Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 715

Beyond Magazine #2

*I'm keen on these Beyond guys because they are into "architecture fiction."

http://shrapnelcontemporary.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/beyond-again/

"The current issue of Beyond is being launched next Thursday 19th, 6pm, within the International Architecture Biennale of Rotterdam, at the Nai.

"After Venice (with Yehuda Safran, Reed Krolloff, Shumon Basar and Map Office), after Harvard (with Eve Blau), after London (with Colin Fournier, Sam Jacob and Liam Young), it is my immense pleasure to announce ...

The Tamara Mellon Guide to Life

*Tamara Mellon is famed for Beyond the Beyond readers as the victim of one of the weirdest computer-intrusion scandals we ever covered. So it's pleasant to see our Tamara soldiering on three years later, high heels, Botox and all. Goes to show that having bent spooks rampage through your PC isn't always the end of the world.

http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyon...

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/fashion/article-23768523-running-in-heels-tamara-mellons-guide-to-life.do

"Int...

Break outta jail, and in come the iPhone hackers

*From SANS (and don't say they didn't warn you:)

–iPhone Data Stealing Exploit Released

(November 11, 2009)

"The same vulnerability that was used to spread a relatively harmless
worm is now being exploited to allow attackers to steal data from
jailbroken iPhones. An estimated six to eight percent of iPhones are
jailbroken, meaning they have been modified to allow applications and
other code to run on the devices even if that code has not been signed
by Apple. The attackers can access music...

What the heck, just spy on everything, it's bound to be useful somehow

*Spookocracy in power. Terrorists and spooks are like Windows and Intel.

*Y'know, this isn't North Korea under discussion here — it's Britain, "Mother of Parliaments," "Britons never never shall be slaves," "man's home is his castle" and all that. It's not that the British don't already Echelon everything they can get their wavelengthy hands on, 'cause they do. This isn't an innovation, it's an attempt to give British spookocracy some modern transparency. Why they would wanna do that, and ...

Atop Burj Dubai

*Nice that it's still so raw and messed-up there. Nice cinema verite vernacular video, too.

Arphid Watch: a worldwide RFID deployment map

*Gosh, that looks kinda handy. Doesn't show where the chips themselves have gone, but it's a nice heat-map of the industry.

http://www.rfidjournalevents.com/map.php

The Fascist Theory of Ruin Value

*Archispeak alert.

http://youyouidiot.blogspot.com/2009/11/albert-speer-and-fascist-theory-of.html

(…)

"So what are the basic points of the 'fascist theory of ruins'? The 'nationalisation' of victimhood and melancholy, the attempted closure after an encounter with genuine disappearance, a distrust of modernisation, and lashings of sentimentality. It's quite easy really.

"What complicates matters somewhat is that Speer also designed the 'cathedral of light', which was part of the very same...

Vooks

*Y'know, there are certain forms of media mashup that instinctively provoke an urge to throw their inventors off a cliff. Not that "vooks" are one of 'em. Oh no.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/books_online_video_vooks.php

*I don't have much trouble with, say, authors on video… except that they're ugly, and they never shut up… So there's bound to be some positive, useful niche for "vooks"… For instance, I'd be super-interested in a vook of Lord Byron's "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage"...

Science versus the seance, 1891

*The seance pretty much wins hands down.

*Awesome period spook photos here. Get yourself some MAKE magazine gear, some bluetooth and a few Arduino boards, and it ought to be dead easy to re-create an ultra-Gothic steampunk apparitional seance, in all its table-rapping, ectoplasmatic glory.

http://www.pd.org/Perforations/perf29/violi/violi_proof_positive.htm

(…)

"It is obvious that Lombroso's association with this environment was sure to have a startling effect, given that his standing and...

Tainted Address Blocks

*Internet address blocks as ghost towns. Tainted by crime, haunted forever. People shiver when they look at these deserted slums. A cold wind whistles through them.

*Gothic High Tech.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/11/a_year_later_a_look_back_at_mc.html

"A year ago today, the Internet community witnessed a remarkable event: The unplugging of McColo, a Web hosting facility in Northern California that for a long time controlled a majority of the spam-sending operations on...