Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 732

Use Twitter to Wiretap Yourself and Megaphone It To the Police

Twitter Revolution made in USA:

Tweet about the police, get  arrested.

Date: October 4, 2009 10:22:03 PM GMT+02:00

What will the web 2.0 visionaries say about this? My hunch: Nothing!

(((Well, I'm kind of a "Web 2.0 visionary," and I'm American to boot,

so I'm gonna horn in and help ol' Felix out here.  There's a lot of this

material available.  Ton o' links.  Oodles. More than you wanna see.)))

But, perhaps the even sadder story is that having a picture of Marx and
Lenin at home is taken as...

Sarkozy political ops people pirate Sarkozy DVDs

*Man, that's pitiful.

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/10/08/nicolas-copyright-sa.html

*At this point I'm wondering if maybe HADOPI deserves a try just because

the Internet is inherently corrupting. Suppose that ALL of France permanently

cut itself off from the Internet, and the French economy boomed, and

employment rose, and the food was great and the sun was shining and Carla

Bruni and Johnny Halliday were selling tons of analog vinyl records…

*If we KNEW the Internet was making us ALL look...

Rebiya Kadeer, Chinese capitalist mogul and mother of 11

"Dressed in traditional Uyghur clothing and with her hair in braids, the energetic and animated 62-year-old grandmother did not look the part of a 'terrorist.'"

http://www.rferl.org/content/Uyghur_Leader_Entire_TurkicSpeaking_World_Rallied_To_Support_Us/1824878.html

*Definitely one of the weirder ethnic-breakaway figures loose on the global landscape lately.

Delete 1984, cough up 150 grand

*Holy mackerel! Orwell himself never made remotely that sum from that book.

–Amazon.com Agrees to Pay US $150,000 to Settle Kindle eBook Removal Lawsuit
(October 1 & 2, 2009)
Amazon.com has agreed to a settlement that would have the company pay
US $150,000 to a Michigan high school student who sued the company after
his copy of 1984 was deleted from his Kindle reading device without
notice. In June of this year, Amazon deleted copies of 1984 and Animal
Farm from users' devices after learning that ...

Core77 at Sketching in Hardware 09

*The state-of-the-art in hardware-geek designer hip.

http://www.core77.com/blog/featured_items/sketching_in_hardware_is_changing_your_life_by_fabricio_dore__14769.asp

"One weekend this past July, an invitation-only group of 40 artists, designers, and researchers from design hotspots and leading institutions such as IDEO, Microsoft Research, NYU, Stanford, Umeå Institute of Design, Wired Magazine UK, and Yamaha, among others (complete list here), gathered in an (almost) secret location in...

Augmented Reality: PIT Strategy

*Not a new YouTube release, and I have no idea if this thing is likely

to see release or not. But this has got to be a textbook example of

media hybridization.

*Part racing-game, part card-game, and part Augmented Reality on a web-linked screen.

All it needs is keychains, T-shirts and Pikachu in a racing helmet.

The BioArt Video PlayList

*Oh lord a mercy. Got some hairy, pulsating stuff here.

"Bioart is art created with living organisms, living cells and materials from living organisms such as DNA, protein and blood."

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=75B185B254023FCC

*Those are interesting videos, but the fact that you can see them all on YouTube, curated as a genre, a school-of-art, is also quite a hairy development. "Bio Art" used to be a rather arcane matter than took a couple of hours of ideological explication...

The Real Cyber Czar

*Spooks uber alles.

*The NSA has won the turf battle, but now they have the interesting problem that the worst cybersecurity threats to the USA come from non-governmental entities. Instead of the NSA versus the DHS (which is clearly something NSA is pretty good at), it's gonna be NSA versus the likes of the Storm Worm Zhelatin Gang. Suppose there's a much-trumpeted Electronic Pearl Harbor and the eastern seaboard goes dark for a couple of days. Do you think anybody is gonna call the NSA on ...

Augmented Reality: Previews of ISMAR 09

*Augmented room design:

*Lots more right here:

http://gamesalfresco.com/2009/10/01/ismar-2009-demos-sneak-preview-of-the-worlds-best-augmented-reality-event/

Augmented Reality: Augmented World Trade Center Re-Appears

*Well, there's some cheery living proof that Augmented Reality can press on some

raw political nerves. This was inevitable, so I'm glad to see it happen; this oughta put a cork

into people who still think AR is some kind of bubble-gum card trick.

http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/10/06/twin-towers-seen-once-more-via-augmented-reality-iphone-app/

"[Austria:] Mobilizy, the company from Salzburg, that brought us one of the world's first Augmented Reality browsers, Wikitude, just released a major...