Money From ATMs

Couple ways to get money from ATMs: Wired points out how to hack the machine itself, NYT discusses how a bank in India was hacked allowing thieves in NYC to steal thousands from multiple machines, and the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal posted video on youtube of the simplest method of all.

Fed Spending (over 50 years)

NPR Money has a nice breakdown of Federal Spending from 1962-2012 in graphic.

Fast Buses

A Fast Bus is a public bus service where the bus has its own road to travel on, allowing riders to get where they need with the least delay as possible.  cool systems, some challenges.

Female Science Writers

Robert Krulwich posts an interesting piece on Science Blogger Emily Graslie, and the completely crazy challenges that woman science reporters have to deal with.

Yearly War on Christmas Poop

Fox news, always showing off their investigative reporting skills, does their yearly war on Christmas.  Of coarse it's all bile, but at least its great fodder for the Daily Show.  Now CNN posts a history of our governments involvement in Christmas and how it has in the past been much less involved.  

Kapton Tape Please!

Yes Virginia, you can own someones computer, look through their camera, and not have the "record" light hint to the user what is going on.  This is why it's a good idea to cover those cameras!

Three Blind Phreaks

Old favorite 2600 story from a while back.  It's about the blind Badir brothers, and how they completely owned Bezeq (Israels old MaBell)

Free Arcade Games Online!

The Internet Archive is publishing old video games online that you can play directly on your web browser!  All hail the Internet Archive!

Life @ Amazon in UK

Financial Times has an interesting piece on what working at Amazon in Rugeley UK is like. Hard work, job insecurity, and mindless work. Interesting how they do stuff, but also depressing. Moral of story: try as hard as you can to stay in school.

Wealth Inequality in America

Well put together (and researched) video of the delta of wealth in the US.

winamp is dead. Long live winamp!

ArsTechnica notes that after 15 years, AOLs mismanagement has eventually killed winamp.

WINAMP IS BACK!!!!
Winamp 5.8 Has Been Officially Released And Supports Windows 10!!

Bartolome not Columbus

'Cause Columbus was a dick!

(as pointed out in the Oatmeal)

No more 4th!

Following up on a previous note about how DHS has just about removed the 4th amendment, On the Media, has an interesting piece about Terry Bressi and his difficulties getting to work without being harassed by law enforcement.

who has our debt?

Because of our stupid House of Reps, and their threats to default on our dept, Planet Money has a nice graphic to visualize who has the largest amounts of our bonds.

$45 Mini PC

Want a low cost mini pc for running monitoring and different scripts?  Check out SolidRun's  2"x2"x2" CuBox, a mini-pc that runs Android or Linux.  The more advanced units even include wifi.  (I have not played with this yet though..)

What good can come from hoarding?

Photographer Jim Golden has some very amazing photos of "collections of stuff".  Wired has a good piece on him, and some great examples of his work, and how he does it.

"Hot or Not" app used to design better cites?

Wired has an interesting piece on a simple app called Place Pulse made by MIT's Media Lab, which uses Google Street View  to show random locations in specific cities, and then asks users to judge which random image is nicer.

What's so wrong with secure Email?

Secure email is a ridiculously simple concept, but unfortunately with very few simple to use applications available to the public.  MailPile is a startup who is attempting to come up with a good working solution.  They also have gotten quite a bit of public backing (they raised $135k with a goal of $100k). Unfortunately, as Slashdot points out (and ArsTechnica), PayPal seems to have unfairly frozen their account to apparently prevent them from making easy to encrypt emails.  

Law + Luddite = ?

Vanity Fair have a very good article by Michael Lewis, about Sergey Aleynikov who is an ex-Goldman Sachs developer who got busted by the FBI for "stealing source code" from his ex employer.  Its an interesting read, about the lack of understanding of technology by law enforcement, the public, and big business.

Big trouble with little bugs

CDC published its first of a kind assessment of the threat we face from antibiotic resistant bugs.  Wired has a nice summary of the results, but it looks dire, suggesting that we will be soon in a "post-antibiotic era".

WiFi Pineapple

Slashdot points out the Pineapple, a wifi hacking device for $80.  A must have gift for the holidays!

Car Pool?

Planet Money shows in graphs how for the last 70 years, the US has been relying more and more on private vehicles to get people to work and less ans less on alternative modes of transportation.

Marine Dead Zones

Earth Observatory has an interesting graphic listing all the dead zones in the sea, and the size of them.

candlestick

Slashdot points out Alex Wellerstein's interactive map which shows the explosive force of different nukes or with different yields and the fall out area from them, and does this over any spot on google maps.  (never realized how big some of those bombs got.)

Want to buy a WOPR?

Too bad. It was just a prop that no longer exists.  (bummer.. I'd get it just for the blinky lights!)  But.. the good news is that IT World has pointed out that the PC's that David used is still around, and is up for sale.  Hope someone gets it and gives it to the Computer History Museum.

Gifting Drugs as a CyberAttack

Funny story about the security journalist Brian Krebs.  Apparently there are some folks out there that really don't like him, and they have been doing all sorts of "aggressive" pranks from swatting him to most recently, mailing heroin to his house and narcing on him to the police.

NSA pwned DE-CIX

The Financial Times's reporter Chris Bryant is claiming that the report by Der Spiegel's Laura Poitras, Marcel Rosenbach, Fidelius Schmid and Holger Stark, points out that the worlds largest exchange DE-CIX, has somehow been "working" with the NSA.  He claims that the NSA has been able to "obtained around 500m communications metadata a month from Germany".

Can't imagine that they are spanning/tapping any ports as the size of the network, number of peers and the number of data centers potentially included would make this a bit on the difficult side, They must be getting some flow data or something... (??)

On a side note, Slashdot notes MITs Immersion Project, that "constructs a map of your associations. Without opening a single message, it gives a clear view of who you connect with. It's a glimpse of some of what the NSA PRISM can do."

Flying the Habu

BBC has a quick video with Colonel Rich Graham, who was the commander of the SR71 Blackbird detachments.

Liberty And Justice

Nina Totenberg reports: 

• Supreme Court Extends Gay-Marriage Rights With Two Rulings (June 26th. 2013)
• Supreme Court Expands Gay Rights In 2 Major Rulings (June 27th. 2013)
• Judge Who Struck Down Proposition 8 Knew Case Would Go Far (June 29th. 2013)

Look! Up in the sky! It's a Bird....

BBC has a bunch of pictures by Michael Markieta, visualizing all the flights around the world.  More on this can be seen at Spatial Analysis. 

Tallest Buildings

Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (who would have known?) has a nice page that lists the tallest buildings as per floors/overall height, and has a bunch of interesting info about large buildings. 

Online Education

Lot of chatter about online education, what some people are doing, and some suggestions on where we might be going.  (and some old points)

• Innovation Hub interviews Sal Khan
• TED Talk by Sugata Mitra about how people can learn on their own (also NPR writeup on this)
• Unstoppable Learning: TED Radio Hour shows on new ways of thinking of education.
• Is Massively Open Online Education a Threat of a Blessing (npr)

Simple Excel error Tanks the European Economy

Marketplace and the BBC both have good writeups on how the economic austerity plans, written by Harvard economists Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, which have tanked the EU economy, and which the US Republicans have been basing their plans on, are faulty.

"This week, economists have been astonished to find that a famous academic paper often used to make the case for austerity cuts contains major errors. Another surprise is that the mistakes, by two eminent Harvard professors, were spotted by a student doing his homework." -[BBC]

 "Better double-check your Excel spreadsheets. This week, two Harvard economists, Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, admitted they had made a mistake in the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet they used in their report on GDP and growth." - [marketplace]

Big MamaJama

Arstechnica has a really interesting read on "How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 moon rocket engine back to life".  Great write up on how massive these engines were, and what it took to take one off of the shelf from a museum, digitize it, model it, and then use that data to come up with the next-gen heavy lifter.  Choice quote:

The power output of the Saturn first stage was 60 gigawatts. This happens to be very similar to the peak electricity demand of the United Kingdom.

New DARPA X-Challange: VTOL

BBC notes the new DARPA funded X-challenge, of creating a better design for a VTOL aircraft.  (aka, something that takes off like a helicopter, and then flies like a plane.)  There is also a reference to the "wheel of misfortune" which is a cool diagram cataloging all the different kinds of VTOL aircraft already created. 

Tour of the Space Station (in HD)

Great :30 min High Res Video of a tour of the International Space Station by departing commander Sunita Williams.

Bad 'Hoods of the Net

BBC reports on a study (and slashdot) by Giovane Cesar Moreira Moura at the University of Twente on where all the bad traffic is coming from on the net.  Seems that spammers come from India, and Phishers are from the US.

New "fail safe" Nuke Power Plants

The register has an article on new nuke power plant designs that would recycle old spent fuel, and be built in such a way that would be free from melt down issues.

"digital" watch

Sure you can get yourself a nice fancy wrist watch, but the the new "connected" watches like pebble, and i'm are very cool as well.

Find the Gorilla

This is the famous experiment by Christopher Chabris related to your ability to pay attention to more thanone thing.
 
On that note, Alix Spiegel has a piece in NPR showing how even Radiologists, who specialize in seeing things in images that most people could not identify, still miss seeing the gorilla hiding in plain sight.

Constitution-Free Zone

Wired and ArsTechnica has write ups on how the Department of Homeland Security has rights to stop, question, and detain anyone within 100 miles of the borders of the country.  (that includes just about every major city in the country.)

CA Certificates

Guys at Berkeley created a map showing the relationships between all the root CA's and their intermediates.  Maybe it's not perfect, but it is kind of cool. 

scientific journals without insane publisher fees

Much has been said about the ridiculous fees and the inaccessibility of research in scientific journals.  There is always the "non-peer reviewed arXiv", but Tim Gowers at Cambridge wants to create a open-access peer reviewed journal that sits on top of arXiv. 

Real life Man from Earth?

The gist of the movie The Man from Earth is this guy that has lived 14000 years.  (no, there isn't any cool sword fighting.)  Well, it looks like there ~might~ be a real example of this with Brooke Greenberg who is 20 years old, but has not aged since the age of 5. 

Dam Fast

Nice side-by-side comparison of F1 and GT race cars going down the track.  (aka: GT is really fast, F1 is psycho.)  Also note TopGears show on driving F1 cars.