Saturday 23 March 2013
life in the biq house or cold water flat
The BIQ experiment represents only one of several innovative designs set to debut in the Hamburg neighbourhood Wilhelmsburg along the wharves. It’s pretty neat that this new concept of reducing one’s ecological footprint premieres together with a calendar of holidays celebrating sustainability and the environment, and reminding us how each of us can help, in big and in modest ways.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ฑ, ๐ก, environment, Wikipedia
recall-roster
Der Spiegel’s International Desk reports that back in late 2012, an anonymous researcher set out to take a roll-call, a secret census of the public internet worldwide.
After establishing dialogues with some 450, 000 server farms, the hacker’s creation, named Carna Botnet (after the Roman goddess of health, internal organs, hinges and stoops) was able to propagate itself further and shake hands with some 2.3 billion active internet protocol addresses. This ease of access was quite surprising and the census project turned unexpectedly into an industry warning about the robustness of security and systemic vulnerabilities. There probably will not be another such screen-capture, snapshot of the internet’s denizens but it was nonetheless exhilarating to be included in something benign that showed how fast the on-line world is growing.
catagories: ๐ฅธ, networking and blogging
Friday 22 March 2013
brinksmanship or no quarter
On the surface of things, the evolving situation in Cyprus’ finances does not seem to make complete sense. There was originally a strange sort stoical solidarity as the idea of levying a deposit tax as collateral against the Euro-Group’s line of credit from the island’s government but public outrage and fears of precipitating such seizures ultimately led to the collapse in negotiations. Presently, the Cypriots look poised to renege on the terms of this rescue package, and the EU looks willing to cut its losses, recognizing the grave realities of a marshal-economy. The transformation was quick, from darling of people seeking out a safe berth for the money to anathema, over-exposed—though fundamentally, the shenanigans were no different than what when on in other crisis lands, or for that matter, what is still tolerable, attractive about other safe harbours, like Luxembourg or the Channel Islands.
catagories: ๐จ๐พ, ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐ฌ๐ท, ๐ฎ๐ธ, ๐ท๐บ, ๐น๐ท, ๐, ๐ง , economic policy, environment, foreign policy, labour
Thursday 21 March 2013
an embarrassment of riches
catagories: lifestyle, technology and innovation
Wednesday 20 March 2013
jail-break, jail-bait
While most conversations about the architecture of Digital Rights Management (DRM, sometimes referred to as Digital Restriction Management) tend to focus the on fact that such platforms are an unwieldy punishment, which does not deter piracy, yields a bunch of play-devices that become quickly incompatible and even stifles creativity.