This is our 1st full episode. In this episode we explore the 5th Estate… to hopefully, nudge you in the direction of questioning everything. Even, (or should that be… especially?) mainstream media.
We’re gonna try podcasting! Wish us luck. This first podcast, we’ll call podcast zero, provides a teaser of what is to come. Our podcast series is called Thought Exercises! Okay, yes, we did do the same said podcast, before, when our website was VRHacks. The primary difference was, that podcast was a text2voice rendition of […]
I recently purchased the Cirago USB Bluetooth/Wifi combo to use with my raspberry pi. All things considered, I am quite pleased. Being reasonably versed in google-fu, helped, of course. Since I want the freedom to do some mobile tinkering, I need to access the pi sans a lan. That, and my latest wild hair project […]
Since I have been spending a great deal of my time playing in the field of 3D design and printing, I have only recently stumbled upon, and had time to read, “Privacy for Me and Not for Thee,” penned by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, a human rights activist whom I first encountered in the virtual world […]
Not long ago, someone asked if I liked 3D printing better than virtual worlds. The short answer is, equally but differently.
“Secure web servers are the equivalent of heavy armored cars. The problem is, they are being used to transfer rolls of coins and checks written in crayon by people on park benches to merchants doing business in cardboard boxes from beneath highway bridges. Further, the roads are subject to random detours, anyone with a screwdriver […]
Pariah, darling, or somewhere in between. Bitcoin has continued to linger in the daily media spotlight since the shuttering of darknet’s black-market drug bazaar, Silk Road, and the subsequent announcement of the arrest of its alleged owner, Ross William Ulbricht (aka DPR), on October 2, 2013. Media mavens have long cast bitcoin as a sort […]
“We’re facing a very great threat of loosely-coupled, organizational networks that increasingly rely on IT infrastructure to coordinate their movements and recruit young disenfranchised, apathetic guys as suicidal pawns in a sophisticated, dispersed movement. (…)” (AHM, Usenet, September 21, 2001)
Meet Jim Script Kiddie (skiddie). He is the guy (usually in his early to mid teens) who comes into a hacker forum, asking inane questions like, “how can I be a hacker?” He also tends to over-indulge in “hacker speak” making him look pretty much like a moron to seasoned (and not so) computer netizens.
In 1956, FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover initiated a program, code-named COINTELPRO (counter intelligence program) ushering in what would become the mainstay for how intelligence communities dealt with domesitic affairs. The sole directive of this program was “to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the activities of various dissidents and their leaders.
Rebecca Zook of Mashable penned a curious article, “Why Computer Engineer Barbie is Good for Women in Tech.” Curious, because she proceeds to explain why she feels Engineer Barbies are good for us. How they somehow open our eyes and minds to being more tolerant of women in Engineering. And while her claim makes a […]
The phrase, “ghost in the machine,” was coined by 20th century British philosopher, Gilbert Ryle as a means of characterizing 17th century mathematician and philosopher, René Descartes theory of mind. Descartes theory was an offshoot of the age-old dualism theories that dated back to Plato and Aristotle. His theory—referred to as Cartesian Dualism—distilled dualism into […]
There has been a lot of buzzing about augmented reality. In the spring of this year, MIT student, Pranav Mistry, gave a demo of his new gadget, the Sixth Sense. The idea of his invention is to augment our everyday activities with overlays of information culled from the Internet. Let’s repeat that.