Of course, in the US they’d be in jail by now

ArsGeek » Blog Archive » Got a band but can’t afford to shoot a video? Use public CCTV cameras and then demand the footage!

Unable to hire a production crew for a standard 1980’s era MTV music video, they performed their music in front of 80 of the 13 million CCTV “security” cameras available in England, including one on a bus.

They then used Britain’s Data Protection Act to request the footage that was shot of them.

Arsgeek is right: this is beautiful. It definitely puts a new spin on the folks like Gordon Bell, who are doing daily memory prostheses with digital cameras hung around the user’s neck. All you need is a GPS and a list of camera locations…

Way cool

Ackroyd and Harvey: Genetics and Culture

We are exploring the capacity of grass to record complex photographic images through the production of chlorophyll. The equivalent of the tonal range in a black-and-white photograph is produced in the yellow and green shades of living grass. Although these organic “photographs” are exhibited in a fresh state for a short time, excessive light or lack of it eventually corrupts the visibility of the image.

Makes me think of what I might want to have our backyard spell…

Read a book and let the bots fight it out

Activist coders aim to deafen Phorm with white noise | The Register

The beta release comes with source code, allowing security experts to verify that it does only what it says on the tin. The app features “natural time delays” and throttling so that computer generated traffic would be difficult to distinguish from the real thing, as explained below:

AntiPhormLite runs independently and silently in the background of your PC. It connects to the web and intelligently simulates natural surfing behavior across thousands of customizable topics. This creates a background noise of false information disguising and inverting your own interests.

Assuming for the moment that this thing does what it claims to (and that phorm or the ISP isn’t going to notice a whole lot more traffic coming from antiphorming machines), I wonder what the next step will be. Will phorm and other advertisers start inserting code that requires user response (like those popups that block your whole screen, or superloud music) to distinguish bot-loaded pages from the ones you’re actually looking at? Will they be able to distinguish bot from real because the bot doesn’t download all the bandwidth-hogging parts of a page? Or maybe they’ll write code that tickles various browser bugs (which the bot presumably won’t have).

And then the bot will evolve to mask those differences, and phorm et al will revise their software, and pretty soon we’ll have full-blown fighting AIs wondering what those puny things generating keyboard interrupts might be.

Do you want to know, or don’t you?

The undead - Times Online

Adrian Owen’s first experiment on Kate involved presenting her with photographs of her mother and father, followed by fuzzy, meaningless pictures, while her brain was being scanned. “We found,” he says, “that areas of Kate’s brain burst into activity when pics of her family were shown that accorded perfectly with the brain locations of healthy volunteers doing the same task.”

Moo

UK’s tallest bovine soars to 6ft 6in | The Register

Chard Chilli and his twin sister Jubilee were abandoned at Ferne Animal Sanctuary nine years ago, when they were just a few days old. Manager Naomi Clarke explained: “For some reason a farmer decided he didn’t want Chilli and Jubilee, so dumped them with three others on our doorstep nine years ago.

“He was only six days old and didn’t look that big but as the years passed we noticed he was getting rather tall. We have made an application to Guinness World Records and we are quite confident he will get it.”

The average adult Friesian is, the Times notes, 5ft tall and tips the scales at 0.65 tonnes. Chilli weighs in at over a ton, and his sister too has reached 6ft tall. Clarke admitted: “We don’t know what has made him so tall. He doesn’t eat that much. Chilli’s feet and head are in proportion - he is just very large.”

Little Bobby Tables

Botnet sics zombie soldiers on gimpy websites | The Register

Asprox zombies have recently been blessed with a tool that sniffs out potentially vulnerable sites running Microsoft’s Active Server Pages and then tries to commandeer them using SQL injections. When infections are successful, the pages then redirect visitors to websites that silently install a malware cocktail that includes the Asprox malware. The vicious cycle gives the scheme worm-like capabilities.

“Because the tool is distributed by the botnet, it may appear to be worm-like in its operation, which may lead to conflicting reports in the media and blogs about the true nature of the attack,” Joe Stewart, the SecureWorks researcher who discovered the attack, wrote in a report. “However, the SQL attack tool does not spread on its own, it relies on the Asprox botnet in order to propagate to new hosts.”

SQL injection attacks have emerged as the flavor of the month for criminals looking for ways to spread their malware. The seemingly endless supply of servers that haven’t been properly locked down by administrators makes them easy to carry out. Once infected, legitimate websites, some of them operated by the Department of Homeland Security and other high-profile organizations, become a means for transmitting malware to thousands of end users’ PCs.

A weapon in search of a target

USAF Colonel goes on the offensive with botnet destroyer plan | The Register

In a recently published article, Col. Charles W. Williamson III argued an Air Force-controlled botnet could be a cost-effective means to protect military networks under near-constant attack. He envisions collecting machines that would otherwise be discarded, removing their power-hungry hard drives and then making them available to wage attacks against foreign-based computers targeting the military.

Does this guy have any idea of what a botnet actually is or what it’s good for? Are we going to go after all the evildoer-infected computers out there and make them start sending erection spam to each other? I guess it’s possible that there are vicious foreign hackers out there who aren’t in a position to use someone else’s computer to launch their attacks, or to disguise their IP addresses, or to filter nasty packets coming from .mil addresses…

But seriously, other than sending spam, botnets are good for DDoS attacks against large more-or-less fixed targets that need other machines to be able to reach them. Which does not describe people launching penetration attacks. And if you’re going after individual attacking computers — assuming that Dr Evil is no better at keeping machines patched than the rest of us — you hardly need a zombie army of old PCs to do it, because those attacks really don’t need much bandwidth.

I do, however, like the idea of the world’s largest honeypot…

They’re both wrong

Sony OLED TV longevity claim challenged | Register Hardware

Like all colour TVs, the XEL-1 colours its pixels by mixing different intensities of red, green and blue light. DisplaySearch found that, during the 1000-hour test period, the ability of the two screens to display blue had degraded by 12 per cent. A seven per cent drop was recorded for red and an eight per cent decline for green.

This discussion of OLED lifetime seems really stupid for a bunch of reasons.

First, who in their right mind these days wouldn’t make a self-calibrating set that adjusts its voltage curves to get the out put right regardless of what the emitters are doing?

Second, the conversion of lifetime in viewing hours to lifetime in years depends so very crucially on what people use the thing for — my monitor is on for probably close to 12 hours a day (which means 17000 hours in about 4 years), but if we watch more than 15-20 hours of TV a week that’s a lot (which means more like 20 years)

But third, if the degradation of OLEDs really is about oxygen and water diffusing into the screen, it’s not clear that the screen being turned on has anything to do with how fast the OLEDs go bad, because that diffusion is happening regardless of whether the screen is on. (Insofar as the the OLEDs generate heat, that might slow down the diffusion — things tend to diffuse away from hot areas. Or it might speed it up, because hot plastics are more permeable.) Or you might need an electrical potential in addition to the diffused-in oxygen and H2O, in which case there will be two separate degradation curves superimposed, with weird things happening when one gets ahead of the other, for example the first few days you turn the TV on after coming back from vacation.

But since the current target market for these widgets will be replacing them in 6 months for the next shiny thing, who cares?

It’s harder to destroy data on a hard drive than you might think

This piece about recovering a disk from the Columbia shuttle crash is sad, impressive, heartwarming and a little bit dull at the same time.

Blocks and Files

The Kroll people managed to recover 90 percent or so of the 400MB of data from the drive with its cracked and burned casing. Now, a few years on, Berg and his team have analysed the data and reported the experiment and its results in the April edition of the Physical Review E journal.

What, you mean school loans really do force bad career choices?

Loan effort lures recruits to health centers - White Coat Notes - Boston.com

Launched last year with a $5 million grant from Bank of America, the program has placed 35 physicians and 12 nurse practitioners at 23 health centers. Most were new hires, but six were current staffers who agreed to stay either two or three more years.

I never expected them to be able to recruit 47 clinicians,” Dr. JudyAnn Bigby , secretary of health and human services and also a primary care physician, said last week. “Some community health centers spend years trying to recruit new physicians. Being able to offer loan repayment has had an incredible impact.”

The program pays up to $25,000 a year for three years in loan repayments, about 60 percent of the average burden of $130,000 graduates carry when they leave medical school. Recipients agree to work in primary care at a community health center for at least two years.

I’m betting that programs like this do better at getting people into community health centers than just raising salaries would, because this just makes the loan issues go away. Which is much better than ostensibly having the money and having to budget it and worry about it and write the checks on top of all the fun things a new doctor does.

And once somebody gets into a job like that, they might just stay rather than competing with a bunch of other highly-paid doctors to treat rich people…