Bookshelves today are simply not as appealing as they used to be, and there’s no shortage of people looking to digitize their own book collections. Fortunately, we now have easy and relatively inexpensive ways to digitize those books. You don’t have to slave away at your copier or scanner, either—we’re talking about building a book scanner of your very own. We’re not talking about the numerous book scanning services that have popped up in the last few years, offering book digitization at the cost of only a few cents per page. Nor are we talking about chopping off the binding of your book and feeding the pages into a copier or scanner, or purchasing a commercial book scanner for upwards of $10,000 (that just isn’t going to happen for most). No, we’re talking toolbelts, paint cans, bike brakes, and digital cameras—doing it yourself. For two law students interested in the legal and policy discussions surrounding copyright and technology, deciding to build a DIY Book Scanner was never just a project to digitize our own textbooks (however practical that might be). Instead, it gave us the opportunity to experience these issues first hand. Plus, we wanted to see what it would take to build one. Read 31 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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How we built a DIY book scanner with speeds of 150 pages per minute
Aurich Lawson Early on Halloween morning, members of Facebook’s Computer Emergency Response Team received an urgent e-mail from an FBI special agent who regularly briefs them on security matters. The e-mail contained a Facebook link to a PHP script that appeared to give anyone who knew its location unfettered access to the site’s front-end system. It also referenced a suspicious IP address that suggested criminal hackers in Beijing were involved. “Sorry for the early e-mail but I am at the airport about to fly home,” the e-mail started. It was 7:01am. “Based on what I know of the group it could be ugly. Not sure if you can see it anywhere or if it’s even yours.” The e-mail reporting a simulated hack into Facebook’s network. It touched off a major drill designed to test the company’s ability to respond to security crises. Facebook Facebook employees immediately dug into the mysterious code. What they found only heightened suspicions that something was terribly wrong. Facebook procedures require all code posted to the site to be handled by two members of its development team, and yet this script somehow evaded those measures. At 10:45am, the incident received a classification known as “unbreak now,” the Facebook equivalent of the US military’s emergency DEFCON 1 rating. At 11:04am, after identifying the account used to publish the code, the team learned the engineer the account belonged to knew nothing about the script. One minute later, they issued a takedown to remove the code from their servers. Read 31 remaining paragraphs | Comments 