Some days one wakes up and it feels as if the world has inexorably become a little more strange - a little more surreal, as if Philip K. Dick took an apprentice who runs the tabletop game that we call our lives and they're starting to try things on their own. And it's delightfully fifteen degrees off dead center.
In China there is an industrial farm that not only raises pigs as food but clones them to keep certain germlines around. The company is called BGI and they've gotten the process of cloning refined to the point where it's methodical, repeatable …
Biology and medicine have long known that more advanced forms of life emit various forms of energy as they go about their business. Mammals emit heat as a byproduct of their metabolisms, and the electrical activity of the musculature, cardiopulmonary, and central nervous systems may be picked up by sensitive instruments and used for diagnostic purposes. Recently, researchers in Japan have discovered that human bodies also emit light in the visble spectrum, albeit in a fashion that most sensors cannot detect. In fact, most lifeforms emit visible light in some fashion though the mechanism behind it isn’t understood. This …
If you're involved in the retrocomputing or PC history scenes, chances are you've heard of double-sided floppy disks that are formatted for one system on side A and another system on side B. For example, I've got a copy of the game Ninja which had the C-64 version of the game on one side and the Atari port on the other. At the time this was a pretty straightforward thing to do because drives only read one side of a disk at a time. A couple of weeks back, PC historian Trixter came across a highly unusual 5 1/4 …
Since the country of China stepped up its activities in Tibet hundreds of pro-Tibet websites have been springing up all across the Net. Predictably, some subset of those sites are being compromised by pro-Communist China crackers, which is a popular political maneuver (of questionable effectiveness). Not content to merely deface these sites, some of them are being infected with a malware agent called Fribet, which attacks vulnerabilities in the user's web browser to silently install itself. Fribet not only sets up a backdoor into the system that allows it to be remotely controlled but it is capable of attacking other …
Every once in a while a news article about attempts to crack US military and government systems coming out of China or the Middle East hits the 'wires; rumors of groups of systems crackers belonging to the Air Force/United Nations/Department of Homeland Security/Microsoft/the Illuminati regularly make their rounds at hacker conventions. Military data nets are increasingly becoming targets of crackers from abroad, safe from prosecution and extradition because it's so difficult to start legal proceedings against someone you don't even know, let alone can grab by the scruff of the neck (police dramas and MLATs to …
Well, I actually could, but that's beside the point. Resuming...
They went so far as to draft official procedures by which one could apply for permission to reincarnate on the material plane in the future. It sounds daffy, but scholars of the Buddhist path have said that this could be a move on the part of the Chinese regeime (which doesn't much like religion of any kind, not just Buddhism …
China is notorious the Net over for its anti-Internet political stance. Bloggers have to register, talking about democracy is a dangerous thing to do at best, and the Great Firewall of China makes a valiant attempt to filter net.traffic to keep the masses uninformed and unable to speak out. They've even managed to have Internet addiction considered a real social problem treatable with hospitalisation and electroconvulsive therapy What gets me is this: The kids that are hospitalised for this 'treatment' (and I use the term in the loosest possible sense) aren't sleeping well, aren't motivated, don't like to listen …
