The Joel Bakan Interview

As part of The Corporation's supplemental material, this interview of Joel Bakan, the author of the book and co-producer of the synonymous film, by Janeane Garofalo covers some of the topics presented in the book and the movie, but also goes a bit further to explain how politics, money and influence has allowed corporations to evolve into the powerful, dominant, yet completely immoral and irresponsible institution of our time. Extremely interesting and definitely worth watching, even if you have watched this excellent fllm.

Liquid Haptics

One thin container (transparent plastic bag) full of dark coloured liquid, one webcam and a glass table and you get your own multitouch interface. Ingenious and very simple. Tom White seems to have come up with this for his Master's Thesis at MIT in 1998 (check out the comments on the page linked to by the title). Here's a video of someone who --- seems to have independently thought of the same idea and --- actually implemented it on their Mac, using his iSight and writing the necessary control software in Cocoa.

Διαπλέουμε τη Μεταδημοκρατία της Δυσφορίας

Εύστοχα και εύγλωττα ο Νίκος Ξυδάκης παρουσιάζει, με καυστικά διαμαρτυρόμενο τρόπο και γκρινιάρικο τόνο το υπόβαθρο των πολιτικών θέσεων, τάσεων και ύφους στην Ελλάδα του 2007. Αποτύπωση των καιρών, πρωτίστως κοινωνικές και όχι πολιτικές ματιές σε μια Ελλάδα που βυθίζεται στη μιζέρια. Κι'όμως, πότε δεν βυθιζόταν;

Thirty years of Voyager

The most distant ambassador of human civilisation, the Voyager probes, turn thirty. Wired has an excellent image set covering schematics and planetary imagery. I think we need more programmes like these. More on the Voyagers here.

Phrack Issue 64

In the latest issue of Phrack, you can find, among others, a very interesting 'paper' on shellcode and rootkit authoring for Mac OS X. While some of the techniques presented are not new, there are few --- if any --- publicly available texts that present them in such a concise manner. The paper focuses mostly on the Intel platform although there are descriptions and some code for PowerPC too. Worth a read.

Dangerous Knowledge

In order to break the stream of posts helping me vent my frustration about Hellenic politics and the upcoming elections in that country, here's an excellent documentary by the BBC (who else?). Its subject matter covers the work and lives of some of the most brilliant scientific minds of the last 200 years and specifically those of Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. A common theme among them is the fact that they all committed suicide. The documentary vaguely attempts to link their prolific scientific and intellectual output and the primitive social environment in which they lived to their death, something which while possible, is vastly more complex correlation to what is presented in this documentary. Still, it is an interesting presentation, especially for those interested in the biographical details of these brilliant thinkers.