thebroken hacking videozine:
Tips and tricks for the casual hacker (even for beginners). Themes include modchips for gameconsoles, wireless LAN sniffing, social engineering, windows security and some special effects from a guy called "Ramzi". Nice stuff!
Link Email Post Mortem: Quote: "Mylastemail.com is a unique online service, which allows you to leave messages for those you care about – to be emailed after your death. Coping with the death of someone close is always difficult – and usually unexpected. It is important to think now about what happens when you don’t have the time to say goodbye properly to family and friends, who are left trying to cope with sudden loss. Mylastemail.com aims to help. Until now, planning for your death has involved making a Will and putting some kind of insurance in place. Unlike a Will and financial planning, mylastemail.com deals with the emotional and compassionate aspects of taking care of the people you leave behind."
Link The Rush to Judgment: Binary Thinking in a Digital Age: Article by Peter Lurie. Quote: "Contrast is power. The greater the distinction between one position and another, the stronger its credentials. We have an atavistic impulse toward opposition: every analysis of a concept or thing reverts to a sketch of its converse. Since dualism is invariably invoked as a hermeneutic aid, we don't notice its role in structuring
our thoughts, in shaping and finally constraining our understanding. After thousands of years of a binary approach to political, philosophical, economic and sociological problems, we have let our imagination ossify. We are three-dimensional beings imprisoned within a two-dimensional perspective. [...]" (via ctheory.net)
Link Margot Knight: Excellent surrealistic photographs. DaddyD writes: "Margot Knight was one of those funky benneton photographers. Remember when the clothing manufacturer used to pride itself on it's provocative and arresting posters? Although the times may have changed, and the current campaign is about as exciting as the 5 minutes before a movie starts, Benneton still has an active interest in exploring the boundaries of Advertising. Even if that only means they are providing artists like Margot Knight a place to work. Patronage is an ancient idea, and maybe it's not as bad as my A-S grey matter would like it to be. The pictures she is making are pretty darn nifty, even if they aren't featured on 3 story posters."
Link Pink Light: Exhibition about Philip K. Dick's "Pink Light Epiphany" at Museumsquartier/Vienna. Quote: "One of the most fundamental experiences in Philip K. Dick's life was what he himself often refers to as 2-3-74: Seeing a golden fish neclace in the spring of 1974 - symbol of early christianity - initiated a series of elaborate visions and methaphysical experiences that kept occuring for well over a year. The remaining years of his life Dick spent searching for a coherent meaning in these "divine invasions" by engaging himself with theology and philosophy and other diverse sources. Dick's metaphysical experiences of 1974/75 are reflected throughout his subsequent writings: Among them his famous Valis trilogy as well as his extensive - and in it's entirely unpublished - Exegesis, over 8000 pages of autobiographical notes, thoughts and speculations."
Link Moonshine by Isaac Asimov. Quote: "When I was very young I read a number of stories and saw several motion pictures which featured some unfortunate individual who tended to turn into a wolf at the time of the full Moon. The logic behind this troubled me, however. Why the full Moon? I had frequently seen the full Moon and been exposed to its light and I had felt no effect of any kind as a result. Was moonshine substantially different from sunshine or from artificial light? [...]"
Link The user-illusion of the world: On the meaning of design: Quote: "Mundus vult decipi, goes an old moralistic saying: the world wants to be deceived. This is especially valid today."
Part 1 Link Part 2 Link Virtual Honesty: Clive Thompson wrote an essay in the New York Times magazine where he muses over a study by Jeff Hancock of Cornell University that found people are more honest when communicating by email than they are when communicating over the phone. Hancock's data suggest that the archival nature of email is responsible for the increased honesty -- there is a belief that email messages are recorded and may be subsequently recounted verbatim, unlike normal speech, where misstatements are forgotten.
(via Terranova)
Link (you have to be registered) Cryonics for Crustaceans: Frozen lobsters brought back to life? A Connecticut company says its frozen lobsters sometimes come back to life when thawed.
Link What Is Information? A question asked by Andrzej Chmielecki. Abstract: "There is a striking paradox in contemporary brain and cognitive science. Their purported fundamental category of information either is not defined or is used in a Shannonesque sense, which is unable to account for the processes of regulation and control when content, not the quantity of information, is concerned. I try to provide a more adequate formula which is applicable to a wide range of systems commonly counted as informational systems. Representative examples would include a single biological cell, animals, persons, and computers. In fact, I consider information - defined here as any detectable difference of physical states - to be the determining principle of all animate systems, one in which determines both their achitecture and their operation. I claim that the concept of information is a realist category and that information itself is, in ontological terms, an irreal entity unable to act on its own. Three hierarchically ordered forms of information are distinguished and a number of applications of the proposed definition are discussed."
Link Nuclear Sept. 11? Nicholas D. Kristof (International Herald Tribune) thinks that the risks of a nuclear Sept. 11 are increasing. Quote: "A 10-kiloton nuclear bomb (a pipsqueak in weapons terms) is smuggled into Manhattan and explodes at Grand Central. Some 500,000 people are killed, and the United States suffers $1 trillion in direct economic damage. [...]"
Link CAP: Christian model to analyze and rate movies. Yeiks! Quote: "Hundreds and hundreds of studies have been conducted by survey and other means to identify and quantify negative influences of our culture on peoples of all ages. Many studies seem to be quite subjective in their methodology. The CAP system uses objective Investigation Standards to generate a numeric score representing the relative morality content of a cultural or sociological system. The CAP numeric scoring system is called the CAP Numeric Analysis Model, or the CAP Model. The CAP Model is applicable to any system or vehicle which imparts information to an observer which requires the observer to learn, to form an opinion, or which elicits emotion(s) or value judgment(s) in the observer. [...] Addams Family Values is clearly R material in Wanton Violence/Crime, Impunity/Hate, and Sex/Homosexuality while PG-13 in Offense to God and Murder/Suicide but G material in Drugs/Alcohol. The CAP score for Addams Family Values is 56. [...] Mary Poppins is a very good example of family viewing, earning 100 in each of the six CAP Investigation Areas. The CAP score for Mary Poppins is 100. [...]"
Link Inside Outside Africa: Springerin's Christian Höller interviews the Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Marie Téno.
Link Ed Rosenthal, Tipping Points and Doomed Laws: Ed Rosenthal was deputized by the City of Oakland, CA to grow marijuana for the city's medical clinics and co-operatives. The Federal Government arrested him and put him on trial as a drug dealer. Apparently, medical marijuana is a political tipping point.
Link Intelligent ink: the world of Tiny-big: Article by John Shirley. Quote: "Intelligence makes things go faster on every level, including the microscopic. [...] Sandia National Laboratories has come up with an "intelligent ink" that is formed of responsive "nanostructures" that perform work. It's ideal for those "wishing to directly write - rather than mechanically construct - sensor arrays and fluidic or photonic systems," says project leader Jeff Brinker."
Link Elite (C64): Revolutionary in its time, the interface of the legendary computer game for the C64 features a simple but ingenious way of displaying three-dimensional space and movement just within a small part of a low-resolution screen. The in-space-locator, for example, is an elliptical projection of a circle where relative height is represented by vertical lines. Based on the strict logic of space-travel, the controls for the spaceship were reduced to simple rolling and up/down-movements. With graphics basically kept in black and white, the system manages to immerse the player in a whole universe that takes months to explore. We present this project not as a part of retro-gaming but because of the unique flight-command interpreter.
Elite was originally written in 1984 by British artistic programmers Ian Bell and David Braben for the BBC Microcomputer. It has since been converted to many platforms. According to Ian Bell, the best conversions were for the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Acorn Archimedes. Link Conjectures and conjunctures: An RPh interview with Étienne Balibar. Étienne Balibar was one of the brilliant group of students around Althusser in the early 1960s, who co-authored Reading Capital (1965, 1968; trans. 1970). Since then he has established himself as one of France's foremost philosophers on the Left.
Link Jaw-dropping theory of human evolution: Michael Hopkin reports: "Researchers have proposed an answer to the vexing question of how the human brain grew so big. We may owe our superior intelligence to weak jaw muscles, they suggest."
Link Gen. Clark's goal: Time travel! "Candidate calls exceeding light speed 'my only faith-based initiative'". An article published September 30, 2003.
Link The New Science Wars: Is George W. Bush's the most anti-science administration in modern times? (csicop.org)
Link The Depp Quiz: Ever wonder which Johnny Depp character you're most like? Take this quiz to find out. (via DaddyD)
Link The perpetual return of 'the new', to cite Walter Benjamin, is nothing to write home about. Except perhaps for the slave-drivers in the fashion industry. I've never been interested in the new just in itself, but in the accidental occurrence. In the moment where things don't tally, where productive confusion arises. That's why in the final analysis, although I've laughed a lot with Stewart Home, I even reject the meta-criticism of innovation-fixation articulated in neoism. Neoism says about itself that it's a prefix and a suffix with nothing between the two. I believe Home's missionary fervour in wanting to establish another anti-anti-avante-garde to end all avante-garde movements has long been redundant anyway. The new sorts itself out when it lands in a museum, Boris Groys was right there...
Link The Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project consists of an electronic collection of primary source materials relating to the Salem witch trials of 1692 and a new transcription of the court records. Are you interested in hysteria, cruelness and bigotry? You'll be charmed.
Link Comet and Asteroid Impact Hazards on a Populated Earth: Computer Modeling // Fascinating book by John Lewis. Synopsis: "This work explores the anticipated consequences of comet and asteroid impact. It presents computer simulations of the hazards of comet and asteroid bombardment of a populated Earth. Previous estimates of fatality and damage rates on the 100 to 10,000 year time scale are shown to be too low because they neglect rare, highly lethal outriders of the populations of bombarding objects, those with exceptional strength, unusually low entry velocity, and near-horizontal entry angles. This is an assessment of both the mean casualty rate and the expected statistical fluctuations in that rate. A breakdown of fatality and damage rates by impactor energy and compositional class suggests lessons for both asteroid search strategies and interdiction techniques. Key features of this title include: quantitative treatment of impact hazards, including structural blast damage, firestorm ignition and tsunami generation; a detailed and realistic Monte Carlo simulation program; a realistic treatment of the impactor population, composition, and orbits; attention to economic and public policy issues of warning, interdiction and asteroid and comet search strategies; quantitatively rigorous treatment of the state of impact hazards with comparisons to historical records; and eight pages of colour plates depicting impacts and hazards related to meteorites."
Link We Hold These Truths to be Self-Evident: I quote Joel Marks: "This column is dedicated to rational discussion of moral and other issues. The underlying assumption is that claims need to be backed up by arguments. But every once in a while, a position seems so obviously true that, in effect, there is no issue at all. That is how I feel about homosexuality. Even to call it an ‘issue’ seems to me to be begging a very big question. Just what is supposed to be unclear: Whether gays and lesbians have a right to engage in sex? Whether their desires are deviant? Whether they are sinners? That’s all nonsense."
Link On Intellectual Life, Politics and Psychoanalysis: A conversation with Gad Horowitz. The distinguished theorist, Gad Horowitz, Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto talks to Colin Campbell about his life as a scholar, teacher and observer of the contemporary political scene, now that we rapidly exit the logic of empire and enter a new era of globalized despotism mixed with utopian struggles for social justice.
Link Why Machines Should Fear: Once a curmudgeonly champion of "usable" design, cognitive scientist Donald A. Norman argues that future machines will need emotions to be truly dependable. By W. Wayt Gibbs (SciAm)
Link UK Patent Application No. GB2060081: A horse-powered minibus. The horse walks along an endless conveyor belt treadmill in the middle of the bus. This drives the wheels via a gearbox. A thermometer under the horse's collar is connected to the vehicle instrument panel. The driver can signal to the horse using a handle, which brings a mop into contact with the horse.
Link Hostile break-up, sinister reunion: Mesmerism & the Boob: Article by John-Ivan Palmer. Quote: "The first "TV" was built in Paris in 1778 by Franz Anton Mesmer. It was all there - the set, the rabbit ears, the broadcast, the reception. Mesmer's TV-like contraption, complete with metal rods for
antennas, was called a "bucket." What you watched was inside your own mind."
Link Wireless monitor frees patients to roam: Quote: "Researchers in Germany have invented a wireless wristband that can monitor heart rates and blood oxygen levels. The invention could liberate recuperating hospital patients or the elderly from their beds."
Link Britain's Butterflies: "A milestone study of British birds, butterflies and wild flowers has revealed the strongest evidence yet that we are on the verge of a mass extinction of global wildlife - the sixth mass extinction in the history of life on Earth." Report by Steve Connor.
Link [The Archives] 
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. . monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Our mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993.
[more] Booking monochrom: [Europe] [USA] External monochrom links: [monochrom Wikipedia] [monochrom Flickr] [monochrom blip.tv] [monochrom GV] [monochrom Youtube] [monochrom Facebook] [monochrom iTunes] [monochrom Twitter] 
[ P r o j e c t s ] Soviet Unterzoegersdorf / Sector 2 / The Adventure Game Krach der Roboter: Hello World! Slacking is killing the DIY industry (T-Shirt) Carefully Selected Moments / CD, LP Freedom is a whore of a word (T-Shirt) International Year of Polytheism 2007 Santa Claus Vs. Christkindl: A Mobster Battle Kiki and Bubu and The Shift / Short film Kiki and Bubu and The Privilege / Short film Kiki and Bubu and The Self / Short film Kiki and Bubu and The Good Plan / Short film Kiki and Bubu and The Feelings / Short film / Short film Soviet Unterzoegersdorf / Sector 1 / The Adventure Game I was a copyright infringement in a previous life (T-Shirt) Firing Squad Euro2008 Intervention I can count every star in the heavens above -- The image of computers in popular music All Tomorrow's Condensations / Puppet show The Redro Loitzl Story / Short film Law and Second Order (T-Shirt) They really kicked you out of the Situationist International? When I was asked to write about new economy Arse Elektronika 2007, 2008, 2009 etc. The Void's Foaming Ebb / Short film The Charcoal Burner / Short film Fieldrecording in Sankt Wechselberg / Short film Campaign For The Abolition Of Personal Pronouns Entertainment (Unterhaltung) / Short film Nicholas Negroponte Memorial Cable Experience the Experience! (West Coast USA/Canada Tour 2005) A Holiday in Soviet Unterzoegersdorf Massive Multiplayer Thumb-Wrestling Network Soviet Unterzoegersdorf Metroblogging Every Five Seconds an Inkjet Printer Dies Somewhere 452 x 157 cm² global durability Blattoptera / Art for Cockroaches An attempt to emulate an attempt The Department for Criticism against Globalisation Disney vs. Chrusov / Short film Turning Threshold Countries Into Plows Roböxotica // Festival for Cocktail-Robotics Cracked Foundation For The Fine Arts Oh my God, they use a history which repeats itself! (T-Shirt) Administrating:  . . . . . |
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