The Builder’s High
By: Rands in Repose, January 2, 2014
When I am in a foul mood, I have a surefire way to improve my outlook – I build something. A foul mood is a stubborn beast and it does not give ground easily. It is an effort to simply get past the foulness in order to start building, but once the building has begun, the foul beast loses ground.
I don’t know what cascading chemical awesomeness is going down in my brain when it detects and rewards me for the act of building, but I’m certain that the hormonal cocktail is the end result of millions of years of evolution. Part of the reason we’re at the top of the food chain is that we are chemically rewarded when we are industrious – it is evolutionarily advantageous to »
Try as I might, I can’t shake the feeling that 2014 is the year we lose the Web. The W3C push for DRM in all browsers is going to ensure that all interfaces built in HTML5 (which will be pretty much everything) will be opaque to users, and it will be illegal to report on security flaws in them (because reporting a security flaw in DRM exposes you to risk of prosecution for making a circumvention device), so they will be riddled with holes that creeps, RATters, spooks, authoritarians and crooks will be able to use to take over your computer and fuck you in every possible way.
We were pressured to weaken the mobile security in the 80’s
They wanted a key length of 48 bit. We were very surprised. The West Germans protested because they wanted a stronger encryption to prevent spying from East Germany. The compromise was a key length of 64 bit – where the ten last bits were set to zero. The result was an effective key length of 54 bit.
…
One other thing that was put in the GSM specification, after demands from some countries, was that the encryption could be turned off, without the cell phone user knowing.
When the encryption is turned off, it is also quite easy for private citizens with the right equipment to eavesdrop on cell phone calls.
“We’re in a business where people perceive complexity as good. It’s not good. Complexity is not good. People don’t understand the elegance of simplicity. There are very few people left that do understand it. The whole idea is to take a sophisticated idea and reduce it to the simplest possible terms so that it’s accessible to everybody — and don’t get simple mixed up with simplistic. It’s how you mount and present something that makes it engaging…Simplistic is doing it badly…simple is your choices.”
—- Gordon Willis on the simplicity of cinematography
Don’t you just love this shot reverse shot sequence in Manhattan?
Stills from Manhattan (1979, dir. Woody Allen) CInematography by Gordon Willis
Bertrand Russell’s Ten Commandments for Living in a Healthy Democracy
Bertrand Russell’s Ten Commandments for Living in a Healthy Democracy
1: Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2: Do not think it worthwhile to produce belief by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3: Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed.
4: When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
5: Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
6: Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
7: Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
8: Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in »
but I can think of Mark Zuckerberg only as a tunnel visionary. He wants Facebook to connect all the people in the world & have a personalized theory of mind for each user. As far as he sees, this is for the good. Some of the questions asked by the incisive audience were polite versions of “What are the dangers of having this much data about so many people?” and “What does Facebook as a company do to help society?” These Zuckerberg dodged so expertly that by the time he was done “answering” (with a hefty & convincing confidence), I had forgotten exactly what the question was.
This year Wired is sending their reporters to cover CES only using phones.
What a crazy, insane, minigame inside the biggest news week for tech.
Instead of the usual mix of old hands and greenhorns, WIRED’s crew is comprised entirely of CES veterans. Which means that covering it would be, like, easy for our team. Easy, that is, if we didn’t intentionally make things harder. So we’re not letting them use computers.
This year at CES, our core crew of reporters can use only their phones to cover the show—this includes any text, images, video or audio content they create. No DSLRS, no laptops; no fancy compact-system cameras or iPads. Just phones. (Our photo department reserves the right to swap out terrible images; you’re welcome.) We’ll call it our CES
Mobile ChallengeSmartphone SuperchallengeSmartphone Thunderdome. And to make it more interesting, »
Goodbye, Cameras
Craig Mod on why he’s done with cameras: http://nyr.kr/1bzuPxY
“In the same way that the transition from film to digital is now taken for granted, the shift from cameras to networked devices with lenses should be obvious. While we’ve long obsessed over the size of the film and image…
Changing with change. Mobilis in mobili.
“The hardest part of being in a biracial relationship is taking a picture together.” [whatthecaptcha]
BRUSH WITH PIZZA by Dikayl Rimmasch
Dear pizza, we love you more than words can say.
(Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)
In 1984, there were 1000 connected devices. That number rose up to reach a million devices in 1992, and reached a billion devices in 2008. Our estimates say…that we will have roughly 50 billion connected devices by the year 2020. That number is going to really accelerate over the next several years. Despite the fact, we estimate that only one percent of things that could have an IP address do have an IP address today, so we like to say that 99 percent of the world is still asleep. It’s up to our imaginations to figure out what will happen when the 99 percent wakes up.
Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s Chief Technology and Strategy Officer, on The Internet of Things in 2014 (via wearebunker)
The internet as you know isn’t even the overture of the symphony of creativity that’s »
How I Shoot: Videos that Tell Stories with @hamadahideaki
How I Shoot is a series where we ask Instagrammers to tell us about the set-up and process behind their photos and videos. This week, Hideaki Hamada (@hamadahideaki) shares his tips for telling a story using video.
Instagrammer Hideaki Hamada (@hamadahideaki) based in Osaka, Japan, finds his creative inspiration in people. Interested particularly in portraits, Hideaki’s favorite models are his two sons, Haru and Mina. “I try to take photos of scenes with people or anything that hints the presence of people,” he says. “I have always taken pictures of my family and ever since I realized that Instagram is the perfect tool to tell real-time stories about your everyday life, I have been posting multiple times a day.”
When those stories involve movement, sound and atmosphere »
But soft tissue… soft tissue is easy to add to the team, but time-consuming to remove. Soft tissue bogs down the rest of the organization, what with all those meetings, the slowdown of time to market, the difficulty in turning on a dime. An organization that lets itself be overwhelmed by the small but insistent demands of too much soft tissue gets happy, then it gets fat, then it dies.
A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing.
Mary Oliver, one of our greatest living poets, on what dogs teach us about the meaning of our human lives (via explore-blog)
Design of The Daft Punk Disguise
Behind The Helmets is a short documentary explaining how members of the band Daft Punk perfected the art of concealing their identities. They took it all very seriously — calling upon an Ohio company that does the metalizing for NASA spacesuits and even the man who designs jumbotron screens to help with their helmet design.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)