The most interesting thing I saw today

[Kirl]

Pointerpointer really rox!


http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention/
On this site you can follow 6 months of the life of Malte Spitz who sued his phone company to hand over the data they collected on him. The 2006 EU data retention directive says Phone Companies and Internet Providers should store all your network data for at least 6 months (up to 2 years).

He made his begotten phone data available online and interactive so you can play around with it and see just how closely all of us can be monitored, tracked, traced and probed like livestock. Combine this with a persons internet behaviour and you know privacy is an illusion, the people with acces to this data know more about you then your closest friends ever will...
Welcome to the brave new world of data collection and retention! 
I found it through his TED talk where he talks about this.

[Raizor]

Pointerpointer really rox!


http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention/
On this site you can follow 6 months of the life of Malte Spitz who sued his phone company to hand over the data they collected on him. The 2006 EU data retention directive says Phone Companies and Internet Providers should store all your network data for at least 6 months (up to 2 years).

He made his begotten phone data available online and interactive so you can play around with it and see just how closely all of us can be monitored, tracked, traced and probed like livestock. Combine this with a persons internet behaviour and you know privacy is an illusion, the people with acces to this data know more about you then your closest friends ever will...
Welcome to the brave new world of data collection and retention! 
I found it through his TED talk where he talks about this.

That was really quite scary Kirl. I knew this stuff goes on, but it's not until it's illustrated like this that you really see the full scope of how the information can be used. I'm sure the "If you're not doing anything wrong, you've got nothing to hide" brigade would consider me paranoid, but they'd probably also object to having the world watching them have sex with their wife, which kinda destroys their argument

[Kirl]

Not to mention the metadata of all that info together. You can see the structure of a society, who the leaders are and their sphere of influence. In his talk he also mentions the berlin wall and how differently that might've worked out if everybody had a mobile phone att... 

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On a much much brighter note: Coursera! 
You can follow entire university courses (Princeton, Stanford et al), including assignments and exams (and a place to ask questions) on a wide range of wildly interesting topics (algorithms, cryptography, machine learning, parralel programming etc etc). Found it through another TED talk.

Free education FTW!

[benny!]

Awesome link, Kirl. Education should be for everyone. Signed in for one course already.

[Kirl]

http://leapmotion.com/

[Raizor]

http://leapmotion.com/

That looks amazing Kirl. Quite excited to see how the finished product turns out and $70 seems very cheap for such a thing. If it performs as well as it does in the video, it could be a real game changer. Have you pre-ordered one?

[benny!]

Looks like another kinect fork ;-)

[Blacksheep8Bit]

Made me cry for a moment, such an amazing orchestra for an amazing game! It give me inspiration when i am programming, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogyonKWT-Ps

[Kirl]

... Have you pre-ordered one?

Nah, I would love to play around with it, but there's still loads of interesting input devices I haven't gotten around to experiment with. I wonder how much of an impact this will make when it's being shipped.

@blacksheep
I love the orchestral treatment of game music, beautiful!

[benny!]

Wow ... this looks like the future of game engines:

Brigade - Real Time Path Tracing

[Kirl]

Wow that's pretty amazing!

As is a bit of pondering over numbers.

[benny!]

Wow that's pretty amazing!

As is a bit of pondering over numbers.

Hmmm .. .seems your link is kind of broken ;-)

[Kirl]

Fixed, thanks

I have been playing fold-it on and off lately. I'm sure some of you know Folding@HOME for PS3 or PC, they made a puzzle game out of it, combining the raw processing power of Computers with the intuition and smarts of humans.

The goal is to find better folding configurations for known proteins and possibly in the long run to educate designers to develop future proteins from scratch. I also really enjoy learning what all the various balls and sticks mean in an interesting interactive manner.

They already had some great results solving several real world scientific problems. Would be great to see this included in the PS4 as freebie too.

[Clyde]

Quite an interesting topic over on Pouet net linking to an article about the democoder IQ and how he pulled of some amazing visuals to the Pixar Film - Brave, by using an oldskool approach. I've always loved Pixar Films.

http://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=9019&page=1&x=17&y=9

[Kirl]

Awesome, I always admired Pixar for their 3d excellence (I made this spoof once) and used to read everything I could about how they solved certain technical issues. I still have an amazingly interesting presentation of a SIGGRAPH talk from a pixar employee about where the eyes are lead and how to controll attention with a bunch of very simple tricks.

Really enjoyed the article, thanks for posting!

[Raizor]

'How I CRASHED my bank, stole PINs with a touch-tone phone'

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/18/dtmf_phone_system_hack_attack/

Impressive

[Kirl]

Phreaky! 

[benny!]

Human pixels making music and images ... even some from some computer games

[Kirl]

Some of the most complex and highest precision formations I ever saw, the moving horse was particularly amazing!

[Raizor]

Fantastic!