My ID classmate kept getting burgled. His second-storey East Village apartment was broken into multiple times, and in frustration he signed a year lease on apartment 6B of a six-flight walk-up. He reasoned that no thief would be willing to haul a television down six flights of stairs. But within a month, he was robbed again—this time they broke in through the roof door. And my TV-less buddy spent the next 11 months going up and down six flights of stairs every day. Six storeys (some say seven) was the maximum height they’d build residential buildings in New York, prior to the elevator. No resident was willing to climb more stairs than that. After Otis’ perfection of the elevator, that height limitation was gone, and within a century we had skyscrapers. Then the new height limitation was building technology. Advanced construction techniques have since skyrocketed, if you’ll pardon the pun; as the World’s Tallest Building peeing contest continues, it is rumored that Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Tower will be a kilometer high . But the new height limitation is the thing that smashed the old one: Elevators. Steel cable is so heavy that at its maximum elevator height of 500 meters, the cables themselves make up 3/4s of the moving mass. You can stagger elevator banks to go higher, but the heaviness of steel cable makes long-haul elevators prohibitively expensive to run. Finnish elevator manufacturer Kone believes they have the answer. After ten years of development they’ve just announced the debut of UltraRope , a carbon-fiber cable that’s stronger than steel, lasts twice as long, and weighs a fraction of the older stuff: (more…)
More:
Elevator Rope Breakthrough Means Mile-High Buildings Possible
Etherwalk writes “Huang Chengqing, China’s top internet security official, alleged that cyberattacks on China from people in the U.S. are as serious as those from China on the U.S. ‘We have mountains of data, if we wanted to accuse the U.S., but it’s not helpful in solving the problem.’ Huang, however, does not necessarily attribute them to the U.S. government just because they came from U.S. soil, and he thinks Washington should extend the same courtesy. ‘They advocated cases that they never let us know about. Some cases can be addressed if they had talked to us, why not let us know? It is not a constructive train of thought to solve problems.’ In response to the recent theft of U.S. military designs, he replied with an observation whose obviousness is worthy of Captain Hammer: ‘Even following the general principle of secret-keeping, it should not have been linked to the Internet.'” A few experts think China’s more cooperative attitude has come about precisely because the U.S. government has gone public with hacking allegations. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
The race to build the world’s tallest building has taken on an urgent tone these past few years. Like the mountaineers of the 1930s, or the astronauts of the 1960s, the developers struggling to out-build each other are also struggling to articulate something deeper—something that smacks of national (or maybe economic) pride. But a Chinese plan to build the world’s tallest building in mere months takes the latest salvo in this architectural arms race to new heights. Read more… 
New submitter Eugriped3z writes with an article in the New York Times that “indicates that manufacturing defect rates for solar panels manufactured in China vary widely, anywhere from 5-22%. Secrecy in the terms of settlements negotiated by attorneys representing multi-million dollar installations perpetuate the problem by masking the identity of unscrupulous or incompetent actors. Meanwhile, Reuters reports that unit labor costs in Mexico are now lower than in China.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
More than two dozen advanced weapons systems were accessed, although documents obtained by The Washington Post do not indicate whether the breaches occurred on government or contractor networks. [Read more] 
The New York Times has taken an interesting look at hacking culture in China —where it seems the practice is no longer an underground phenomenon, but a massive commercial enterprise. Read more… 
Images courtesy of the artist We were duly impressed with David Soukup’s painstakingly detailed stencils when we first saw them back in 2011 —I could hardly believe that some of those ultrafine lines were stenciled and not applied by an implement (or at least masked off). He’s pleased to announce a solo show at Maxwell Colette gallery in his current hometown of Chicago: “This show is one of my most personal to date, and marks a return to some of the imagery and technical precision that I became known for.” I hadn’t realized that he lost his way (the mural project , pictured above, dates to October of last year), but earlier this year, Soukup wrote that “I had been cutting stencils for so long that I really lost what made them most important to me, and why I started doing them in the first place.” In any case, we’re glad he’s back on track with his first exhibition in 16 months, featuring “over 20 pieces of new work (both stencils and screenprints).” The title, Perennial Escapism , is an obvious play on the subject matter, but the rather literal take on an exit strategy belies the integrity of the subject matter: the imagery is “derived from the artist’s own photographs of early 20th century wrought iron fire escapes in Chicago.” To hear Soukup tell it: This work represents a personal ‘escape’ so to speak. I went back to what first made me passionate. I drew inspiration not just from the city imagery itself, but from the textures, the grit, and the distress that makes up a city. Perennial Escapism marks the beginning of a new direction, one I’ve never been more excited to pursue. Where his previous work was more collage-y and surreal, the stark new compositions evoke film stills, superimposed on a baselayer of impasto on the wood panels to achieve the effect of a vaguely patina’d or otherwise weathered surface. Per the press release : Soukup’s paintings combine visual elements of graphic design and collage with the tactile elements of paint and reclaimed materials to create decidedly urban motifs. He hand-cuts the elaborate stencils, some up to four feet in length, that are utilized to create his paintings. The resulting latticework of iron bars and shadows echoes the visual experience of his everyday life, and reflects his obsession with meticulous detail. We’re pleased to present an exclusive preview of Perennial Escapism : (more…) 
colinneagle writes “Verizon’s 2013 Data Breach Investigation Report is out and includes data gathered by its own forensics team and data breach info from 19 partner organizations worldwide. China was involved in 96% of all espionage data-breach incidents, most often targeting manufacturing, professional and transportation industries, the report claims. The assets China targeted within those industries included laptop/desktop, file server, mail server and directory server, in order to steal credentials, internal organization data, trade secrets and system info. A whopping 95% of the attacks started with phishing to get a toehold into their victim’s systems. The report states, ‘Phishing techniques have become much more sophisticated, often targeting specific individuals (spear phishing) and using tactics that are harder for IT to control. For example, now that people are suspicious of email, phishers are using phone calls and social networking.’ It is unknown who the nation-state actors were in the other 4% of breaches, which the report says ‘may mean that other threat groups perform their activities with greater stealth and subterfuge. But it could also mean that China is, in fact, the most active source of national and industrial espionage in the world today.'” The report also notes that financially-motivated incidents primarily came from the U.S. and various Eastern European countries. Read more of this story at Slashdot.