Friday 30 December 2011

Russia submerges nuclear submarine to douse blaze

Linguagroover Richard Dixon
Kim Jong Un rounds off period of official mourning in North Korea and underlines change of direction with release of Morrissey covers album

HA!

Egypt police raid offices of human rights groups in Cairo

2011 in review

28c3: How governments have tried to block Tor

Download high quality version: http://bit.ly/v04Z25
Description: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/events/4800.en.html
Jacob Appelbaum, Roger Dingledine: How governments have tried to block Tor
Iran blocked Tor handshakes using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) in January 2011 and September 2011. Bluecoat tested out a Tor handshake filter in Syria in June 2011. China has been harvesting and blocking IP addresses for both public Tor relays and private Tor bridges for years.

State of the arms race between repressive governments and anti - censorship/surveillance Tor technology (and why American companies are on the repressive governments' side)

???

Via

Up And Down Year For Cable News

Mikhail Gorbachev: Is the World Really Safer Without the Soviet Union?

HA!

(Click to enlarge)

Via

ggreenwald Glenn Greenwald
Congrats to the telecoms in having courts recognize the full-scale lawbreaking amnesty they bought from both parties http://t.co/lrp1JNs8

Orangutans 'could video chat' between zoos via iPads

Ker-pow! Women kick back against comic-book sexism

The 10 Most Sampled James Brown Songs

Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker's 1903 lulz

Late one June afternoon in 1903 a hush fell across an expectant audience in the Royal Institution's celebrated lecture theatre in London. Before the crowd, the physicist John Ambrose Fleming was adjusting arcane apparatus as he prepared to demonstrate an emerging technological wonder: a long-range wireless communication system developed by his boss, the Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi. The aim was to showcase publicly for the first time that Morse code messages could be sent wirelessly over long distances. Around 300 miles away, Marconi was preparing to send a signal to London from a clifftop station in Poldhu, Cornwall, UK.

Yet before the demonstration could begin, the apparatus in the lecture theatre began to tap out a message. At first, it spelled out just one word repeated over and over. Then it changed into a facetious poem accusing Marconi of "diddling the public". Their demonstration had been hacked - and this was more than 100 years before the mischief playing out on the internet today. Who was the Royal Institution hacker? How did the cheeky messages get there? And why?

It had all started in 1887 when Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of the electromagnetic waves predicted by James Clerk Maxwell in 1865. Discharging a capacitor into two separated electrodes, Hertz ionised the air in the gap between them, creating a spark. Miraculously, another spark zipped between two electrodes a few metres away: an electromagnetic wave from the first spark had induced a current between the second electrode pair. It meant long and short bursts of energy - "Hertzian waves" - could be broadcast to represent the dots and dashes of Morse code. Wireless telegraphy was born, and Marconi and his company were at the vanguard. Marconi claimed that his wireless messages could be sent privately over great distances. "I can tune my instruments so that no other instrument that is not similarly tuned can tap my messages," Marconi boasted to London's St James Gazette in February 1903...

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