burds: just a fun little cleanse—cartoony birds hopping about—via Waxy
shred, white and blue: the totally normal and perfectly legal ways the White House handled official records
neft daลlarฤฑ: a decaying offshore oil platform in the middle of the Caspian Sea
the thoughtful spot: the Phrontistery (ฯฯฮฟฮฝฯฮนฯฯฮฎฯฮนฮฟฮฝ, Greek for the thinking place) catalogues a treasury of rare and obscure words—via Kottke
memphis milano: iconic design studio of Ettore Sottsass (previously) acquired by Italian furniture company
earn it act: controversial bill restricting encryption—presented as an anti-trafficking and child safety initiative (see also) passes committee in the US Senate
quantitative easing: lampooning practises that exacerbate inflation and speculation, an artist in Kuala Lumpur opens Memebank
As Slashdot reports, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, Meta, is threatening to pull core services out of Europe altogether if EU privacy laws—including GDPR which has been enforceable for years now—prevent the company from sharing European user data with domestic operations. Good riddance to bad rubbish—I hope that that’s a promise that the anti-social media platform can deliver on. We hope regulators do not relent and make concessions to the platform.
Via Web Curios (definitely lot’s more to check out there), we are introduced to a project by Molly Whitewho curates articles and discussion threads that illustrate the dark side of tech utopian-thinking and how we can’t just code our way to equality and out of an environmental crisis that is exacerbated by Ponzi schemes and chasing that greater fool. There are some choice headlines about corporate malfeasance, lack of disclosure and how riots and disruptions to the internet in Kazakhstan (to quash the coordination of said protests) reveal the extent of bitcoin mining occurring there, subsidised and underwritten by the government’s policy of producing cheap fuel from the dirtiest sources.
Slated to be released on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the original publication of nineteen eighty-four on 8 June 2023 and greenlit by the estate of George Orwell, the dystopian, cautionary tale will be retold from the perspective of Julia, Winston Smith’s erstwhile subversive, thoughtcriminal, inculcated to the Party at a young age and avid member of the Junior Anti-Sex League and the Two Minutes Hate directed against those who would betray the revolution but who quickly redirected her fervour to rebellion, though knowing they will eventually be caught and betray one another’s confidence.
uap: an interview with former US DoD head of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Programme says that “Tic-Tac” craft have been observed by the navy for decades
Buried within the pared down yet still massive and significant US Infrastructure Bill is a rider that encourages in the pursuit of public safety the tagging of pedestrians and bicycles with transponder beacons so as to make it easier for autonomous vehicles from running them over—thereby, like the crime of jaywalking, shifting the responsibility away from the manufacturers to public and shared spaces.
Via Things Magazine, we are presented with this quite dystopian and invasive catalogue of playthings with the hallmark of being highly addictive by design following the form of manipulation. Age-inappropriate, there’s data-hungry aggregate Pocket Troll, Fishing for Likes and a grab-bag of Mystery Friends to be foisted on all and sundry, aged nine to ninety-nine.
heir apparent: after over a century, Russia hosts a royal wedding for a member of the Romanoff family
9m²:a luxury apartment in Tokyo that makes very efficient use of space—at more than twice the size, my work-week flat feels rather sprawling and and ilunder-utilised
pandora’s box: a trove of leaked records, following on from the Panama papers shows how the wealthy and connected hide their riches
Last in the line of a spy, crime adventure syndicate that began in 1960 with Danger Man, The Prisoner, The Avengers and The Saint, the charismatic action-comedy vehicle of Tony Curtis and Roger Moore was first simulcast on ITV and ABC to UK and US audiences on this day in 1971. Though considered a crowning, ambitious and concluding series and played well in foreign franchises, dubbed as Dos Tipos Audaces (Two Bold Characters in South American markets), Minden Lรฉben Kรฉt Kanรกl (Two Spoons in Every Soup in Hungary), Snobbar som Jobbar (Snobs on the Job in Sweden), Amicalement Vรดtre in French-speaking areas (Amicably Yours) and Die Zwei in the Deutschsprachrรคume (one of the best titled cinematic adaptations The Sum of All Fears is plaintively called simply Der Anschlag, The Attack in German) the production of Baron Lew Grade (also behind the series of Supermarionation shows) about two individuals from starkly different backgrounds that have been reluctantly teamed together to solve international cases that the authorities cannot disappointed domestic viewers and was cancelled after one albeit complete season. The opening title sequence (see also) features music by John Berry.
Via the always brilliant Things Magazine, we quite enjoyed this look into this demonstration project with automotive camouflage (see previously, see also) not necessarily meant to conceal but rather confuse and overwhelm the proliferation of prying eyes, perhaps containing a hidden QR code to throw ubiquitous spyware off the trail and send it down the garden path. Prior to the ubiquity of spy technology, the article also contains an interesting aside regarding how auto manufacturers first explored this type of detailing in order to combat corporate espionage when sleuthing photographers tried to capture images of road-testing prototype vehicles before their R&D was ready for market and perhaps steal their design—these concept cars out in the wild published under the caption, catagory Erlkรถnige (with the less poetic English translation, development mule) after the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ballad about the Fairy King with the opening line Wer reitet so spat durch Nacht und Wind—Who rides so late through night and wind? to refer to the drivers who thought they were being stealthy when they were just rather conspicuous.
While best known for inventing the electronic musical instrument the theremin, Lรฉon Theremin also designed one of the first bugging devices to passively transmit audio signals. A forerunner to RFID (radio-frequency identification) chips used in inventory control and as anti-shoplifting technology, the so called Thing (the first of its kind) or the Endovibrator (ะญะฝะดะพะฒะธะฑัะฐ́ัะพั) was embedded in a carved wooden seal presented to the ambassador of the US diplomatic mission to the Soviet Union by the Young Pioneer organisation (see also) as a gesture of friendship on this day in 1945, shortly before the end of World War II. Ingeniously, a small length of antenna requiring no external power source would vibrate, picking up voices in the embassy office and could be demodulated—without risk of detection by a receiver tuned to the right station.
Unnoticed for nearly seven years until under the tenure of George F. Kennan, the Thing was only discovered by accident with a radio operator at the neighbouring British compound picking up feedback. The existence of such bugging capabilities was not disclosed to the public until 1960, during an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council convened after a US spy plane had been shot down over Soviet territory.
sky mall: the inevitable fate of all platforms, selling botware to other bots in glossy format—via Things Magazine plus an update on the Metabolist capsule hotel of Kisho Kurokawa
Via JWZ and ourselves just seeing the Y in the corporate logo for the first time, we are rather enjoying this show of corporate solidarity from villainous, fictitious companies including Umbrella Corporation, Tyrell and Cyberdyne Systems, makers of Skynet. No official statements yet from their real world counterparts regarding Pride Month and often fleeting and hollow-ringing shows of support irrespective of however a person might identify themselves or whatever association is foisted on them.
Via Waxy, taking some numbingly tedious (low-stakes) annual training and always failing to recall the difference between nuanced jargon—plus not paying close attention to the presentation before the post-test, I’ve encountered such flash cards and drills that promise the right answers if one types in the question verbatim but I never expected peers to help out one another (eyes on your own test) with the same crib notes for the safety and security of nuclear armaments. Responsibly redacted in the exposรฉ, the practises and protocols of US weapons stockpiles overseas were breached through these tutorials, and while the existence of this forward operating bases and their host nations was somewhat of an open secret, spillage of alert procedures, security norms and panic words strikes as pretty grave and just as embarrassing as being outed by one’s pedometer.
Released on this this day in cinemas in 1995, the Keanu Reeves and Dolph Lundgren dystopian science-fiction adaptation of the eponymous William Ford Gibson cyberpunk novel, the film takes place in 2021 with global population deeply and irretrievably engaged with an augmented reality internet which has a debilitating long-term effect called “nervous attenuation syndrome” (NAS) and transfer and transmission of data is closely controlled by mega-corporations who enforce their hegemony through the mafia.
Reeves’ character is a mnemonic courier discreetly transports data, avoiding traffic on the worldwide web, with an implant in his brain, and is entrusted with the safekeeping and eventually uploading into the public domain documents that reveal the corporations’ connections with organised crime and the computer virus that will return power and autonomy to the people, teaming up with the Lo-Teks under the leadership of J-Bone, played by Ice-T, a mysterious female projection of an omnipresent digital assistant and a genetically enhanced dolphin with abilities to break any encryption.
property values: Trump family accounting firm drops them as a client, disavows the validity of a decade’s worth of business assessments
