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.

flicker-fusion threshhold

A laboratory at the University of Tokyo is developing some amazing dynamic projection mapping technology that can beam any image onto any surface and adjust to seamlessly match and correspond to any movement at a rate of thousand frames per second. We’ve encountered this sort of presentation in a mostly virtual environment beforehand (or in a purely augmented reality) but never one that quite outstripped the limits of our perception so well. What sort of applications can you imagine? See video demonstrations courtesy of Laughing Squid.

flight-path or airportraits

I’ve been admiring these sleek composite images of planes taking off and landing from airports from photographer Mike Kelley.
Of course the artist had to camp at each location for a few days to amass the right shots, angles and approaches—though probably not all that long considering the volume of air-traffic, and I notice that one of his arrangements captures a milieu that’s very familiar as I drive past the Frankfurt Flughafen on the Autobahn twice a week. Sometimes, by ones and twos only though, a jet will pass overhead and seem incredibly close and looming but I never try to capture that moment, as I don’t need any further distractions while driving. One of these days, I’ll figure out how to safely perch myself in the field or on the overpass. Read more about Kelley’s technique and travels on Colossal.

indented writing

Much to everyone’s dismay, a blind novelist in Dorset who commits her to ink and paper to later have them transcribed had a creative spurt that ran for twenty-six pages before realising her pen had run dry.
I’m sure the moment after the experience of hitting “save” rather than “save as” does not begin to frame that feeling of love’s labour lost, but the solution was rather an elegant and befittingly creative one. Her friends and family had the wherewithal to turn to the local police office for help and the forensics team using a technique called electrostatic detection were able to recover the text from the impressions of the indented writing that her inkless pen left on the page.

pharmacopoea

As we face a medical crisis that threatens to return health care to pre-industrial levels, researchers have been scouring the natural world for novel compounds that have not yet been overcome by anti-microbial resistance (here, read about how that dragnet might be extended with citizen science)—as even the most potent in our limited quiver of antibiotics have been vanquished due to our abuse and overuse. Scientists and care-takers in Australia have discovered that the milk of Tasmanian devils have six-fold the immunity boosters of human milk and can combat some of the most dread pathogens that linger in what ought to be the cleanest of places. I wonder if these carnivorous marsupials might one day be our salvation and it really punctuates the fact that we diminish any part and parcel of Nature at our peril, since who knows what’s already been lost.