replace-example – Page 4 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Aluminum castings of ant-nests

Anthill Art fills ant colonies with molten aluminum, creating massive, intricate castings of the architecture of the ants’ nests. They’re for sale on Ebay (surprisingly cheap, too), and they’re spectacular. I make casts of ant colonies using molten aluminum to fill the tunnels and chambers of the nest. The result is an amazing sculpture showing the intricate detail of the nest architecture. The cast is then mounted for display on a wood base. Each display has a stainless steel plaque mounted on it with information on the cast and a unique cast number. These make perfect displays for a home or as an educational piece for teachers and professors to display in a science classroom or laboratory. Anthill Art – Artistic and Educational Ant Colony Castings ( Thanks, Fipi Lele! )

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Aluminum castings of ant-nests

Life from the near future of location surveillance

In Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data , the ACLU’s Jay Stanley presents a slide deck from the near future in which a government intelligence service presents a glowing account of how it convicted “Jack R Benjamin” of DUI pre-crime, by watching all the places he went, all the people he interacted with, and using an algorithm to predict that he would commit a DUI, and, on that basis, to peer into every corner of his personal life. The use of the slide deck is inspired here, echoing as it does the Snowden leaks (Snowden had been tasked with consolidating training documents from across the NSA, which is why he had access to such a wide variety of documents, and why they’re all in powerpoint form). And the kind of data-mining here is not only plausible, it’s likely — it’s hard to imagine cops not availing themselves of this capability. Just out of curiosity, who else has been visiting Mary Smith’s house? Looks like Mary has a few close friends. Wonder if Mr. Benjamin is aware of this Bill Montgomery character who spent a few nights with her? Going back to the main screen, looks like Mr. Benjamin is quite a union activist. Perhaps we should notify George over at BigCorp (he serves at the Fusion Center with us). Just in case our man has been involved in the trouble they’ve been having over there. Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data [Jay Stanley/ACLU] ( via MeFi )

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Life from the near future of location surveillance

Medieval kids’ birch-bark doodles

Michael sez, “Apparently medieval Russian schoolroooms used birch bark for things like writing practice. Erik Kwakkel, medieval book historian at Leiden University, Netherlands, has some charming photos of stick-figure illustrations on bark by kids who, like kids everywhere, got a bit bored with the lesson and started doodling in the margins. There are links to more images (and an interesting scholarly article) at the bottom of the post .” The most special items, however, are the ones shown above, which are from a medieval classroom. In the 13th century, young schoolboys learning to write filled these scraps with alphabets and short texts. Bark was ideal material for writing down things with such a short half-life. Then the pupils got bored and started to doodle, as kids do: crude drawings of individuals with big hands, as well as a figure with a raised sword standing next to a defeated beast (lower image). The last one was drawn by Onfim, who put his name next to the victorious warrior. The snippets provide a delightful and most unusual peek into a 13th-century classroom, with kids learning to read – and getting bored in the process. Medieval kids’ doodles on birch bark [Erik Kwakkel] ( Thanks, Michael ! )

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Medieval kids’ birch-bark doodles

Botnet of 20,000 point-of-sale machines

Details are emerging about Stardust, a piece of malicious software that targets point-of-sale credit-card processing machines. Stardust has reportedly compromised over 20,000 PoS machines and turned them into a easy-to-control botnet. The malware’s masters can monitor the botnet in realtime and issue fine-grained commands to its components, harvesting a titanic volume of payment card details. The discovery comes as researchers from a separate security firm called Arbor Networks published a blog post on Tuesday reporting an active PoS compromise campaign. The advisory is based on two servers found to be hosting Dexter and other PoS malware. Arbor researchers said the campaign looks to be most active in the Eastern Hemisphere. There was no mention of a botnet or of US restaurants or retailers being infected, so the report may be observing a campaign independent from the one found by IntelCrawler. It remains unclear how the attackers manage to initially infect PoS terminals and servers that make up the botnet. In the past, criminals have targeted known vulnerabilities in applications that many sellers of PoS software use to remotely administer customer systems. Weak administrator passwords, a failure to install security updates in a timely fashion, or unknown vulnerabilities in the PoS applications themselves are also possibilities. Credit card fraud comes of age with advances in point-of-sale botnets [Dan Goodin/Ars Technica]

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Botnet of 20,000 point-of-sale machines

Terabyte laptop SDDs for $435!

For the second half of the 1990s, my standard advice to people buying computers was to max out the RAM as the cheapest, best way to improve their computers’ efficiency. The price/performance curve hit its stride around 1995, and after decades when a couple gigs of RAM would cost more than the server you were buying it for, you could max out all the RAM slots in any computer for a couple hundred bucks. Operating systems, though, were still being designed for RAM-starved computers, and when you dropped a gig or two of RAM in a machine, it screamed . It’s still good practice to max out your RAM, but it doesn’t get you much of a dividend. The turbo-charger of the 2010s is solid-state disk-drives, and they’re screaming up the same price/performance curve that RAM traversed twenty years ago. Two years ago, I traded my laptop drive for a 400GB SDD, spending as much on the drive as I had on the machine, and it was worth every penny. My laptop battery-life nearly doubled, and I stopped getting watch-cursors altogether; no matter what task I performed, it was done instantly. In October, I bought a one terabyte SDD for a ridiculous $435 — about a third of what I paid for a 600GB drive a little over a year ago! — and having run it for two months now, I’m prepared to pronounce it good. I wasn’t familiar with the manufacturer, Crucial, but they got very good reviews on Amazon, and at that price I was prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. My machine — a Thinkpad X230 running Ubuntu 13.10 — chugs along with nary a beach-ball, and I can go six to eight hours on a six-cell battery with full brightness, and continuous Wifi and Bluetooth usage. I’m rough on my computer, and it’s taken plenty of knocks and bumps without any noticeable impact on the drive. To accompany the new drive, I bought a pair of $78 Toshiba USB3 1TB drives (one for backing up at the office, the other for my travel bag). They’re nothing near as fast as the SDD, but combined with the USB3 bus, they’re plenty quick for daily incremental backups, which take less than five minutes. If your storage needs aren’t as massy as mine, there’s a whole line of Crucial SDDs, 480GB for $269 , 240GB for $140 and so on. They all come with three year warranties, though I haven’t had cause to get service for my drive yet (knock wood). The drive is 7mm high, and comes with an easy-to-fit adapter for 9mm enclosures. I was less impressed with the adapter I bought to copy the files over; it was fiddly and prone to losing its connection. Ultimately, I slapped the new drive into a case in order to make the transfer. Crucial M500 960GB SATA 2.5-Inch 7mm (with 9.5mm adapter/spacer) Internal Solid State Drive CT960M500SSD1

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Terabyte laptop SDDs for $435!

China launches lunar probe

The China National Space Administration has launched Chang’e 3, a plutonium-powered lunar lander on-board at 185-foot-tall Long March 3B rocket. The lander is on a four-day trajectory for the lunar surface, and will brake and enter lunar orbit on December 6th. It is scheduled to land on December 14th, in the Bay of Rainbows (Sinus Iridum). The rover masses 140kg, with nuclear heaters to keep systems alive during the two-week-long lunar nights, and will use radar to probe the lunascape as it roves during its mission. It is also outfitted with high-resolution panoramic cameras and telescopes. The Chinese space program’s stated goal is to establish a space-station and autonomous landers that can return to Earth with samples. “On behalf of the Xichang Satellite Launch Center and the command headquarters, I would like to extend my gratitude to all those who have been part of the project,” said Zhang Zhenzhong, director of the Xichang launch base. “And my thanks also go to all the friends who have been helping us throughout the whole process. “The Chang’e probe is on the way to the moon. Of course, it’s a symbol of China’s national power and prowess,” Zhang said in post-launch remarks translated into English on China’s state-run television. Over the next few days, Chang’e 3 will adjust its path toward the moon three times to set up for a critical rocket burn to enter lunar orbit Dec. 6. Landing on the moon is scheduled for Dec. 14 in a region known as Bay of Rainbows, or Sinus Iridum, on the upper-left part of the moon as viewed from Earth. Many of the mission’s specifications and objectives remained secret until the week of launch, when China rolled out details in a press briefing and through official state-owned media outlets. The lander carries a bipropellant rocket engine designed to adjust its power level and pivot to control the probe’s descent from an altitude of 15 kilometers, or about 9 miles, according to China’s state-run Xinhua news agency. Long March rocket blasts off with Chinese lunar rover [Stephen Clark/Spaceflight Now]

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China launches lunar probe

Apps come bundled with secret Bitcoin mining programs, paper over the practice with EULAs

Researchers at Malwarebytes have discovered that some programs covertly install Bitcoin-mining software on users’ computers , papering over the practice by including sneaky language in their license agreements allowing for “computer calculations, security.” The malicious programs include YourFreeProxy from Mutual Public, AKA We Build Toolbars, LLC, AKA WBT. YourFreeProxy comes with a program called Monitor.exe, which repeatedly phones home to WBT, eventually silently downloading and installing a Bitcoin mining program called “jhProtominer.” So now that we have proof that a PUP is installing miners on users systems, do they do it without ever letting the user know? Well not exactly, their EULA specifically covers a section on Computer Calculations: COMPUTER CALCULATIONS, SECURITY: as part of downloading a Mutual Public, your computer may do mathematical calculations for our affiliated networks to confirm transactions and increase security. Any rewards or fees collected by WBT or our affiliates are the sole property of WBT and our affiliates. Their explanation is basically the purpose of Bitcoin Miners and that they will install this software on the system, run it, use up your system resources and finally keep all rewards from the effort YOUR system puts in. Talk about sneaky. In my opinion, PUPs have gone to a new low with the inclusion of this type of scheme, they already collected information on your browsing and purchasing habits with search toolbars and redirectors. They assault users with pop-up ads and unnecessary software to make a buck from their affiliates. Now they are just putting the nails in the coffin by stealing resources and driving user systems to the grave. Potentially Unwanted Miners – Toolbar Peddlers Use Your System To Make BTC [Adam Kujawa/Malwarebytes] ( via /. )

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Apps come bundled with secret Bitcoin mining programs, paper over the practice with EULAs

Google admits that Youtube/Google Plus integration increased ASCII porn, spam and trolling – UPDATED

Earlier this month, mathematics vlogger Vi Hart posted a ringing denunciation of the new integration of Youtube comments with Google Plus, arguing that the ham-fisted change had brought Youtube comments to an even lower low. Hart said that the new system gave precedence to people who were able to provoke lots of replies with trollish and insulting behavior, crowding out good commenters. Now, Youtube has officially recognized that the new system has led to an increase in spam, flaming, and the posting of ASCII art pornography . It’s part of a wider program through which Google is attempting to drive all its users into Google Plus (largely because advertisers are willing to pay higher rates for “social” ads, this being the latest industry mania). Googlers’ annual bonuses are being paid out based on Google Plus’s success, meaning that across the business, Google Plus is being crammed into every possible corner . The latest Android system, KitKat, tries to force users into Google Plus accounts for sending and receiving SMSes, and makes you opt out of Google Plus about six times during setup. When Google Plus came in, its company proponents insisted that forcing people to use their real names would improve civility. As is often the case when doctrine fails to line up with reality, they have now doubled down on their folly. If Google Plus hasn’t made the Internet “civil,” the problem can’t be that Real Names don’t work — the problem must be that Google Plus hasn’t been wedged into enough corners of the Internet. It’s hard to believe that Google managed to make Youtube comments worse, but there you have it. It turns out that if you provide Google engineers and product designers with sufficient motivation, there’s no limit to how bad things can get. Update : Thanks to David Otaguro for clarifying that the Google bonuses for Google Plus success was a one-year only affair to coincide with the service’s launch, and that the bonus was only partially based on Google Plus’s success. The Google+ integration has also proven unpopular in a broader sense for a couple of reasons. The change constitutes a) meddling with a well-understood, if broken, system in the interest of creating engagement and more data affiliated with real people, thus creating more business for Google, and b) doing so using Google’s social network, which sits somewhere on a spectrum between reviled and ignored. Google seems to be counting on the outcry against Google+ itself to eventually settle down. The company’s response to the newly bad YouTube comments has been to finally introduce better content moderation at a high level. The update to the system will have “better recognition of bad links,” according to the YouTube blog post, as well as “improved ASCII art detection” and altering the display of long comments. The next step will be to add bulk comment moderation, a long-requested feature that YouTube has avoided until now. The post also mentions briefly that the team is “working on improving comment ranking.” However, no details are provided on how the system will overcome YouTube’s ability to co-opt the definition of “engaged” and turn it into, specifically, “controversial.” The Google+ integration, though, appears to be here to stay. That’s despite the fact that the strongest user-based case for its use—that accountability will prevent trolls from trolling—has been killed, drowned in a sea of ASCII penises. YouTube hilariously impotent against ASCII comment pornographers [Casey Johnston/Ars Technica]

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Google admits that Youtube/Google Plus integration increased ASCII porn, spam and trolling – UPDATED

Google turns in child porn owner who used its cloud services

Google turned in a man who copied child pornography to his cellphone using Picasa. Raul Gonzales, 40, was charged with possessing more than 3,000 pornographic pictures of children on the phone. The FBI says the investigation began in March when Google’s hashing technology found two child porn pictures in his Picasa library. Picasa is a cloud-sharing platform for images owned by Google. From there, the company notified the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which says it found more images on a Tumblr account owned by Gonzalez. That’s when the feds took over. Agents say they also found pictures of a 9-year-old who is close to the family, and that Gonzales admitted to sexually assaulting the child. “When an image is found,” Google assured CBS, “an employee will inspect it to make sure it’s actual abuse and not just a picture of a child at bathtime.” It’s good to know that an alleged sexual predator was identified and dealt with, and it’s good to know that Google assigns individual humans to inspect our naked children for the authorities’ consideration.

Hanging Gardens of Bablyon "found" … at Nineveh

Oxford University academic Dr Stephanie Dalley believes she has identified the precise location of the fabled Hanging Gardens of Bablyon : near Nineveh, hundreds of miles north. Dalley’s hypothesis has the gardens built not by Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, but by Assyrians under Sennacherib about 2,700 years ago. Nineveh’s ruins now lie on the city limits of modern-day Mosul.

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Hanging Gardens of Bablyon "found" … at Nineveh