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Leon Ferrari, Civilización Occidental y Cristiana
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Indigo & Umber

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Dropcam

[ed. For a more detailed account of Dropcam's home surveillance system, read this.]

Dropcam, the San Francisco startup that makes a $149 camera that can stream and record video to the cloud, announced $30 million in new funding on Wednesday.

That round, led by Institutional Venture Partners, along with other investments from Accel Partners, Menlo Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, will be used to speed up product plans that originally were slated for 2015 and beyond, says Dropcam CEO Greg Duffy.

"We're pulling in most of our long-term plans," Duffy told CNET. "We're going to try to take care of those much sooner. Definitely expect new stuff coming out in the interim."

Just what exactly those new things are, Duffy's not saying, but he did hint at broadening the company's investment in computer vision technology, which is currently used to spot and report motion. "We want to make these more reliable and more useful," he said.

To do that the company plans to triple its staff of about 40 people. Most of that group is in San Francisco, Calif., along with a group in China that handles manufacturing. Dropcam is on its third-generation model, which how offers HD recording. That model was introduced at last year's CES. Since then the company has added new features, like standard-definition recording and video rotation, and changed how it detects and reports motion, all through software updates.

The investment underscores the growing appeal of hardware companies that are tied with Web-connected services. That same group includes wearable technologies from Jawbone and Fitbit, all the way to Nest and its Web-connected smart thermostat. The big difference in Dropcam's case is that it would be relatively useless if not connected to the Web, where Dropcam customers, according to the company, are uploading more video per minute than YouTube.

by Josh Lowensohn, CNET | Read more:
Image: Dropcam

The Blockbuster Heist That Rocked the Deep Web

Before he gutted and nearly destroyed one of the most influential criminal markets on the Internet, a man using the nickname Boneless published a detailed guide on the art of disappearing.

“I have some experience in this area,” he wrote, detailing how fugitives should best go about buying phony passports, dodging cops, and keeping their stories straight.

The guide was just one of many contributions Boneless made to HackBB, a popular destination on the Deep Web, a group of sites that sit hidden behind walls of encryption and anonymity. Back in 2012, the forum was a top destination for buying stolen credit cards, skimming ATMs, and hacking anything from personal computers to server hardware. And thanks to Tor’s anonymizing software, members were shielded from the ire of law enforcement around the globe. It was one of the safest and most popular places on the Deep Web to break the law.

Then one day in March, HackBB simply vanished, its databases destroyed. One user likened the events to burning a city—its library, market, bank, and entire community—to the ground. It wasn’t hard to guess who’d done it. A few days earlier, Boneless had disappeared—and with him, a serious chunk of the market’s sizable hoards of money. (...)

All business is inherently risky on the Deep Web. Escrow funds in particular require serious trust, which is itself a valuable commodity on the anonymous Web. The popular drug market Silk Road established a highly successful escrow service by building years of trust and name recognition.

Silk Road’s founder, Dread Pirate Roberts, is rumored to conduct thorough background checks on staff, an act that would require extraordinary trust, considering the immense illegality of Silk Road’s existence. Such a policy, though extremely difficult to enact, would severely diminish the chances of a staff betrayal. It would also create a delicate house of cards that could completely collapse if Dread Pirate Roberts were ever apprehended.

At HackBB, Boneless either shared no identifying details with OptimusCrime, or he was supremely confident in his ability to go away without getting caught. He did, after all, write the book on how to disappear completely.

Such was Boneless’s reputation that, after the attacks, many wondered if he was really even responsible in the first place. Forum members suggested Boneless actually sold his powerful administrator account to the highest bidder.

"Someone got a hold of his credentials somehow," wrote one HackBB moderator, "He probably sold them."

by Patrick Howell O'Neill, Daily Dot | Read more:

Image: uncredited

Jimmy Cliff

Inner Peace

When we think of silence, because we yearn for it perhaps, or because we’re scared of it — or both — we’re forced to recognise that what we’re talking about is actually a mental state, a question of consciousness. Though the external world no doubt exists, our perception of it is always very much our perception, and tells us as much about ourselves as it does about the world. There are times when a noise out there is truly irritating and has us yearning for peace. Yet there are times when we don’t notice it at all. When a book is good, the drone of a distant lawnmower is just not there. When the book is bad but we must read it for an exam, or a review, the sound assaults us ferociously.

If perception of sound depends on our state of mind, then conversely a state of mind can hardly exist without an external world with which it is in relation and that conditions it — either our immediate present environment, or something that happened in the past and that now echoes or goes on happening in our minds. There is never any state of mind that is not in some part, however small, in relation to the sounds around it — the bird singing and a television overheard as I write this now, for example. (...)

It’s fairly easy to concentrate on the body in motion. If you’re running or swimming, it’s possible to move into a wordless or semi-wordless state that gives the impression of silence for long periods. In fact one of the refreshing, even addictive, things about sport is the feeling that the mind has been given a break from its duty of constantly building up our ego.

But in Vipassana you concentrate on sensation in stillness, sitting down, not necessarily cross-legged, though most people do sit that way. And sitting without changing position, sitting still. As soon as you try to do this, you become aware of a connection between silence and stillness, noise and motion. No sooner are you sitting still than the body is eager to move, or at least to fidget. It grows uncomfortable. In the same way, no sooner is there silence than the mind is eager to talk. In fact we quickly appreciate that sound ismovement: words move, music moves, through time. We use sound and movement to avoid the irksomeness of stasis. This is particularly true if you are in physical pain. You shift from foot to foot, you move from room to room.

Sitting still, denying yourself physical movement, the mind’s instinctive reaction is to retreat into its normal buzzing monologue — hoping that focusing the mind elsewhere will relieve physical discomfort. This would normally be the case; normally, if ignored, the body would fidget and shift, to avoid accumulating tension. But on this occasion we are asking it to sit still while we think and, since it can’t fidget, it grows more and more tense and uncomfortable. Eventually, this discomfort forces the mind back from its chatter to the body. But finding only discomfort or even pain in the body, it again seeks to escape into language and thought. Back and forth from troubled mind to tormented body, things get worse and worse.

Silence, then, combined with stillness — the two are intimately related — invites us to observe the relationship between consciousness and the body, in movement and moving thought. Much is said when people set off to meditation retreats about the importance of ‘finding themselves’. And there is much imagined drama. People expect old traumas to surface, as though in psychoanalysis. In fact, what you actually discover is less personal than you would suppose. You discover how the construct of consciousness and self, something we all share, normally gets through time, to a large extent by ignoring our physical being and existence in the present moment. Some of the early names for meditation in the Pali language of the Buddhist scriptures, far from linking it to religion, referred only to ‘mental exercises’.

by Tim Parks, Aeon |  Read more:

Image: Judy Shreve, Winter Leaves

Bumper Crop, Mike Carroll (Lanai)
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Antibiotic Resistance: The Last Resort

As a rule, high-ranking public-health officials try to avoid apocalyptic descriptors. So it was worrying to hear Thomas Frieden and Sally Davies warn of a coming health “nightmare” and a “catastrophic threat” within a few days of each other in March.

The agency heads were talking about the soaring increase in a little-known class of antibiotic-resistant bacteria: carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CREs). Davies, the United Kingdom's chief medical officer, described CREs as a risk as serious as terrorism (see Nature 495, 141; 2013). “We have a very serious problem, and we need to sound an alarm,” said Frieden, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia.

Their dire phrasing was warranted. CREs cause bladder, lung and blood infections that can spiral into life-threatening septic shock. They evade the action of almost all antibiotics — including the carbapenems, which are considered drugs of last resort — and they kill up to half of all patients who contract them. In the United States, these bacteria have been found in 4% of all hospitals and 18% of those that offer long-term critical care. And an analysis carried out in the United Kingdom predicts that if antibiotics become ineffective, everyday operations such as hip replacements could end in death for as many as one in six1.

The language used by Davies and Frieden was intended to break through the indifference with which the public usually greets news about antibiotic resistance. To close observers, however, it also had a tinge of exasperation. CREs were first identified almost 15 years ago, but did not become a public-health priority until recently, and medics may not have appreciated the threat that they posed. Looking back, say observers, there are lessons for researchers and health-care workers in how to protect patients, as well as those hospitals where CREs have not yet emerged.

“It is not too late to intervene and prevent these from becoming more common,” says Alexander Kallen, a medical epidemiologist at the CDC. At the same time, he acknowledges that in many places, CREs are here for good.

Hindsight is key to the story of CREs, because it was hindsight that identified them in the first place. In 2000, researchers at the CDC were grinding through analyses for a surveillance programme known as Intensive Care Antimicrobial Resistance Epidemiology (ICARE), which had been running for six years to monitor intensive-care units for unusual resistance factors. In the programme's backlog of biological samples, scientists identified one from the Enterobacteriaceae family, a group of gut-dwelling bacteria. This particular sample — of Klebsiella pneumoniae, a common cause of infection in intensive-care units — had been taken from a patient at a hospital in North Carolina in 1996 (ref. 2). It was weakly resistant to carbapenems, powerful broad-spectrum antibiotics developed in the 1980s.

Antibiotics have been falling to resistance for almost as long as people have been using them; Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, warned about the possibility when he accepted his Nobel prize in 1945. Knowing this, doctors have used the most effective drugs sparingly: careful rationing of the powerful antibiotic vancomycin, for example, meant that bacteria took three decades to develop resistance to it. Prudent use, researchers thought, would keep the remaining last-resort drugs such as the carbapenems effective for decades.

The North Carolinan strain of Klebsiella turned that idea on its head. It produced an enzyme, dubbed KPC (for Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase), that broke down carbapenems. What's more, the gene that encoded the enzyme sat on a plasmid, a piece of DNA that can move easily from one bacterium to another. Carbapenem resistance had arrived.

by Maryn McKenna, Nature |  Read more:

Image: Nature

Stranded by Sprawl

Detroit is a symbol of the old economy’s decline. It’s not just the derelict center; the metropolitan area as a whole lost population between 2000 and 2010, the worst performance among major cities. Atlanta, by contrast, epitomizes the rise of the Sun Belt; it gained more than a million people over the same period, roughly matching the performance of Dallas and Houston without the extra boost from oil.

Yet in one important respect booming Atlanta looks just like Detroit gone bust: both are places where the American dream seems to be dying, where the children of the poor have great difficulty climbing the economic ladder. In fact, upward social mobility — the extent to which children manage to achieve a higher socioeconomic status than their parents — is even lower in Atlanta than it is in Detroit. And it’s far lower in both cities than it is in, say, Boston or San Francisco, even though these cities have much slower growth than Atlanta.

So what’s the matter with Atlanta? A new study suggests that the city may just be too spread out, so that job opportunities are literally out of reach for people stranded in the wrong neighborhoods. Sprawl may be killing Horatio Alger.

The new study comes from the Equality of Opportunity Project, which is led by economists at Harvard and Berkeley. There have been many comparisons of social mobility across countries; all such studies find that these days America, which still thinks of itself as the land of opportunity, actually has more of an inherited class system than other advanced nations. The new project asks how social mobility varies across U.S. cities, and finds that it varies a lot. In San Francisco a child born into the bottom fifth of the income distribution has an 11 percent chance of making it into the top fifth, but in Atlanta the corresponding number is only 4 percent.

When the researchers looked for factors that correlate with low or high social mobility, they found, perhaps surprisingly, little direct role for race, one obvious candidate. They did find a significant correlation with the existing level of inequality: “areas with a smaller middle class had lower rates of upward mobility.” This matches what we find in international comparisons, where relatively equal societies like Sweden have much higher mobility than highly unequal America. But they also found a significant negative correlation between residential segregation — different social classes living far apart — and the ability of the poor to rise.

And in Atlanta poor and rich neighborhoods are far apart because, basically, everything is far apart; Atlanta is the Sultan of Sprawl, even more spread out than other major Sun Belt cities. This would make an effective public transportation system nearly impossible to operate even if politicians were willing to pay for it, which they aren’t. As a result, disadvantaged workers often find themselves stranded; there may be jobs available somewhere, but they literally can’t get there.

by Paul Krugman, NY Times |  Read more:

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Katsuyuki Nishijima
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Olga Kurylenko
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Star Wars

In the days before the Internet, eating at an unknown restaurant meant relying on a clutch of quick and dirty heuristics. The presence of many truck drivers or cops at a lonely diner supposedly vouchsafed its quality (though it may simply have been the only option around). For “ethnic” food, there was the classic benchmark: “We were the only non-[insert ethnicity] people in there.” Or you could spend anxious minutes on the sidewalk, under the watchful gaze of the host, reading curling, yellowed reviews, wondering if what held in 1987 was still true today. In an information-poor environment, you sometimes simply went with your gut (and left clutching it).

Today, via Yelp (or TripAdvisor or Amazon, or any Web site teeming with “user-generated content”), you are often troubled by the reverse problem: too much information. As I navigate a Yelp entry to simply determine whether a place is worth my money, I find myself battered between polar extremes of experience: One meal was “to die for,” another “pretty lame.” Drifting into narrow currents of individual proclivity (writing about a curry joint where I had recently lunched, one reviewer noted that “the place had really good energy, very Spiritual [sic], which is very important to me”), I eventually capsize in a sea of confusion. I either quit the place altogether or, by the time I arrive, am weighed down by a certain exhaustion of expectation, as if I had already consumed the experience and was now simply going through the motions.

What I find most striking is that, having begun the process of looking for reviews of the restaurant, I find myself reviewing the reviewers. The use of the word “awesome”—a term whose original connotation is so denuded that I suspect it will ultimately come to exclusively signify its ironic, air-quote-marked opposite—is a red flag. So are the words “anniversary” or “honeymoon,” often written by people with inflated expectations for their special night; their complaint with any perceived failure on the part of the restaurant or hotel to rise to this momentous occasion is not necessarily mine. I reflexively downgrade reviewers writing in the sort of syrupy dross picked up from hotel brochures (“it was a vision of perfection”).

In one respect, there is nothing new in reviewing the reviewer; our choices in pre-Internet days were informed either by friends we trusted or critics whose voices seemed to carry authority. But suddenly, the door has been opened to a multitude of voices, each bearing no preexisting authority or social trust. It is no longer merely enough to read that someone thought the vegetarian food was bad (you need to know if she is a vegetarian), or the hotel in Iowa City was the best they have ever seen (just how many hotels have they seen?), or a foreign film was terrible (wait, they admit they don’t like subtitles?). Critics have always had to be interrogated this way (what dendritic history of logrolling lay behind the rave about that book?), but with the Web, a thousand critics have bloomed. The messy, complicated, often hidden dynamics of taste and preference, and the battles over it, are suddenly laid out right in front of us.

by Tom Vanderbilt, Wilson Quarterly |  Read more:

Image: Henglein and Steets

Filippo De Pisis (Luigi Tibertelli): Natura morta con trota (1951)
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Krzysztof Wodiczko — Dis-Armor, 1999-2001
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Garry Davis, Man of No Nation, Dies at 91

On May 25, 1948, a former United States Army flier entered the American Embassy in Paris, renounced his American citizenship and, as astonished officials looked on, declared himself a citizen of the world.

In the decades that followed, until the end of his long life last week, he remained by choice a stateless man — entering, leaving, being regularly expelled from and frequently arrested in a spate of countries, carrying a passport of his own devising, as the international news media chronicled his every move.

His rationale was simple, his aim immense: if there were no nation-states, he believed, there would be no wars.

Garry Davis, a longtime peace advocate, former Broadway song-and-dance man and self-declared World Citizen No. 1, who is widely regarded as the dean of the One World movement, a quest to erase national boundaries that today has nearly a million adherents worldwide, died on Wednesday in Williston, Vt. He was 91, and though in recent years he had largely ceased his wanderings and settled in South Burlington, Vt., he continued to occupy the singular limbo between citizen and alien that he had cheerfully inhabited for 65 years.

“I am not a man without a country,” Mr. Davis told Newsweek in 1978, “merely a man without nationality.”

Mr. Davis was not the first person to declare himself a world citizen, but he was inarguably the most visible, most vocal and most indefatigable.

The One World model has had its share of prominent adherents, among them Albert Schweitzer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Einstein and E. B. White.

But where most advocates have been content to write and lecture, Mr. Davis was no armchair theorist: 60 years ago, he established the World Government of World Citizens, a self-proclaimed international governmental body that has issued documents — passports, identity cards, birth and marriage certificates — and occasional postage stamps and currency.

He periodically ran for president of the world, always unopposed.

by Margalit Fox, NY Times |  Read more:
Image: Carl Gossett/The New York Times

[ed. Dave Matthews, Tim Reynolds - One Sweet World]

O.K., Glass

On a weekday afternoon in late June, a nondescript forty-year-old man in beige shorts, a blue Penguin sports shirt, and what appears to be a pair of shale-colored architect’s glasses with parts of the frame missing gets on an uptown No. 6 train at Union Square to go see his psychoanalyst, on East Eighty-eighth Street. As the man walks into the frigid subway car, he unexpectedly jerks his head up and down. A pink light comes on above the right lens. He slides his index finger against the right temple of the glasses as if flicking away a fly. The man’s right eyebrow rises and his right eye squints. He appears to be mouthing some words. A lip-reader would come away with the following message: “Forever 21 world traveler denim shorts, $22.80. Horoscope: Cooler heads prevail today, helping you strike a compromise in a matter you refused to budge on last week.”

There is a tap on his shoulder. He turns around. An older man, dressed for the office in a blue blazer, says, “Are those them?”

“Yes.”

“My kid wants one.”

“If you give them to your kid, you’ll be able to see everything he sees from your computer. You could follow him around all day.”

The businessman considers this. “Are they foldable?”

The man with the glasses shakes his head. A young college student in a hoodie and Adidas track pants, carrying a Pace University folder, takes out one of his earbuds. “What does it do?”

Everyone on the train is now staring at the man with the glasses.

The man with the glasses jerks his head up and down. The soft pink light is on above his right eye. “O.K., Glass,” the man says. “Take a picture.” The pink light is replaced by a shot of the subway car, the college student with the earbuds, the older man, now immortalized. If they are paying close attention, they can see a microscopic version of themselves and the world around them displayed on the screen above the man’s right eye. “I can also take a video of you,” the man says. “O.K., Glass. Record a video.”

“That is so dope,” the college student says. It appears to the man that the student is thinking over the situation. There’s something else he wants to say. It’s as if the man with the glasses has some form of mastery of the world around him, and maybe even within himself. (...)

My first encounter with Google Glass came on a Saturday in June, when I showed up at the Glass Explorers’ “Basecamp,” a sunny spread atop the Chelsea Market. My tech sherpa, a bright-eyed young woman, set me up with a mimosa as we perused the various shades of Glass frames, each named for a color that occurs in nature: cotton, shale, charcoal, sky, and tangerine. I went for shale, which happens to be the preference of Glass Explorers in San Francisco. (New Yorkers, naturally, go for bleak charcoal.) I was told that I was one of the first few hundred Explorers in the city, which made me feel like some third-rate Shackleton embarked on my own Nimrod Expedition into the neon ice. The lightweight titanium frames were fitted over my nose, a button was pressed near my right ear, and the small screen, or Optical Head Mounted Display, flickered to pink-ish life. I was told how to talk to my new friend, each command initiated with the somewhat resigned “O.K., Glass.” In deference to Eunice and Lenny, I started off with two simple instructions, picked up by a microphone that sits just above my right eye, at the tip of my eyebrow.

“O.K., Glass. Google translate ‘hamburger’ into Korean.”

“Haembeogeo,” a gentle, vowel-rich voice announced after a few seconds of searching, as both English and Hangul script appeared on the display above my right eye. Since there are no earbuds to plug into Glass, audio is conveyed through a “bone conduction transducer.” In effect, this means that a tiny speaker vibrates against the bone behind my right ear, replicating sound. The result is eerie, as if someone is whispering directly into a hole bored into your cranium, but also deeply futuristic. You can imagine a time when different parts of our bodies are adapted for different needs. If a bone can hear sound, why can’t my fingertips smell the bacon strips they’re about to grab?

Glass responds to a combination of voice and touch-pad commands. After the initial “O.K., Glass,” you can tap and slide your way through the touch pad, but since there is no keyboard or touch screen, Googling and Gmailing will probably always involve voice recognition.

“O.K., Glass. Google translate ‘hamburger’ into Russian.”

“Gamburrrger,” a voice purred, not so gently, like my grandmother at the end of a long hot day.

And, all of a sudden, I felt something for this technology.

by Gary Shteyngart, New Yorker | Read more:
Photograph by Emiliano Granado

Olomana