-
Unified theory of Cthulhu # includes white paper on gravitational distortions and madness ; HT @jimfinnis
In 1928, the late Francis Wayland Thurston published a scandalous manuscript in purport of warning the world of a global conspiracy of occultists. Among the documents he gathered to support his thesis was the personal account of a sailor by the name of Gustaf Johansen, describing an encounter with an extraordinary island. Johansen`s descriptions of…
-
BBC News – Cold Calling: The victim who fought back – and won # #PPI scams beware
Back in July, Mr Herman answered a call from an overseas call centre inviting him to make a PPI claim, he decided to stay on the line. He answered the caller’s questions until he was eventually passed through to a UK operation, called PPI Claimline, and told them he wanted to be taken off their…
-
Royal Society journals open access # Going to be JSTOR & @aaronsw all over again, but British? HT @geoffarnold @openrightsgroup
Compare: Royal Society journals open access – The Panda’s Thumb. With http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-07/20/swartz-arrest?page=all
-
TIL Encryption systems are (or were) *heavy* – really heavy. Must have been all those One-Time Pads.
…and that’s why terrorists could snoop Predator video feeds: There were reasons for this. The original Predator, just 27 feet long, was little more than a scaled-up model plane with an 85-horsepower engine. It had a payload of just half a ton for all its fuel, cameras and radios. And encryption systems can be heavy. (Big…
-
Rethinking the Computer at 80 – NYTimes.com #PGN # MUST READ FOR ALL SECURITY GEEKS /ht @fanf
MENLO PARK, Calif. — Many people cite Albert Einstein’s aphorism “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Only a handful, however, have had the opportunity to discuss the concept with the physicist over breakfast. One of those is Peter G. Neumann, now an 80-year-old computer scientist at SRI International, a pioneering…
-
Cops outraged after NYU class requires students to plot a terrorist attack | Fox News #fairandbalanced
Especially note the “He was blasted to hell in Yemen last year in a CIA drone strike“. No editorialising there, then. Heavens forfend these folk ever attend a proper security conference, too. A New York University class on transnational terrorism is requiring students to “hypothetically plan a terrorist attack” — and shocked cops say the…
-
Tsunamis on Lake Geneva: Lake monsters | The Economist
IN 563AD a tsunami devastated Geneva. Two accounts of the disaster, one by Gregory of Tours and the other by Marius of Avenches, have survived. What caused the wave, and the extent of the damage that resulted, have been matters of conjecture for centuries. But over the past decade several groups of scientists have pieced…
-
Why making a call-centre worker say “poopsy-poo” will strengthen your security » The Privacy Surgeon # HT @owenblacker
Having become heartily sick of arguing the toss over who should provide information first I discussed the dilemma with a helpful call centre manager and we figured a solution. It turns out that nearly all call centre systems have a “special instructions” field that allows operators to add useful comments about calling times, payment instructions…
-
The first nuclear-propelled manmade object in space?
During the Pascal-B nuclear test, a heavy (900 kg) (approx 1,984 pounds) steel plate cap (a piece of armor plate) was blasted off the top of a test shaft at a speed of more than 66 km/s (41 miles per second). Before the test, experimental designer Dr. Brownlee had performed a highly approximate calculation that…
-
This is what the 3D Inspection of www.whitehouse.gov/cybersecurity looks like
update: Tools > Web Developer > Inspect. Then hit 3D Click to embiggen. Note the floating elements top-right. And the highlighted blue element with its details in the toolbar at the bottom. This is going to be really useful…