blag.dh

Smartphone Rants, Part III: A Tracking Device that Makes Phone Calls

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 16:28:30 -0400

TIME: What Your Cell Phone Could Be Telling the Government

Christopher Soghoian: 8 Million Reasons for Real Surveillance Oversight

Wired: The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center

New York Times: That’s No Phone, That’s My Tracker

PC Mag: Defcon Hacker Eavesdrops on GSM-based Cell Conversations for $1,500

Slashdot: Leaked Memo Says Apple Provides Backdoor To Governments

InfoSecurity Magazine: China’s ZTE admits to backdoor in mobile phone model

Bloomberg: Spyware Matching FinFisher Can Take Over IPhones

EFF: When a Secretive Stingray Cell Phone Tracking “Warrant” Isn’t a Warrant

Slate: Verizon Wireless Secretly Passed AP Reporters’ Phone Records to Feds

MIT Technology Review: How Wireless Carriers Are Monetizing Your Movements

Nature: Unique in the Crowd: The Privacy Bounds of Human Mobility

Washington Post: NSA Asked Verizon for Records of All Calls in the U.S.

USA Today: NSA has Massive Database of Americans’ Phone Calls

Guardian: NSA Prism Program Taps in to User Data of Apple, Google and Others

New York Times: Your Smartphone is Watching You

Privacy isn’t a question of hiding, privacy is a question of control. Smartphones have brought all the world’s information to our fingertips, but not the information being collected about us, or even a solid answer of how much of it is.

The information age has become the surveillance age. The technological capacity of modern states has become so sophisticated that Orwell’s Big Brother would not so big in comparison. Some would ask what we have to fear if we have nothing to hide, but what exactly makes you think you get to choose whether you do? In the age of mass data retention, why would anyone care not to record everything you do “just in case?”

That choice, to control our own conversations by consenting who it is heard by has become so easily overturned by the same machines that enable our speech that it can only demand an equally radical alternative. What would that be, exactly? Go live on a mountain outside the range of any cell tower?

No. We go back to the drawing board, rebuild the machinery of voice communication in the design of our ideals: Decentralized connectivity. Transparency through open source software and hardware. Privacy by design. A schism in the centurion history of telecommunications.

No cleartext.

No backdoors.

No cell tower.

No god-mode, no master switch.

Oh, and while we’re at it: Better battery life and robust design.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things' – video

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 00:13:50 -0400

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things' – video:

Fuck Superman. This is what a real hero looks like.

Happy Caturday.

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 22:05:47 -0400

Happy Caturday.

darkmindbrightfuture: Holy Other - Yr Love

Wed, 29 May 2013 18:45:22 -0400

darkmindbrightfuture:

Holy Other - Yr Love

We think we’re at a point where we get to choose our own...

Mon, 27 May 2013 22:41:06 -0400

We think we’re at a point where we get to choose our own adventure here. So, do we go the way of Apple and gets thousands of patents on things and argue with lawyers? Or do we continue on the path of open hardware and figure out a way to share and grow and help everybody together?

Catarina Mota & Dustyn Roberts’s State of Open Source Hardware address from World Maker Faire.

I think it’s a responsibility for any artist to protect...

Sun, 26 May 2013 00:35:55 -0400

I think it’s a responsibility for any artist to protect freedom of expression and to use any way to extend this power.

Ai Weiwei.

radiomaru: Waaaaaaaaa~* Happy Caturday.

Sat, 25 May 2013 00:10:09 -0400

radiomaru:

Waaaaaaaaa~*

Happy Caturday.

Smartphone Rants, Part II: The Broken Glass Age

Tue, 21 May 2013 10:00:00 -0400

I’ve barely started to read Snow Crash, but from what my philosopher roommate tells me, Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age has neo-Victorians in it. OG Victorians believed in human perfectibility, defined according to an overly specific code of manner and dress that made everyone look and act identical and boring. Steve Jobs would have had a lot of common ground with that crowd, at least on some fundamental business principles. His clothes even all look the same.

So do all your phones.

Since the iPhone’s inception, variation in the design of handsets (to borrow a term from The Good Old Days*) has by and large become a race to graft a rough base of “iPhone-like” Android or Symbian with bullshit added to it to make certain features be “more” than the iPhone. Bigger screen than the iPhone, more megapixels than the iPhone, more jigabytes, and always less battery life. Fewer physical keyboards, stylii, external antenna (because no one ever has reception problems) or screens that don’t turn into finger-shrapnel the minute someone drops it, which people do because humans are imperfect and so is Apple’s product design.

As if to take a cue from it’s less imaginative competitors, Apple did little more than make its latest iPhone taller and slightly thinner than it’s predecessor. Why thinner? Because “more thin than the Galaxy class Nexus SIII with Nutella Crepe Slushie.” Why taller? “More app icons on screen.” I can’t wait for the iPhablet! Ugh.

The quest for “more” makes the fundamental assumption that the direction of a design decision was the correct one to begin with and unfortunately, Apple’s competitors are happy enough to copy the same mistakes into their designs. Smartphone users without engineering backgrounds are also not making the connection between these design decisions and their need to hold the phone a certain way, buy an external battery pack, curse at auto-correct and slap on some sort of protective case.

Meaningful innovation in mobile device design is stagnant, not in terms of which combination of uncomplementing off-silver colors a phone is or which stupid widgets you’re forced to look at, but in terms of making things work, work well and handle imperfect humans in imperfect situations.

Continued in Part III: A Tracking Device that Makes Phone Calls

* The age of Palm OS (not to be confused with WebOS). Those days weren’t actually good outside of Palm OS though, and were already ending well before iOS or Android.

simurai: Tried to make a Brushed Metal style in CSS3. The...

Fri, 17 May 2013 00:13:44 -0400

simurai:

Tried to make a Brushed Metal style in CSS3. The texture is done by using 3 repeating-gradients with different length. That makes it look somewhat random. For the linear version, browser support is pretty ok, but for the radial one it’s not quite there yet. I think only in Safari 5.1 and Chrome Windows.

In addition I tried to add a conical gradient for the circle with just faking it with ellipse gradients. It’s ok for low contrasts and if you cover the middle part with an icon or so.. hehe.. ;-P A much more real looking technique is used in this experiment, but I believe it currently only works in Safari and Chrome Windows. Let’s hope that CSS4 will add support for real conical gradients.

See demo.

shapeways: at Shapeways LIC

Fri, 17 May 2013 00:02:51 -0400

shapeways:

at Shapeways LIC

Smartphone Rants, Part I: Chasing the Charge Dragon

Sat, 11 May 2013 21:26:00 -0400

In 2001, a 17-year old introvert from Idaho got a job bagging groceries. Fascinated by the idea of a PDAs (personal digital assistants) and their conceptual and physical resemblance to the PADDs of Star Trek, he blew his first paycheck on a Handspring Visor Edge. It was used everywhere, including school, where teachers and students alike loathed the fact it was taking attention away from them even though he’d already been tuning them out by staring blankly towards space (and probably also thinking about space). That shit was normal though. This was not (yet), and it bugged them.*

“Dude, you’re addicted to that thing!” was a common concern.

“You use your truck every day, does that mean your addicted to it?”

“No, I use my truck to get to school.”

“You could walk.”

“That’s impossible!”

“So is holding twenty paperbacks, two notebooks and a Rolodex in my pocket. This is the future!”

The future happened, even in Idaho, roughly like I predicted, but with awful battery life.

In 2006, I forgot I left my Visor, first-generation Motorola Razr, and a cup of coffee on the top of my car and drove to work, losing both somewhere along the Loop 101 in north Phoenix. In my five-year stretch with the Visor I’ve experienced a dead battery maybe four times, even without the ability to charge the phone with anything but a bulky proprietary adapter that I never had to carry with me. Similar story for the Razr and SLVR which replaced it. The psuedo-government entity I worked at gave me a taste for Blackberries and in 2008 I entered the era of the smartphone as we know it today.

The battery life sucked. On a long road trip I took shortly after the 2008 presidential election, the Phoenix Linux User Group mailing list got into one of its off-topic train wreck political discussions that kept my phone vibrating nonstop from Tempe to American Fork until it died.** It would end up constantly being charged at work, home, and transit. As smartphones advanced and annexed more and more functions of previously separate devices, the amount of dependency on a single device to do the work of six devices multiplied with the battery life of only one device. The obvious advantage was that I could use a camera, PDA, GPS navigator, cell phone, portable game system, wireless access point and e-reader without having to carry each device. The disadvantage is that you can’t use anything at all should something happen to just one device, including looking up a phone number you never had to remember to call a cab out of post-Sandy lower Manhattan on a payphone that hasn’t worked since 2003. The only thing left to do is chase the charge dragon and wait for the graphene revolution.

The trend in recent smartphone manufacturing has been to put every smartphone on a fad diet to make it as thin as possible but with screens so large that it can’t fit in your pocket anyway; Batteries are no longer replaceable, so for anyone with any amount of unpredictability in their day-to-day life or travel, that means buying battery packs which make phones thicker, completely defeating the purpose of “thin”; A purpose that has yet to be explained.

Continued in Part II: The Broken Glass Age

* Yes, this totally reminds of current reactions people are having towards Google Glass

** THANKS, OBAMA

Some people play Fantasy Football. We play Fantasy Phone...

Fri, 10 May 2013 20:53:03 -0400

Some people play Fantasy Football. We play Fantasy Phone Company.

Shadytel.

Charlatan, Martyr, and Hustler.

Wed, 08 May 2013 00:25:04 -0400

Charlatan, Martyr, and Hustler.

A tel called nowhere.

Mon, 06 May 2013 19:52:59 -0400

A tel called nowhere.

livejamie: This video is a cat, dressed in a shark costume,...

Sat, 04 May 2013 13:55:12 -0400

livejamie:

This video is a cat, dressed in a shark costume, riding a Roomba, chasing a duckling around. And if that weren’t enough, a dog shows up, dressed in his own hammerhead costume.

Happy Caturday.

May the fourth be with you.

Sat, 04 May 2013 13:08:00 -0400

May the fourth be with you.

Arduino + ARM + Wifi + Extra Smallness on one board. Literally...

Fri, 03 May 2013 22:31:00 -0400

Arduino + ARM + Wifi + Extra Smallness on one board. Literally the core of everything I’ve been wanting to build with Arduino, finally built.

NYC GOV: 2013 NYC Bike Map

Fri, 03 May 2013 10:21:02 -0400

NYC GOV: 2013 NYC Bike Map:

nycgov:

The NYC Department of Transportation recently updated its Cycling Map for 2013. The new map marks all 900 miles of bike-friendly paths in NYC. Over 375,000 maps will be distributed this year from bicycle shops, libraries, and schools. You can also order your free copy by calling 311.

In…

Hideaki Anno Releases Statement About New Evangelion Movies

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 21:16:01 -0400

Hideaki Anno Releases Statement About New Evangelion Movies:

den1990:

EVA creator posts message in theatres across Japan, hopes to lure new audiences to Evangelion films

On February 17th, Shin Seiki Evangelion (Neon Genesis Evangelion) creator Hideaki Anno made a statement in the form of a movie poster that appeared in theatres all over Japan. The announcement was also posted on the new Evangelion movie and Yahoo! Japan portal sites for the film, which also launched on Friday.

A translation of the entire announcement is as follows:

Many different desires are motivating us to create the new “Evangelion” film.

The desire to portray my sincere feelings on film.
The desire to share, with an audience, the embodiment of image, the diversity of expressions, and the detailed portrayal of emotions that animation offers.
The desire to connect today’s exhausted Japanese animation [industry] to the future.
The desire to fight the continuing trend of stagnation in anime.
The desire to support the strength of heart that exists in the world.

Finally, the desire to have these wishes be realized.

For these purposes, we used the best methods available to us to make another Evangelion film.
Many times we wondered, “It’s a title that’s more than 10 years old. Why now?”
“Eva is too old”, we felt.
However, over the past 12 years, there has been no anime newer than Eva.

Specifically, among the stagnant mood of the present day, it is the portrayal of will - not technology - that is most important.
To support the fans that support animation, we felt that a work that would appeal to middle and high school-aged men, who quickly grow away from Anime, was necessary.
When we decided that we wanted to something to support the anime [industry] of today, the determination to return to this title was strong.

As the creator of this project, [I assure you that] a very new-feeling Evangelion world has beeen constructed.
For this purpose, we are not returning to our roots at Gainax. I have set up a production company and studio, and it is in this new setting that we will start again.
Without looking back, without admiration for the circumstances, we aim to walk towards the future.
Thankfully, we have gathered staff from the old series, new staff, and many other fantastic staff to work on this series.
We realize that we are creating something that will be better than the last series.

”Eva” is a story that repeats.
It is a story where the main character witnesses many horrors with his own eyes, but still tries to stand up again.
It is a story of will; a story of moving forward, if only just a little.
It is a story of fear, where someone who must face indefinite solitude fears reaching out to others, but still wants to try.
We hope that you look forward to the 4 new retellings of this story.

In closing, it is also our job to provide a service to our customers.
Although it seems obvious, we aim to create a form of entertainment that anyone can look forward to; one that people who have never seen Evangelion can easily adjust to, one that can engage audiences as a movie for theatres, and one that produces a new understanding of the world.

This fall, we hope you can join us.

Creator/General Director, Anno Hideaki

* SPOILER WARNING * cateringisalie: Evangelion 3.33: You...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 01:39:26 -0400

*** SPOILER WARNING ***

cateringisalie:

Evangelion 3.33: You Can (Not) Redo

A quick run-down of where we were with the Evangelion films by this point; Evangelion 1.11 was a glorious reworking of the first six episodes of the TV series in cinematic form with cryptic hints at a changed future for the series, with late reveals brought really far forward, some changed terminology and great animation. Evangelion 2.22 derailed from the existing TV series canon, expanded the cast, changed relationship dynamics, introduced a new pilot, offered an astonishingly dramatic ending, and began Third Impact. A whole half-way through the series.

3.0 and 3.33 sure had their work cut out following that ending. I’d already seen the first six minutes of the latest film was it was premiered back in November. It was interesting but hinted that an astonishing amount of explanation was needed for how things wound up like that. Do we get that explanation? No. Well, we get part of one, but its not enough, there’s just not enough information to make sense of what happened between 2.22 and 3.33.

There is a clear emotion running through this film; and that emotion is abject frustration. I can’t remember the last time I was this irritated by nearly every single character on-screen. There are a slew of new characters who are never introduced. Half the time the existing cast variously tell Shinji he doesn’t need to do anything, glare at him or actively try to injure him. The other half they’re yelling at him for not understanding the situation.

Never before have I been so much on Shinji’s side. He doesn’t understand what’s going on, and as a direct consequence of framing neither do we. Asuka spends the film livid with Shinji but never stops to explain why. Misato and Ritsuko are the same. Kaworu at least is capable of talking without being obtuse and vindictive, but pretty much fails to fill in some much needed back-story.

I’m not going to really go into that (not least as I don’t fully understand what did happen), but suffice to say the sheer hints of what happened in the direct aftermath of 2.22 seem a million times more important then anything in 3.33 and the story relies on them so heavily that to not explain them fully just alienates the audience that much further. There’s even new terminology, strange hints and portents, and none of it will give you a moment of satisfaction.

The next episode preview doesn’t so much offer a final conclusion as point to an extended brawl for stakes we don’t comprehend, involving combatants we don’t care for. 3.33 has new terminology it fails to explain. Appearances and dialogue from characters made me want to swear every single time they spoke.

Evangelion has a reputation for being cryptic, symbolic and confusing, and never has this been so painfully true as with 3.33. It’s as if the writers had no clue where to proceed after the finale of 2.22, and rather then try to produce a workable plot, rushed a third film into production well before things were ready.

This was not a pleasant film to watch; not simply for all the blood and gore, but for the absolute failure to allow the audience to enjoy watching any one minute of it. If there is any hope for the films, 4.0 is going to have to work some serious magic.

This.

blag.dh

Smartphone Rants, Part III: A Tracking Device that Makes Phone Calls

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things' – video

Happy Caturday.

darkmindbrightfuture: Holy Other - Yr Love

We think we’re at a point where we get to choose our own...

I think it’s a responsibility for any artist to protect...

radiomaru: Waaaaaaaaa~* Happy Caturday.

Smartphone Rants, Part II: The Broken Glass Age

simurai: Tried to make a Brushed Metal style in CSS3. The...

shapeways: at Shapeways LIC

Smartphone Rants, Part I: Chasing the Charge Dragon

Some people play Fantasy Football. We play Fantasy Phone...

Charlatan, Martyr, and Hustler.

A tel called nowhere.

livejamie: This video is a cat, dressed in a shark costume,...

May the fourth be with you.

Arduino + ARM + Wifi + Extra Smallness on one board. Literally...

NYC GOV: 2013 NYC Bike Map

Hideaki Anno Releases Statement About New Evangelion Movies

*** SPOILER WARNING *** cateringisalie: Evangelion 3.33: You...

* SPOILER WARNING * cateringisalie: Evangelion 3.33: You...