ONLINE PRIVACY:
"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."
~Edward Snowden
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FOSS, HELL YEA!
FOSS means Free and Open Source Software. It doesn’t mean the software is free of cost. It means that the software's source code is open for all and anyone is free to use, study and modify the code. This principle allows others to contribute to developing and improving a software like a community.
In short, it means you have:
> The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
> The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish.
> The freedom to redristibute copies so you may help your neighbour.
> The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others.
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Because the preservation of humanity's knowledge is based:> The Internet Archive |
INTRIGUING LINKS
Dig Deeper Agora Road Old Maps Online 100K stars
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ONEKO
Outputs a cat that chases your cursor
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VARIOUS
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Jonathan Wild, ye olde mafia boss
Jonathan Wild (1682-1725) was probably the first notable leader of organized crime, posing for more than a decade as "Thief Taker* General of London", a vigilante-like figure admired by the public, all the while running a sizable criminal empire, and using his reputation to protect his accomplices and threaten those who crossed him.
Wild, born around 1682 in Wolverhampton, had apprenticed as a buckle-maker, before coming to London in 1708, looking for work. In march 1710 he would be arrested for debt, and incarcerated in one of the infamously corrupt debtor's prisons of 18th century England. There, he would manage to enter the good graces of the guards by running errands, to the point of being allowed to help with arrests. While jailed, Wild would meet Mary Milliner, whose gang he would later join.
Upon release, Wild began to live with Milliner, and both engaged in illegal activity. Wild became a fence, that being a middleman who buys stolen goods, removes identifiable marks, and resells them. These actions were aided by the fact that crime, especially property crime and, as we will see, corruption, had risen dramatically in London following the population boom and its importance as a commercial hub.
In 1713, Charles Hitchen, who occupied the position of Under-Marshal of London, approached Wild, looking for an assistant who could temporarily take over his role, as Hitchen was embroiled in a corruption investigation. Hitchen himself was the leader of a gang of thieves, who also engaged in extortion on an industrial scale, to the point of extorting thieves as well as the victims of theft, and signing extortion notes with his real name. One can only wonder why he was being investigated...
Jonathan Wild would streamline the formula, creating a fine-tuned mechanism of larceny:
-Thieves from his gang would steal goods,
-Wild would wait for the crime to be announced in newspapers,
-Wild would claim that the stolen goods had been found,
-The blame for the theft would be placed onto thieves from a rival gang,
-A fee would be paid to Wild for "finding" the stolen goods,
-The owner of whatever was stolen would meet in private with a "thief-taking assistant" (read: member of Wild's gang) to pay _another_ fee for the object itself,
-rinse and repeat until filthy rich ;)
* A thief-taker was a bounty hunter, catching criminals in exchange for a reward from either the authorities or a citizen who hired them. This profession preceded the establishment of a police force in England.
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Almost 4000 years ago, when the ancient city of Ur was not yet in ruins, a copper merchant called Ea-nasir was participating in the long-running tradition of scamming his fellow man. His exploits were rewarded by a number of clay tablets inscribed with complaints (which he kept in his house in present day Iraq. They were found in 1922). These include a letter from a man named Arbituram who complained he had not received his copper yet, while another says he was tired of receiving bad copper.
The most well known of these tablets is the one written by Nanni. Listen to it here.
There is something beautiful as well as hilarious about the fact that the culture of the Sumerians is a mystery to us, but this ancient civilization gave us the first customer complaint.
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History of the webcam - the trojan room coffee pot
The coffee pot, viewed using the world's first webcam
In 1991, Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky, both of whom worked in the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, installed a camera in the kitchen adjacent to the lab and connected it to the laboratory's local network in order to spare their colleagues the annoyance of finding the coffee machine empty after making the trip to the room.
In 1993, when web browsers gained the ability to display images, the coffee pot camera was connected to the world wide web, making the live image public.
Despite the fact that the camera was decommissioned in 2001 when the laboratory was renovated, the first ever webcam is still remembered fondly, and was even included in Hitman 2 as an easter egg.
The last picture that the webcam ever took, showing a hand about to switch the server off at 09:54 UTC on 22 August 2001.
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The fallen astronaut -- remembering the cost of progress
