Exploration within the realm of robotic dresses; a spider dress gave birth. A cute little host creature created by fashiontech designer Anouk Wipprecht and hacker & engineer Daniel Schatzmayr – a prototype of a mechanic dress equipped with sensors, indicators and controllers, created with the aim to give more power and ‘psychological thrills’ to the sugar sweet character that performative wearables often have. Sensoric, servo controlled, mechanic, microcontroller based and reacting/attacking upon approach, inspired by the game LIMBO.
source: Anouk Wipprecht | YouTube
Technology
LivingSocial, the daily deals site owned in part by Amazon, has suffered a massive cyber attack on its computer systems, which an email from CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy — just sent to employees and obtained by AllThingsD.com — said resulted in “unauthorized access to some customer data from our servers.”
The breach has impacted 50 million customers of the Washington, D.C.-based company, who will now be required to reset their passwords. All of LivingSocial’s countries across the world appear to have been affected, except in Thailand, Korea, Indonesia and the Philippines, as LivingSocial units Ticketmonster and Ensogo there were on separate systems.
One positive note in a not-so-positive situation: The email sent to employees and customers noted that neither customer credit card nor merchant financial information was accessed in the cyber attack.
This is the latest big data breach in the consumer Internet space, which has seen troublesome incursions into some high-profile companies recently, including Zappos,LinkedIn and Evernote.
When asked for comment on the email, a LivingSocial PR spokesman confirmed the attack and that 50 million customers were impacted.
The attack comes at a tough time for the company, since it has been trying to turn itself around after a downturn across the daily deals landspace. LivingSocial got a large cash infusion recently from investors to help staunch its losses. Amazon owns 29 percent of the company.
source: Kara Swisher | AllThingsD
Brian Knappenberger, the director of the Anonymous documentary We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists, was at the Social Computing Symposium conference at New York University when he heard that Aaron Swartz had passed away. As word began to spread that the young programmer and internet activist had killed himself, Knappenberger realized he was surrounded by people – Gabriella Coleman and Clay Shirky, amongst others – who knew Swartz well. So as a filmmaker, he did what came naturally; he grabbed a camera.
“I felt this sense of loss as we started talking about him and telling stories,” Knappenberger said in an interview with Wired. “I tend to always travel with a camera of some sort, so I just started talking to people.” Today, he launched a Kickstarter to raise $75,000 to fund his feature documentary about Swartz, one of the more magnetic and enigmatic figures in recent internet history. (Check out some of Knappenberger’s early footage in the exclusive clip above.)
The documentary, currently titled The Internet’s Own Boy, will look not just look at the life of the programmer and activist, but at the culture he helped build. At the time Swartz took his own life in January, he was facing federal fraud and hacking charges in Boston for allegedly downloaded millions of academic articles from JSTOR using MIT’s network. But even though only 26 years old at the time of his death, Swartz had become not only a champion of open access to information, but someone who had a hand in everything from RSS to the birth of Creative Commons to the founding of the SOPA/PIPA-fighting Demand Progress. He also founded Infogami, which became part of Reddit. [Disclosure: Reddit, like Wired, is owned by Condé Nast.]
“I feel a real responsibility – his story has touched so many people that I feel like I really want to this justice,” Knappenberger said. “It’s touched people that didn’t really know him all over the world so, [the film] is about exploring why that is, why people knew about him and why he inspires people. … It’s not a memorial of him, either. It’s an investigative approach into what happened and who he was.”
In addition to speaking with Swartz’s family and loved ones – many of whom have already been interviewed – Knappenberger also plans to speak with officials at MIT, which has been reviewing what happened in the JSTOR case since the programmer’s death. Keeping in line with Swartz’s vision, the director said he plans to release the film under a Creative Commons license so that others can build off of what he produces, much like Cory Doctorow does with his books. Because the documentary is being Kickstarter funded instead of funded by a studio it can be released in a variety of ways from DRM-free digital downloads to film festival runs to college screenings.
Even though the film, which Knappenberger would like to complete by the end of the year, will mark the second feature documentary the director has done about internet activists, he said Swartz’s is a much different story than the tale of Anonymous. Not only was his identity well known, Swartz was also very different in that he wanted to work with the system, instead of outside of it.
“Creating We Are Legion, as you can imagine, I met a lot of people who were just done with the system – just ready to throw it out,” Knappenberger said. “Aaron wasn’t one of those people. He wanted to hack it in the best sense. Use his tools to make it better. He didn’t fit into that same mold.”
source: Angela Watercutter | Wired
This is yet another milestone for private space exploration and the effort to keep us reaching for the stars. Privatizing these endeavours is clearly the way to keep costs competitive and will ensure a steady pace of applicable innovations… this being a BIG one! Creating a reusable first stage that isn’t lost at sea after each use is going to save a lot of weight and money. This successful flight of 820 feet paves the way for tests of more than two miles. Onward and upward!
SpaceX’s Grasshopper flies 820 feet, tripling its March 7th leap.
Grasshopper is a 10-story Vertical Takeoff Vertical Landing (VTVL) vehicle that SpaceX has designed to test the technologies needed to return a rocket back to Earth intact. While most rockets are designed to burn up in the atmosphere during reentry, SpaceX’s rockets are being designed to return to the launch pad for a vertical landing.
source: spacexchannel | YouTube
Long before there was the Internet, there was Viewtron!
Viewtron was AT&T’s third attempt at a telephone-based information system that fed data to a terminal in the user’s home. The first was EIS, from 1979. It was tested in a few regional markets, including the Albany, NY area. Viewtron was the next generation. This film gives an overview of the systems available internationally as well as profiling the features of Viewtron.
Viewtron ran on your television, navigated via Sceptre terminal and fed via modem. It used a teletext graphical interface with basic, early multicolor ‘paint’ type graphics — on the NAPLPS standard (North American Presentation Level Protocol Syntax). The system was test-marketed in Florida by Viewtron, a company formed by the collaboration of AT&T and Knight-Ridder. It rolled out 4 years after EIS, in 1983. It offered many more services than EIS (which was limited to the phone book, Dr. Joyce Brothers’ column, weather, headlines, and sports scores), including online shopping and games.
The system never went national, though other companies marketed their versions in other local markets (like Keyfax in Chicago and Gateway in L.A., among others). The best part of this film, in particular, is getting to see what kind of services were offered and what they looked like on-screen. But in practice, the service was slow, expensive, and maybe a little too far ahead of its time. There just weren’t enough customers who could justify both the cost of the terminal and the monthly — and hourly — charges to make it profitable for Viewtron. In 1986, the company pulled the plug on the experiment.
Teletext (or videotex) systems still existed as late as the 2010s, but they were a disappearing medium. You still see them in use on cable television (circa 2012), especially on local public access stations for broadcasting events and schedules. The BBC cancelled their Ceefax teletext signal during 2012.
source: ATTTechChannel | YouTube
The Pirate Bay cofounder Gottfrid Svartholm was indicted today on hacking charges unrelated to his one-year prison sentence for running the world’s most notorious and illicit file-sharing service.
According to Swedish prosecutors, the 27-year-old is accused of hacking into Nordea Bank to withdraw money, and of hacking into several Swedish companies and the government’s federal taxing agency.
“A large amount of data from companies and agencies was taken during the hack, including a large amount of personal data, such as personal identity numbers of people with protected identities,” prosecutor Henrik Olin said in a statement.
Three others were indicted in connection to the hacks, prosecutors said. Olin told Swedish media that Svartholm was the “main person and brains behind the hacker attack.” According to the indictment, the authorities seized a computer and chat transcripts of Svartholm and the other suspects.
Svartholm was arrested in September in Cambodia and deported to Sweden under an arrest warrant in connection to his Pirate Bay conviction.
Sweden’s Supreme Court last year upheld the prison sentences of the four men convicted of running The Pirate Bay. Peter Sunde faces eight months; Fredrik Neij, 10 months; Carl Lundström served his four-month term. Svartholm was handed one year. They share combined fines of more than $6.8 million. Sunde is seeking clemency. Neij’s whereabouts are unknown, and is believed to have fled Sweden.
They were convicted in 2009 in a joint civil and criminal proceeding in Sweden that pitted the entertainment industry and the government against the four defendants and the torrent-based file-sharing site, which points the way to free games, movies, software and music, much of it copyrighted.
The Pirate Bay is used by millions and is notorious for its rebellious nature.
source: David Kravets | Wired
And so it begins… the slow and gradual transition to an Internet with limitless possibilities.
Google and the City of Austin just sent out a slew of invitations to an event next week, but declined to provide details on what will be announced.
While city officials are staying quiet, multiple sources tell VentureBeat that the announcement could involve expanding Google’s gigabit broadband Internet service Google Fiber to Austin. Alternately, the city could announce plans for a new Austin-based Google campus, or even some partnership to involve the city with a new Google service. Obviously, we don’t know what the announcement will entail, but its safe to say that it’ll be of interest to a broad section of the local community.
Here’s the invitation itself:
On Tuesday, April 9, at 11 a.m., the City of Austin and Google will make a very important announcement that will have a positive impact on Austinites and the future of the city. We anticipate more than 100 community leaders and elected officials to be in attendance to celebrate this announcement. The event invitation is attached for your convenience. Although we cannot share the details of the announcement with you in advance, we know readers will want to learn more, so we encourage you to join us on Tuesday.
Google Fiber offers download and upload speeds that are 100 times faster than the average consumer broadband Internet connection, and at a much cheaper price. The service launched in the Kansas City area back in July, which instantly prompted competing services from Time Warner Cable to boost their own offerings. Currently, Kansas City is the only Google Fiber location, but Google chairman Eric Schmidt has previously stated that this is not a side project for the company — implying that Google Fiber could launch elsewhere in the future.
The presence of Google Fiber within Kansas City has sparked an increase in new tech startups to the area, as VentureBeat’s Sean Ludwig previously pointed out. Austin already has a robust startup culture and is home to several large tech company campuses, including Dell, National Instruments, Intel, Apple (call center), Samsung, and others. That said, Austin is very much a tech-focused city, so the availability of Google Fiber would only add to that.
source: Tom Cheredar | VentureBeat
I really enjoyed reading this article about the pitfalls of the Bitcoin currency, as it has a ton of information all backed up by links to the source. What’s really concerning here is that we are slowly moving towards a cashless society with less than 27 percent of transactions being done in cash.
So far, Bitcoin is not a big deal. Its total value in circulation was $1.4 billion as of this week. That’s equivalent to the currency stock of a small nation — somewhere between Iceland and Uruguay — and just one-thousandth of the total value of U.S. dollars in circulation. The volume of transactions in Bitcoin is growing only slowly, relative to the massive increase in demand for the currency: This discrepancy is strong evidence that Bitcoin’s rise is a speculative bubble.
Nonetheless, Bitcoin raises some interesting questions. One is whether it might undermine the modern state — which, for many of its libertarian-anarchist advocates, is the whole idea.
Technology enabled governments to grow more powerful and more centralized in the 19th and 20th centuries, as Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, has argued. The intriguing possibility is that technologies of the 21st century — such as Bitcoin — might push the other way.
Physical cash is used in a rapidly shrinking share of transactions: 27 percent in 2011, 23 percent by 2017, and so on, according to Javelin Strategy & Research, a financial-services research firm. The central banks of Sweden and Nigeria have both declared goals of a cashless economy. In Europe, the volume of non-cash transactions is forecasted to rise by 7 percent per year, despite economic stagnation.
What’s going on? First, a global shift to mobile payments and credit and debit cards. Second, a rise in online retail — one that could put 15 to 20 percent of all retail sales online in the U.S., U.K., China, and Europe, according to Bain & Company.
Electronic payments aren’t new. Bitcoin’s only innovations are its status as an independent currency and its decentralized network design. But those differences might make Bitcoin — or rather, crypto-currency in general — an existential threat to the modern liberal state. If widely adopted, crypto-currencies would cripple government in three central functions: taxation, police and macroeconomic stabilization. That is exactly what Bitcoin’s biggest fans are hoping.
- Taxation: How do governments collect taxes on transactions in Bitcoin? The answer is they don’t, and they can’t. Crypto-currency’s strong protections on anonymity make it impossible for any state to know who is buying what, who is paying whom, who earns what, and who has what in savings. That poses a direct challenge to the power of states to levy taxes.
The problem is that Bitcoin makes tax evasion easier. States could enforce reporting of Bitcoin income for individuals and businesses, as they try to do for cash, which is also hard to track. But encryption and the peer-to-peer network structure make Bitcoin even harder to follow than physical cash, and digital cash is much better than the physical kind for storage and transactions, so the scale of the challenge could end up being much bigger.
- Police:It would be almost impossible for states to detect certain crimes. One of the major alleged uses of Bitcoin — though, of course, one can never truly know — is buying illicit drugs. Bitcoin’s cryptography makes it uniquely able to facilitate money laundering, insider trading, fraud, and bribery. The transactions would be untraceable, and the money doesn’t ever have to return to the bank, where the financial crime might have been detected.
- Macroeconomic policy:A Bitcoin economy would undermine the power of real-world central banks to make monetary policy. Yes, governments can influence the demand for national currencies by requiring taxes to be paid in them. But the monetary lever on private transactions and lending would be gone if such commerce was denominated in Bitcoin. And by displacing governments as currency issuers, Bitcoin also threatens their ability to finance public debt. In a world where many transactions are anonymous, it’s unclear how governments could even compile accurate economic data, without which macroeconomic policy is impossible. Economic depression in a Bitcoin regime could be an insoluble problem.
If Bitcoin remains on the fringes, then the state is safe. The question is, if it shows signs of becoming a widely used currency, what could governments do to crush it?
The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the wing of the U.S. Treasury Department that investigates money laundering, said last month that it has the authority to regulate transactions involving both Bitcoin and U.S. dollars under the Bank Secrecy Act. These inter-currency exchanges appear to be the best foothold for regulation. Governments could require records of all purchases and sales of Bitcoin, for instance.
But this approach has severe limits. There are, by design, no direct avenues for government to interpose itself in Bitcoin-only transactions. Government does have some enforcement leverage over the individuals and businesses. Bitcoin transactions have a real-world side. The problem, though, is that the usual mechanisms for detection and enforcement are very weak against Bitcoin. Ask the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Bitcoin presents “distinct challenges for deterring illicit activity,” according to a leaked intelligence assessment that was prepared in April 2012. “Bitcoin is unique because it is the only decentralized, P2P network-based virtual currency,” the FBI’s Cyber Intelligence and Criminal Intelligence Sections wrote. “The way it creates, operates, and distributes bitcoins makes it distinctively susceptible to illicit money transfers.”
Bitcoin may be a bubble that will burst. If it does, other forms of digital cash will come along. The state was intimately involved in the development of money — but that was before networked computers. In the next chapter of the history of currency, money might very well turn on its creator, and roll back government.
(Evan Soltas is a contributor to the Ticker. Follow him on Twitter.)
source: Bloomberg