The first social media — blogs — were built on the idea of “user-pull” (users would decide which creators to follow) and “reverse chrono” (users received the most recent posts first).

The first social media — blogs — were built on the idea of “user-pull” (users would decide which creators to follow) and “reverse chrono” (users received the most recent posts first).

Between 2009 and 2010, Iran's nuclear program was the target of a devastating cyber attack. A virus, reportedly developed by the American and Israeli governments and known as Stuxnet, took control of centrifuge controls in facilities across the country, causing thousands of machines to break.

Happy Thanksgiving! Here are some legit Mario 64 Corruptions found using our corrupter. Thanks to WeinerlessSteve for submitting most of these.

Edited from multiple live Mario 64 corruption streams on http://www.vinesauce.com

Want to learn how this is done? Go here: http://vinesaucevidya.com/vinetalk/index.php?topic=2895.0

THE PIRATE CINEMA TRANSFORMS FILM TORRENTS INTO ILLICIT INTERACTIVE ART A CINEMATIC COLLAGE GENERATED BY PEER-TO-PEER NETWORK USERS. > More info: thepiratecinema.com - In the context of omnipresent telecommunications surveillance, “The Pirate Cinema” reveals the hidden activity and geography of Peer-to-Peer file sharing. The project is presented as a monitoring room, which shows Peer-to-Peer transfers happening in real time on networks using the BitTorrent protocol. The installation produces an arbitrary cut-up of the files currently being exchanged. User IP addresses and countries are displayed on each cut, depicting the global topology of content consumption and dissemination. - Conception: Nicolas Maigret - 2012-2013 Software development: Brendan Howell Production: ArtKillArt, La Maison populaire - More info: thepiratecinema.com More IMG: flickr.com/photos/n1c0la5ma1gr3t/sets/72157633577769570/Cast: N1C0L45 M41GR3TTags: piracy, pirate, hack, cinema, peer-to-peer, P2P, copyright, illicite, file sharing, Torrent, BitTorrent, thepiratebay, download, distributed, network, mashup, collage and cut-up

Introducing… The Badgermin

The internet finally seems to have made a dint in New York's institutional art world. Cory Arcangel, an artist who began his career manipulating old computer technologies and critiquing web culture, has an entire floor to himself at The Whitney. At the age of 33, his show Pro Tools makes him the youngest artist to receive a solo show at the institution since Bruce Nauman in 1973. Meanwhile, over at MoMA PS1, 30-year-old art star Ryan Trecartin is gathering steam with his four hour-plus video exhibiton of fucked-up child-adults on Blackberries, titled Any Ever. The show at PS1, chock full of internet jargon, is just one stop on a world tour that includes the Istanbul Modern Museum and the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Given the ridiculous level of buzz now surrounding these shows, one has to wonder just what we're expecting from the art. 

Arcangel’s conflicted relationship  with technology drives his artistic practice and pervades Pro Tools, the artist’s first solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. At 33, Arcangel will be the youngest artist ever to receive an entire floor for new work. The exhibition features product demonstrations of mostly outdated technologies Ataris, Commodores, Pen Plotter Printers, to express suspicions about contemporary digital culture. The show is conspicuously absent of the Internet, ironic given Arcangel’s prolific body of web-art: no YouTube mash-ups of Lolcats playing Schoenberg, or digitally altered photographs morphing Paris Hilton into Macaulay Culkin and vice versa, or browser-based works like “Working On My Novel,” (2011), a live twitter search for the phrase “working on my novel” (“obviously, if you’re twittering about working on your novel, you’re probably not working on your novel,” says Arcangel, “I love these situations!”).

Shanzai is the name used for a huge black market industry that (currently) specialises in making fake mobile phones in small factories. Basements. We’re not talking about a few phones either. The volume is terrifying. According to CCID Consulting in 2007 an estimated 150 million phones - 20% of the 750 million devices produced in China - were counterfeit or off brand.

Initially carbon copies of the genuine article, more recent shanzai phones sometimes add eccentric new features to meet the demands of the market and can produce them far quicker than the genuine manufacturers can adapt (apparently 28-30 days to market). It’s probably because they have access to the components, tools, skilled factory workers and they’re not held back by corporate bureaucracy, legal issues, manufacturing schedules and overheads - or safety. For example shanzai Nokia phones had dual SIM slots before the genuine ones did -

A "hacker" is a technologist with a love for computing and a "hack" is a clever technical solution arrived through a non-obvious means. It doesn't mean to compromise the Pentagon, change your grades, or take down the global financial system, although it can, but that is a very narrow reality of the term. Hackers tend to value a set of liberal principles: freedom, privacy, and access; they tend to adore computers; some gain unauthorized access to technologies, though the degree of illegality greatly varies (and much, even most of hacking, by the definition I set above, is actually legal). But once one confronts hacking empirically, some similarities melt into a sea of differences; some of these distinctions are subtle, while others are profound enough to warrant thinking about hacking in terms of genres or genealogies of hacking -- and we compare and contrast various of these genealogies in the class, such as free and open source software hacking and the hacker underground.