HUPOMNEMATA

Currently, the comics books writer Warren Ellis is obsessed with Sumo Wrestlers and with Japanese suicides as you can see in his very nice blog.

Fascinating news in the New Scientist

“A prototype GPS tracking device, designed to be implanted inside a person, has been successfully tested, claims its manufacturer. However, technical experts are questioning whether the system could really work.
(…)
Applied Digital Solutions (ADS) hopes the device will appeal to people who might be a potential hostage target, as well explorers and mountaineers who risk being stranded in remote locations.”

There are still some difficulties. More there.

A text from Wired magazine

Several portaits of virus writers(from the basement hacker type to the scientific researcher on AI or suit and tie entrepreneur)

by Julian Dibbell

“One computer virus writer in his early 20s lives on unemployment checks in a white, working-class exurb of New York City. He tends to spend a fair amount of his leisure time at the local videogame arcade playing Mortal Kombat II, and would prefer that you didn’t know his real name. But don’t let the slacker r/sum/ fool you: the only credential this expert needs is the pseudonym he goes by in the computer underground: Hellraiser.

Hellraiser is the founding member of the world-renowned virus-writers’ group Phalcon/Skism. He is also creator of 40Hex, an electronic zine whose lucid programming tips, hair-raising samples of ready-to-run viral code, and trash-talking scene reports have done more to inspire the creation of viruses in this country than just about anything since Robert Morris Jr.’s spectacularly malfunctional worm nearly brought down the Internet.
And as if all this weren’t enough, Hellraiser also comes equipped with the one accessory no self-respecting expert in this cantankerous field can do without – his very own pet definition of computer viruses. Unlike most such definitions, Hellraiser’s is neither very technical nor very polemical, and he doesn’t go out of his way to make it known. “Sure,” he’ll say, with a casual shrug, as if tossing you the most obvious fact in the world: “Viruses are the electronic form of graffiti.”

Which would probably seem obvious to you too, if you had Hellraiser’s personal history. For once upon his teenage prime, Hellraiser was also a hands-on expert in the more traditional forms of graffiti perfected by New York City youth in the 1980s. Going by the handle of Skism, he roamed the city streets and train yards with a can of spray paint at the ready and a Bronx-bred crew of fellow “writers” at his side, searching out the sweet spots in the transit system that would give his tag maximum exposure – the subway cars that carried his identity over the rails, the truck trailers that hauled it up and down the avenues, and the overpasses that announced it to the flow of travelers circulating underneath.

In other words, by the time Hellraiser went off to college and developed a serious interest in computers, he was already quite cozy with the notion of infiltrating other people’s technology to spread a little of himself as far and wide as possible. So when he discovered one day that his PC had come down with a nasty little digital infection, his first thought was not, as is often customary, to curse the “deviant hackers,” “sociopaths,” and “assholes” who had written the program, but to marvel at the possibilities this new infiltration technique had opened up. Street graffiti’s ability to scatter tokens of one’s identity across the landscape of an entire metropolis looked provincial in comparison. “With viruses,” Hellraiser remembers thinking, “you could get your name around the world.”

read on:
viruses are good for you …

We still have not seen the Matrix. But even The Register’s Security Focus journalist, Kevin Poulsen, seems to give credit to Trinity’s talent…

“A scene about two thirds of the way through the film finds Carrie-Anne Moss’s leather-clad superhacker setting her sights on a power grid computer, for plot reasons better left unrevealed.

But at exactly the point where audiences would normally be treated to a brightly-colored graphical cartoon of a computer intrusion, ala the 2001 Travolta vehicle Swordfish, or cheer as the protagonist skillfully summons a Web browser and fights valiantly through “404 Errors,” like the malnourished cyberpunk in this year’s “The Core,” something completely different happens: Trinity runs “Nmap.”

Probably the most widely-used freeware hacking tool, the real-life Nmap is a sophisticated port scanner that sends packets to a machine — or a network of machines — in an attempt to determine what services are running. An Nmap port scan is a common prelude to an intrusion attempt — a way of casing the joint, to find out if any vulnerable service are running.

That’s exactly how the fictional Trinity uses it. In a sequence that flashes on screen for a few scant seconds, the green phosphor text of Trinity’s computer clearly shows Nmap being run against the IP address 10.2.2.2, and finding an open port number 22, correctly identified as the SSH service used to log into computers remotely. ”

more on Trinity

Just finished “the collapsium” by Wil Mc Carthy, in which people can fax themselves to the other end of the galaxy, or even just send copies if need be. Some nice plot twist about the legal status of these copies : who are they? Do they belong to their “original”? What happen if someone make an illegal copy of you? Is what happen in the head of your copy your intellectual property?
And, when you’re faxed, what happens to you?

« Bruno marveled again that faxing now seemed to provoke no sensation at all, though their bodies were sundered, atomized, quantum-entangled and finally recreated. Exactly as before? Indistinguishable, anyway. The soul, it was imagined, followed the entangled quantum states to the new location. Inconvenient to think it might be destroyed and duplicated along with the body, or worse, that copies of it might be piling up in an afterlife somewhere. But weighed against crowds and traffic and bad weather and all the other inconveniences of physical travel, people were surprisingly willing to take the risk. »

” One pathologist is holding the esophagus, stomach, pancreas, duodenum, and spleen. He will open these, and may save a portion of the gastric contents to check for poison.

Another pathologist is holding the kidneys, ureters, and bladder. Sometimes these organs will be left attached to the abdominal aorta. The pathologist will open all these organs and examine them carefully.

Dissecting the lungs can be done in any of several ways. All methods reveal the surfaces of the large airways, and the great arteries of the lungs. Most pathologists use the long knife again while studying the lungs. The air spaces of the lungs will be evaluated based on their texture and appearance.”

more!

from an interview with Rob Vollmar

“Q: I’ve noticed that some (though certainly not all) female artists draw in a style that has some relation to manga art (Lea Hernandez, to give one example), presumably as a reactionry stance against masculine western art. Do you think there’s any truth to this statement, or is the western feminisation of manga too broad a topic to draw definite conclusions (especially since said style in adult manga is already perceived as masculine in Japan anyway)?

A: Actually, let me answer those in reverse…

Manga has its own very defined standard of femininity in its shoujo tradition. Shoujo manga is loosely defined as “manga for girls” and not only are most of its most celebrated mangaka women, but the broader category of shoujo has, in turn, produced a vibrant tradition of women’s manga in Japan that puts the blatant sexism of the comics publishing industries in a much clearer light in contrast.

““I’ve noticed that some (though certainly not all) female artists draw in a style that has some relation to manga art…”

This tradition began, as I can peg it, with Wendy and Richard Pini’s ELFQUEST which is an almost perfect marriage of shoujo manga aesthetics with comics storytelling methods. I think it is perfectly valid to see this as a protest, as women were all but excluded from comics for several generations beginning in the late 1950s until the 1970s. But, as I see it, the protest comes not in the incorporation of a “foreign style” but in the reinforcement of a singularly female tradition, ie shoujo manga. Lea Hernandez RUMBLE GIRLS’ is also an excellent example of an adept Western mind adapting not just the visual stylisms of shoujo manga but also the core themes of the form. ”

You can read the rest on the interview there

If you can’t wait to read something about Matrix reloaded actually written by someone who has seen it, I guess you could choose worse than this.

This from the wikipedia, placing artificial intelligence as a key element building to singularity but not being it (and mentionning Matrix along the way 😉

“Vinge’s technological singularity is commonly misunderstood to mean technological progress rising to “infinity.” Actually, he refers to the pace of technological change increasing to such a degree that a person who doesn’t keep pace with it will rapidly find civilization to have become completely incomprehensible. This was one of the philosophical ideas that inspired the successful movie The Matrix.

It has been speculated that the key to such a rapid increase in technological sophistication will be the development of superhuman intelligence, either by directly enhancing existing human minds (perhaps with cybernetics), or by building artificial intelligences. These superhuman intelligences would presumably be capable of inventing ways to enhance themselves even more, leading to a feedback effect that would quickly surpass preexisting intelligences.”

An exchange in the House of Lords :

“Lord Renton: My Lords, will the Minister explain how it is that an inedible tinned food that lasted for ever and was supplied to those on active service can become an unsolicited e-mail, bearing in mind that some of us wish to be protected from having an e-mail?

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, I am afraid that I have not been able to find out why the term “spam” is used, but that is the meaning it now has. It is a matter that should be taken very seriously because it not only clutters up computers but involves a great deal of very unpleasant advertising to do with easy credit, pornography and miracle diets. That is offensive to people, and we should try to reduce it.

Lord Faulkner of Worcester: My Lords, I can help the Minister with the origin of the word. It comes from aficionados of Monty Python, and the famous song, “Spam, spam, spam, spam”. It has been picked up by the Internet community and is used as a description of rubbish on the Internet.

More seriously, is the Minister aware that up to 85,000 pieces of unsolicited e-mail are received by the Parliamentary Communications Directorate each month? Will he join me in congratulating the directorate on its valiant efforts to filter out that menace, given that a high proportion of it is rubbish advertising from the United States and that some of it consists of profane material? The directorate is battling against a rising tide; the Government’s assistance is needed in combating it. ”

Monty Python indeed. This was brought to our attention by the always excellent Charles Stross’diary