Munch, Crunch, Boom
{ Spy Gadgets in World War II: Exploding chocolate bar | Secutrity Servce MI5 }
Archive for September, 2007
Collector Struggling to Reconnect With His Ex
A thief with a hankering for sexy undergarments slipped off with hundreds of bras from a Victoria’s Secret store in broad daylight.
Police in Flagstaff say they’re taking a close look at how the thief managed to take off with about 350 bras (worth an estimated $15,000) while the store was open. The anti-theft tags hooked on the bras did not trigger a store alarm.
The theft from the store at the Flagstaff Mall on Sunday was not captured by surveillance cameras, police said. They suspect the items may be resold, and are monitoring Internet auction sites.
photo { David LaChapelle }
Plop, Plop, Fizz
Researchers who launched an experimental cyber attack caused a generator to self-destruct, alarming the government and electrical industry about what might happen if such an attack were carried out on a larger scale. Sources familiar with the experiment said the same attack scenario could be used against huge generators that produce the country’s electric power. { CNN | full story }
I’m Just a Scarecrow With Out You Baby
The Comic Plaza internet café never closes, but it is not until the late evening that the regulars begin to occupy its tiny, neon-lit cubicles. They are men, mostly; slightly grubby looking, and carrying small rucksacks. They take full advantage of the free coffee and soft drinks included in the all-night charge of 980 yen ($8.40).
They have no interest in the world wide web – to many of them the Comic Plaza is the only home they have. They are the internet café “refugees”, Japan’s new social headache, and the object of growing concern among politicians and bureaucrats.
The Japanese Government announced yesterday the results of a survey on this new class of homeless people: at least 5,400, it concluded, live out their lives in the tiny cubicles of 24-hour coffee shops and “comic cafés”. Tens of thousands more live in them for part or most of the month – and these are only the ones who owned up to their status. The fear is that they represent a generation without qualifications, professional experience or permanent accommodation, and no realistic prospect of acquiring them.
The appearance of large numbers of homeless people, living in cardboard shelters in parks, on streets and on river banks, was one of the features of the 1990s – Japan’s so-called “lost decade” – when economic recession brought large-scale redundancies and bankruptcies for the first time in its postwar history. Now the economic recovery is creating income disparities between a growing class of newly wealthy people and an underclass of “losers” – not victims of outright destitution, but disqualified by low income from settling into permanent accommodation.
Among them is Koichi Ishizawa, a cheerful 52-year-old who fell through the cracks in society 25 years ago and has never managed to crawl back up. He lost his factory job in his 20s; ever since, he has worked as a day labourer, paid a maximum of Y9,000 a day as an unskilled construction worker. For the 20 days a month that he succeeds in finding work, he stays in the company dormitory. The rest of the time, he attempts to sleep in an uncomfortable chair in the Comic Plaza.
photo { Marco Bettoni, Tokyo Light Series, 2007 }
An Endless Digital Forest of Mediocrity
The growing number of websites that mix and match low-quality articles produced by amateurs in order to generate traffic is causing concern.
Richard Clayton, a security researcher at Cambridge University, knows how to spot unsolicited junk mail - but even he had to look twice at what arrived in his inbox recently. The mail invited him to put a link to bustem.com from his website. When he looked at bustem.com, he found a collection of security articles written by people he hadn’t heard of.
As an academic and author for the security blog lightbluetouchpaper.org, Clayton has an eye for good writing - especially security writing. What he found on bustem.com didn’t make him very happy. “I had a look at it and I wasn’t very impressed,” he says. “There were spelling mistakes, ridiculous bits of grammar, words missing from sentences and so forth.”
He traced bustem.org to Privila, an Illinois-based company that uses unpaid interns to produce large amounts of content that it then uses on its websites. The company, which expects a minimum commitment of 150 hours or 50 articles from each intern over a 15-week period, retains ownership of the content they produce.
Bustem.com isn’t the only site in Privila’s network, according to Clayton’s colleague Steven J Murdoch, whose research last month turned up a network of almost 300 sites connected to Privila - up from 153 in April.
Privila’s public mandate is to “preserve the value and credibility of information on the web”. Executives would not comment on the business model, and interns approached by the Guardian said they were bound by a non-disclosure agreement, but the websites it operates have something in common other than identical visual design: they all carry advertisements from either Google or Yahoo!. Google’s advertising business has two main strands. Its Adwords service is aimed at companies who want their advertisements to appear on participating web sites.
The websites that display the ads are part of a programme called Adsense. Google’s website indexing system analyses each Adsense website and tries to display advertisements that are relevant to its content. Every time a visitor to an Adsense website clicks on an Adsense advertisement, the owner of the site gets some of the money that the advertiser pays to Google.
The internet is replete with sites that post content optimised purely to drive ad traffic rather than having any value of its own. The internet marketing community even has a term for them: made for Adsense (MFA).
photo { Suckapants }
Every Day, the Same, Again
Two women dressed like ninjas — one with a dagger, and the other carrying the sword — entered a Sunoco station in the 5600 block of Route 8 at about 3 a.m. The women tied up the clerk and robbed the store of cash, cigarettes and lottery tickets.
Men apparently enjoy being with their parents, while women find time with their mom and dad to be slightly less pleasant than doing laundry.
Only men can be geniuses… but there are far more stupid men than women, a controversial new research claims.
Man raped daughter, dogs and horse.
NJ magician charged in child sex assault.
A man pleaded guilty Thursday to stealing more than 1,500 pairs of girls’ shoes from area schools.
More gas masks.
Arizona boy has become the sixth victim to die nationwide this year of a microscopic organism that attacks the body through the nasal cavity, quickly eating its way to the brain.
The body’s complicated cell-making process may help to avoid cancer.
A gene named “Mothers against decapentaplegic homolog 3“.
Where did the Earth’s oceans come from? Most scientists think they came from water-rich asteroids and comets raining down on the planet in its youth.
Hong Kong Canto-pop star Jacky Cheung has been banned from hiring any more maids from the Philippines after firing 21 in three years.
If it cost around $34 with tip, then I put $34.34, or if it cost $122, then I put $122.22. I do this reliably now, on all restaurant transactions. What I’ve found is a shocking number of restaurants don’t charge me what I write.
Anatomy of Credit Card numbers.
Authorities unveiled 100 new questions immigrants will have to study to pass a civics test to become naturalized American citizens [All Questions and Answers — PDF]
Here I am going to show you how someone can install a persistent backdoor within your GMail account and snoop onto all your conversations.
Un petit oiseau, un petit poisson…
Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116 (pronounced ‘albin’) was a name intended for a Swedish child who was born in 1991.
Get ready for the power disco.
I Keep Seeing the Blue Light of the TV Show
Find yourself glancing at the time more often at the time 11:11 or the date 11/11? You’re not alone. Some people feel haunted by the number everywhere they go, claiming it’s a nod from angels or a mystical sign of eleven’s importance in math and science.
But think of a word you learned the meaning of just recently. You probably see that word everywhere now. Or pretend that the number 4359 has supernatural significance and it’ll begin to appear mysteriously, too.
Psychologists call this apophenia, or applying meaning to randomly occurring data, where none really exists. Apophenia feeds on itself, which is why 11:11—with a long standing in pop culture and twice-per-day airplay on clocks—seems so important to so many. Simply put, the more conscious we are of something, the more we’ll notice it around us.
photo { p0cket-paul }
Also, My Rug Was Stolen
Americans are facing a brave new world of post-September 11 technology marvels that could soon find their way into billions of dollars of projected homeland security spending.
Already in use are such things as infrared cameras with built-in brains that capture license plate images and match them in milliseconds to police records of vehicles of interest to the authorities.
Such license plate recognition systems, fixed and mobile, already are stopping criminals in cars in New York City, Washington D.C. and 23 states, according to Mark Windover, president of Remington ELSAG Law Enforcement Systems, which is marketing its product to 250 U.S. police agencies.
“Seventy percent of all criminal activity can be tied to a vehicle,” he said. “Had to get there, had to go home.”
Remington ELSAG says its algorithms — which turn images into data in the blink of an eye — could guard airports, military bases and other federal facilities as well as crack down on the drug trade, robberies and other crime hinging on stolen cars. (…)
Airport screening is another area that could be transformed within 10 years, using scanning wizardry to pinpoint a suspected security threat through biometrics — based on one or more physical or behavioral traits.
“We can read fingerprints from about five meters… all 10 prints,” said Bruce Walker, vice president of homeland security for Northrop Grumman Corp (NOC.N). “We can also do an iris scan at the same distance.”
image { Fliegender }
My Feet Keep Dancing, Dancing
A man who bought a smoker Tuesday at an auction of abandoned items might have thought twice had he looked inside first.
Maiden, N. C. police said the man opened up the smoker and saw what he thought was a piece of driftwood wrapped in paper. When he unwrapped it, he found a human leg, cut off 2 to 3 inches above the knee.
The smoker had been sold at an auction of items left behind at a storage facility, so investigators contacted the mother and son who had rented the space where the smoker was found.
The mother, Peg Steele, explained her son had his leg amputated after a plane crash and kept the leg following the surgery “for religious reasons” she doesn’t know much about. “The rest of the family was very much against it,” Steele said.
Steele said her son, John Wood, plans to drive to Maiden, about 35 miles northwest of Charlotte, to reclaim his amputated leg, police said.
{ WSOCTV }
And Then He Opened a Horse Butchery
An Oxford man has filed a lawsuit against his neighbor, claiming he can’t sell his house because of the smell of horse manure from next door.
In court documents filed in Superior Court, Gino Sciortino claims Helen Catlin is permitting significant quantities of horse manure to accumulate in piles on her property and the foul odor can often be smelled at his home.
Helen and David Catlin have lived on Park Road more than a year and own three horses. Sciortino said that at times, the smell is overpowering.
“When the wind blows, everything smells of horse manure,'’ Sciortino said Thursday, saying the odor has made it difficult to sell his house for the past year.
Sciortino is asking for monetary damages as well as an injunction ordering Helen Catlin to relocate the horse manure and other debris and to re-grade the soil near their property line.
“Once this is resolved, I will try to sell again,'’ Sciortino said.
David Catlin, the husband of the woman named in the lawsuit, said Thursday that he mixes the manure with other material to create compost, which he sprinkles with lime to prevent the scent from wafting across the property. “Nobody else seems to be able to smell it,'’ Catlin said of his other neighbors. “He’s misleading a lot of people.'’
