Group items tagged

Well, it was only a matter of time: first, there were robot swarms on the ground. Then, there were robot swarms in the air. And now, we've got robot swarms taking over a swimming pool. Run for the hills! Or really, you'll probably be fine running for any sort of dry land if you want to escape this swarm of robotic boats. But why would you want to do that? It's not like they're part of some sort of DARPA project that will one day take over the world or something. Nope, definitely nothing like that.

"Passwords control your life. From accessing work email and stock prices on the go to checking a grocery store shopping list, passwords have become the primary source of identifying who you are. They are arguably more important than your driver's license. But with that ubiquity comes risk - this tiny, yet powerful device contains enough information to expose your financial or health records and other personal details. From an enterprise perspective, the risks are just as great, if not greater."

Alpha One Labs co-founder Sean Auriti and a group of like-minded hackers have launched a campaign to build Hackert0wn, a Brooklyn hackerspace the likes of which the world has never seen. As planned, Hackert0wn will be an  entire hacker ecosystem complete with retail shops stocked with spare parts, sleeping pods, a gym that feeds power back into the building, a co-working space, private offices, a cafe with a coffee dispensing robot, a dumpling shop, an aquaponic farm that raises fish and produce for nearby residents and restaurants, and a state-of-the art CNC machine shop. Oh, and all the buildings will be built out of recycled shipping containers.

In a stunning move, on March 16, 2012, Barack Obama signed an Executive Order stating that the President and his specifically designated Secretaries now have the authority to commandeer all domestic U.S. resources including food and water. The EO also states that the President and his Secretaries have the authority to seize all transportation, energy, and infrastructure inside the United States as well as forcibly induct/draft American citizens into the military. The EO also contains a vague reference in regards to harnessing American citizens to fulfill "labor requirements" for the purposes of national defense.

Inside NYU art professor David Darts' black metal lunchbox, painted with a white skull and crossbones, is the PirateBox - a tiny Linux server, a wireless router, and a battery. Turn the PirateBox on and you have a self-contained mobile communications and file-sharing device, whereby those in the vicinity can upload and download files securely and anonymously. (See this 2011 Ars Technica story for photos and details.) Built with free and open source software and openly licensed itself, the PirateBox has inspired a number of other projects, including Alan Levine's Storybox and now Jason Griffey's LibraryBox.

Sergei Skorobogatov, a postdoc in the Security Group at the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge has written up claims that reprogammable microchips from China contained secret back-doors that can be used to covertly insert code:

After reading your recent post, I thought you might find this interesting - especially the scanned interview that is included at the bottom of the posting. It's an old OMNI interview with Walter Stewart that was the first thing I read (at a young and impressionable age ;) about the prevalence of errors, fraud and cheating in science, the institutional barriers to tackling it, the often high personal costs to whistleblowers, the difficulty of accessing scientific data to repeat published analyses, and the surprisingly negative attitude towards criticism within scientific communities. Highly recommended entertaining reading - with some good examples of scientific investigations into implausible effects. The post itself contains the info I once dug up about what happened to him later - he seems like an interesting and very determined guy: when the NIH tried to stop him from investigating scientific errors and fraud he went on a hunger strike.