extra, extra

As one popular social mediator is making it harder for the publishers of yellow journalism—the click-bait, catchpenny variety which ironically the internet giant fostered and prompted in the first place—makes it harder to gain a purchase within their walled-garden, some outlets are turning to celebrities—some prominent and popular ones with a following and some, well not so much—to shill for them. One can assume that the revenue gained by increased traffic out-weights what they pay for celebrity endorsement, but one can never be sure about this sort of economic model. What do you think? Would you unfriend someone for failing to disclose their financial arrangements so far as sharing what’s newsworthy goes?

legacy software

Corroborated with the US Government Accounting Office’s (GAO) annual report, the Simpsons have been vilified in accusing the Internal Revenue Service (the IRS, the tax authority) of operating the “slowest, punch-cardiest” computer in the government—at least, in one sense.
Those who work for the government have enjoyed heretofore some measure of job-security in knowing that their position is justified because different, entrenched systems cannot communicate with one another and need human translators—or at least water-bearers, but often it’s not the equipment, the hardware that’s wholly off life-cycle. Those laurels can be awarded to the nuclear defence platforms running on the same mainframes since inception and cannot be taken offline for updates and payroll systems. They may not be the most sophisticated but that does not necessarily mean that a system that goes on working for decades, with proper maintenance, ought to be overhauled for the sake of efficiency or intelligibility—since they are impervious to attack (at least the lazy, automated kind) and there might be an element of self-preservation in the programming, like the Voyager space probes exploring the Cosmos as our competent ombudsmen.

portfolio

From an architect disrobed astride a donkey, to mock crime-scenes to a tour of the property from a feline perspective, dezeen showcases some of the most unconventional real estate photographs meant to grab the attention of prospective buyers with jarring details.

bashnet or the hunting of the snark

There’s no evidence that the massive internet outage that did not just affect single platforms but rather significant geographical swathes of access by a coordinated and sophisticated assault on one of the structural switchboards is the work of those that might want to disrupt the US election.

It is, however, certainly a foretaste of how the smartening up of every aspect of our lives might have been not well thought through and how everything from car-pooling, couch-surfing, ordering a la carte, grocery-lists and free-wheeling banking might needn’t have been untethered from one thing to be tied to a conspiracy to make our days seamless and coordinated. If allowed to remain an ad hoc and arguably unnecessary network of interlaced parking meters, baby-monitors, or fast-food tray liners, then we there’s a huge front of least resistance to exploit, and hackers can deploy unlimited foot soldiers in the form of botnets that can’t be easily repelled and countermeasures can be countermanded. If the internet becomes subject to takedown, does the growing reliance on the Internet of Things become a handicap and a liability? What do you think? If this temporary static elicited such a panic, it’s hard to imagine what a true and sustained outage might look like—although, thankfully, we wouldn’t of course be posting live about it.

fall foilage

Of course, the turning leaves of the trees are delightful but so too can be vines and ivy, like this rather spectacularly vibrant creeper with mixed colours that I saw scaling the side of a building.

hug of death or one ring to rule them all

Quaintly and soberingly, we’re reminded that the internet is controlled by seven individuals (plus their understudies) who are stewards of seven keys, meeting quarterly in a ceremony steeped with ritual to verify and update the underlying architecture of the web and ensure that no one could make changes unanimously.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Number (ICANN), which recently absorbed the protective redundancy built into the Domain Name System (DNS) when the US relinquished control earlier in the year, is the unglamourous sounding metonymic monarch that’s accorded all this pomp and circumstance and this level of security. With as de-centralised as the internet is, it’s a little hard to appreciate the role of this obscure office, but it’s akin to the clearing houses that control banking transfers, establishing a naming-conversion and turning strings of numbers into addresses that people can recall and without their oversight, internet sites could experience denial of service attacks where so much traffic is redirected to one site, its servers are overloaded and the site shuts down—the hug of death, or imposter sites could be more easily fabricated to siphon off user data. We owe it to ourselves, I think, to try to understand this strange and inscrutable cabal a little better.

vanity gallery

Recalling once that a professor espoused the opinion that Soviet elements had infiltrated the Peacenik anti-war movements of the Vietnam and this support (both fiduciary and ideologically) was made manifest by the quality and artistry of the protest posters that they carried, I enjoyed this guided tour of the not so secret but still politically covert gallery of the CIA’s art collection. Though the rationale behind the particular patronage of abstract expressionists may be rather tamely selected due to the style of the day of when the headquarters were completed in the late 1950s, we learnt nonetheless that the intelligence agency funded and promoted—unbeknownst to the artists themselves, the likes of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, in additional to the creators of the canvases that adorn the agency corridors.
Who knew? This is leagues better than most patriotic pictures of soaring eagles and flags—with long titles like “Why are there no knock-knock jokes about America? Because Freedom rings, by damnit!” Made available to the viewing public (at last and at least through the power of the internet and thanks to Hyperallergic), there was also an element of propaganda at work, making the statement that America was unbounded by tradition and fostered such licence and even showcased that freedom by loaning artwork out to a sort of travelling exhibition to Iron Curtain countries—despite being inaccessible to the American museum-goers. Be sure to visit this excellent and privileged curation at the link above.