When the Visigoths burned Library Of Alexandria you can bet that old Ptolemy I Soter would have loved to have had a Czur (pronounced “Cesar”) scanner in his palatial marble-clad staterooms. The Czur is basically a book scanner on steroids that allows you to scan a 300-page book – or priceless scroll of ancient knowledge – in about five minutes. The Czur is a sort of… Read More
Visit site:
The Czur Scanner Can Build A Digital Library Five Minutes At A Time
An anonymous reader writes with a story that might warm the hearts of anyone just outside the service area of a decent internet provider: Faced with a local ISP that couldn’t provide modern broadband, Orcas Island residents designed their own network and built it themselves. The nonprofit Doe Bay Internet Users Association (DBIUA), founded by [friends Chris Brems and Chris Sutton], and a few friends, now provide Internet service to a portion of the island. It’s a wireless network with radios installed on trees and houses in the Doe Bay portion of Orcas Island. Those radios get signals from radios on top of a water tower, which in turn receive a signal from a microwave tower across the water in Mount Vernon, Washington. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Originally posted here:
How a Group of Rural Washington Neighbors Created Their Own Internet Service
After fifteen years of providing 11th-hour copy+paste material for high schoolers, the English-language version of Wikipedia has just hit a milestone: five million articles. Read more…
Read more here:
English Wikipedia Just Broke Five Million Posts
Techdirt comments approvingly on a new project from Harvard Law School, called Free the Law, which in a joint effort with a company called Ravel to scan and post in nicely searchable format all federal and state court decisions, and put them all online, for free. As Techdirt puts it, This is pretty huge. While some courts now release most decisions as freely available PDFs, many federal courts still have them hidden behind the ridiculous PACER system, and state court decisions are totally hit or miss. And, of course, tons of historical cases are completely buried. While there are some giant companies like Westlaw and LexisNexis that provide lawyers access to decisions, those cost a ton — and the public is left out. This new project is designed to give much more widespread access to the public. And it sounds like they’re really going above and beyond to make it truly accessible, rather than just dumping PDFs online. … Harvard “owns” the resulting data (assuming what’s ownable), and while there are some initial restrictions that Ravel can put on the corpus of data, that goes away entirely after eight years, and can end earlier if Ravel “does not meet its obligations.” Anything that helps disrupt the stranglehold of the major legal publishers seems like a good thing. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read More:
Harvard Project Aims To Put Every Court Decision Online, For Free
Besides the spookiness of it all, someone passing within a home can potentially affect the value of the house. DiedInHouse can find out if and how someone died in your house, or the house you’re considering to buy. Read more…
More here:
Find Out If Anyone Has Ever Died Inside Your House With This Web Site
On this very night in 1938, a radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds may or may not have caused mass hysteria for American listeners. But there’s another War of the Worlds that scared me much more as a kid. For me, there’s the HG Wells version, the Orson Welles version, and the rock opera version by composer Jeff Wayne, released in 1978. Read more…
Visit link:
Listen to the Dad Rock Version of The War of the Worlds
Mere months after having more than 400 GB of confidential information stolen from its servers , spyware vendor Hacking Team has announced that it has resumed operations with a suite of digital tools to help law enforcement agencies get around pesky device encryption technology. In an email pitch sent to existing and potential new customers earlier this month, Hacking Team CEO David Vincenzetti, touted the company’s “brand new and totally unprecedented cyber investigation solutions.” The company has also been reportedly working on a revamped 10th edition of its proprietary Remote Control System, which constitutes the core of its software suite. There is no word, however, as to when RCS 10 will be made available. It also remains to be seen as to which, if any, law enforcement agencies will take Hacking Team up on its offer, given the company’s recent security debacle. [Image Credit: Moment Editorial/Getty Images] Source: Motherboard
See the original post:
Hacking Team offers encryption breaking tools to law enforcement
itwbennett writes: Researchers from Kaspersky Lab and the Dutch Public Prosecution Service have obtained the last set of encryption keys from command-and-control servers that were used by CoinVault and Bitcryptor, ‘ writes Lucian Constantin. ‘Those keys have been uploaded to Kaspersky’s ransomware decrypt or service that was originally set up in April with a set of around 750 keys recovered from servers hosted in the Netherlands. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Follow this link:
CoinVault and Bitcryptor Ransomware Victims Can Now Recover Their Files For Free
Cassini has just finished the second of three planned Enceladus flybys on October 28th, going as close at 30 miles above the surface of the icy moon’s south polar region. The photo above was taken after the flyby, showing both the moon and Saturn’s rings, but rest assured the probe took a lot of close-up photos. It even grabbed some of the gas and dust that erupted from one of Enceladus’ geysers that typically spew water and other materials up to 125 miles into the sky. NASA will analyze those samples within the next few weeks, which should gives us more details about the composition of the moon’s ocean floor, as well as about any underwater hydrothermal activity. Cassini made the first flyby this early October to take a closer look at Enceladus’ north pole region. It’s scheduled to make its last one on December 19th to measure the heat the moon gives of, after which it’ll move on to other things for the last two years of its life. Source: NASA
More:
Cassini gets cozy with Saturn’s moon, flies 30 miles above its surface
(credit: Samuel Huron ) On Thursday, the Tor Project released its first public beta of Tor Messenger , an easy-to-use, unified chat app that has security and cryptography baked in. If you care about digital security, you should ditch whatever chat program you’re using and switch to it right now. The app is specifically designed to protect location and routing information ( by using Tor ) and chat data in transit (by using the open source Off-The-Record, or OTR, protocol ). For anyone who has used a similar app (like Pidgin or Adium), Tor Messenger’s interface will be fairly self-explanatory, but there are two notable quirks. First, by default, it will not allow you to send messages to someone who doesn’t support OTR—but there is an option to disable that feature. (We’ll get to that in a minute.) Second, unlike Pidgin or Adium, Tor Messenger cannot log chats, which is handy if you’re privacy-minded. Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Read the article:
How to use Tor Messenger, the most secure chat program around