Wednesday 18 September 2013
shutter-bug
Monday 16 September 2013
biometrics or cutting off your nose to spite your face
Not long ago, a group of hacktivistas requisitioned the fingerprints of a high ranking German minister from a water glass in order to illustrate inherent flaws in the personal security prescription that the minister was championing.
The lifted prints were circulated and used in this experiment for impersonation, showing that any element of biometric data released into the wilds (that's why it proves useful for police in forensics) is prone for use and abuse and not such an advisable method for locking and unlocking personal troves. Of course, passwords not generally circulated are prone to other methods, but owning that false-sense of security is an expensive proposition. For the interim, I can envision people doffing and donning their shoes and socks for verification-purposes. There are of course methods to suppress ne'er-do-wells but I wonder with thieves wearing charm necklaces of trophy thumbs and toes if the sort of safety that is being sold to us is possible.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ก, ๐ฅธ, networking and blogging
mmm mmm mmm mmm or tip of the tongue
As part of its weekly digest of innovative and new ideas, the excellent blog Brain Pickings features an interesting review of a new work from Clive Thompson about how technology are collaborating in positive ways to augment how we remember, learn and triangulate novel and familiar concepts. The book, “Smarter than You Think: How Technology is Changing our Minds for the Better,” smartly covers a lot of emergent and age-old praises and cautions and is by no means swerving to avoid the counter-argument or discussion, neither a retreat into apologies for new standards of etiquette and work-ethics nor a luddite bemoaning short attention-spans and information overload, but rather presents an extended thesis that certain aspects of on-line resources can prove to be transcending, proving one knows how these tools function.
catagories: ๐, ๐ง , networking and blogging, philosophy, technology and innovation
Sunday 15 September 2013
is there in truth no beauty?
Artist Juan Ortiz gives the original Star Trek series the brilliant treatment of re-imaging each of the the eighty episodes in classic movie-poster-form. At the link, one can purchase the collection and browse images. Though the title of individual shows might escape even the greatest and most-studied of fans, all are rife with iconic images that certainly take well to one of the pulp but defining art forms of contemporary (retro) times. Though maybe not all episodes of nostalgic television could be re-imagined as such, do you have memorable viewing experiences, either first- or second-hand that ought to be committed to this very portrayal, like your neighbours joining your parents to watch the finale of M*A*S*H*, Tatort or The Outer Limits?
laissez-faire is everywhere
There were several stories in circulation this week, echoing from many corners of the world and many times without deference to this being the fifth anniversary of the collapse of the too-big-to-fail financial house whose downfall placed economics internationally in chaos, that proclaimed real and shadow markets to be fully recovered and no longer in danger of relapse.
catagories: ๐ช๐บ, America, economic policy, labour
Saturday 14 September 2013
suffrage
The citizens of Bavaria will go and cast their votes for state elections on this Sunday, and I discovered, after appreciating the collusion of events, like the anticipation of the beginning of Oktoberfest, which celebrates into October starting on next Saturday, that state governments do have some discretion in setting the dates for election day—no sooner than 59 weeks before and no later than 62 weeks after the last cycle of four years hence.
And though there was license to place balloting the morning after the bacchanalia, officials put it strategically a week prior to federal elections. There is not the same kind of flexibility in campaigning in the United States, whose moment of decision, by law, falls on the day after the first Monday in November—due to the agrarian nature of the early US and notwithstanding the provisos of early- and absentee-voting. That German federal elections (and neighbouring Hessen's state elections also) come maybe while nursing a hang-over is quite another matter and maybe too by design. Coincidences of the calendar are certainly not always politically advantageous but does make one wonder when it came to the legal convention—like US presidential elections being always (except in the rare case of a year equally divisible by 400) on leap-years or during years of a summer Olympiad—locust plagues, perhaps, in addition to whatever sideshows can be introduced. I wonder if such precedents were considered.
catagories: ⚖️, ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐บ๐ธ, holidays and observances
Friday 13 September 2013
austausch, b-gosh
Long had European Union Commissioner for Internal Affairs Malmstrรถm held her tongue over the on-going revelations of the breadth and depth of indiscriminate intelligence gathering on the part of the US—not, I think, out of a lack of concern or zeal but rather to not bait controversy prematurely, but digesting the reported reach of the spying, suggested that the lack of transparency could lead to the EU's withdrawal from the SWIFTBanking Treaty with the United States.
catagories: ๐ช๐บ, ๐ฅธ, America, economic policy