on a parliamentary website, it was hoped that its more sensitive contents would be properly redacted.But, as the Daily Star reports, although there were sections "blacked out", the contents could easily be recovered simply by cutting-and-pasting.
Last time the MOD made this mistake it was related to nuclear submarine secrets, one hopes that they have learnt their lesson by now and provided an easy-to-understand guide for staff on how to properly redact documents.
If you want to learn how to properly redact Adobe PDF files, here's a good guide describing how to do it with Acrobat X Pro.
Remember that simply marking text will not actually remove it from your sensitive PDFs. You also have to apply redactions!
Graham Cluley @'naked security'
Mental Health
World Mental Health Day: 10 October 2011
World Mental Health Day raises public awareness about mental health issues. This year the theme is "Investing in mental health". Financial and human resources allocated for mental health are inadequate especially in low resource countries. The majority of low- and middle-income countries spend less than 2% of their health budget on mental health.- Read more about World Mental Health Day
- Secretary-General's message
pdf, 19kb - Arabic
pdf, 59kb - Chinese
pdf, 89kb - French
pdf, 21kb - Russian
pdf, 127kb - Spanish
pdf, 15kb
dangerroom Danger Room
Could the Predator drone virus be the military's own doing? bit.ly/oazhST // Not the first person I've heard float this theory.
Sunday, 9 October 2011
Rep. Peter King (R-NY): Do Not Allow Any Legitimacy For Wall Street Protests, Or It Will Be Like 1960s Again
Speaking with right-wing radio show host Laura Ingraham on Friday, Rep. Peter King (R-NY), the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, blasted the media for providing fair coverage to the Occupy Wall Street protests. “They have no sense of purpose other than a basically anti-American tone,” he said. King also explained that he is “old enough to remember what happened in the 1960s when the left-wing took to the streets and somehow the media glorified them and it ended up shaping policy.” He added, “We can’t allow that to happen.”
King is right that the 99 Percent Movement, with “occupation” actions from Sacramento to New York City and beyond, mirrors the broad-based protest movements of the 1960s. Back then, millions of American engaged in street protests which eventually led to the end of legal racial segregation, the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, as well as other successful programs to reduce the level of poverty and human suffering in America. The same protest movement King fears also led to the development of the Environmental Protection Agency, the birth of the mainstream feminist and gay rights movement, and the end of the wars in Indochina.
It might seem natural that King is an opponent of the 99 Percent Movement. He has spent much of his career in Congress placing the corporate interest over the public interest. For instance, King made a high-stakes legislative move to block health benefits for the rescue workers who developed cancer as a result of their heroic work during after the 9/11 terror attacks. He blocked the money because it was paid for by ending certain tax loopholes for foreign corporations. Indeed, like many of his GOP colleagues, King placed the foreign wealthy one percent over the people who risked their lives rescuing people at the World Trade Center.
Lee Fang @'ThinkProgress'
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