Monday, September 23, 2019

The Dark Web: A guide for business professionals

The good news is also the bad news in Sydney's property conundrum

A glut of new properties is testing Sydney's apartment market just as a crisis of confidence in building standards takes hold.


Every second of every day, someone iscomplaining about bias, pointing to evidence that justifies outrage. This arms race in cultural analysis is unwinnable... Unsinkable  

“The Dark Web is used to sell stolen data, drugs, and weapons—but it’s also used by legitimate outfits, like news organizations and the UN. This ebook looks at what the Dark Web is and how it affects you. The Dark Web is a network of websites and servers that use encryption to obscure traffic. Dark Web sites require the .onion top-level domain, use non-memorable URL strings, and can be accessed only by using the open source, security-focused Tor browser. Because it’s portable and disposable, Tails, a Linux-based operating system that boots from a flash drive, adds a layer of security to Deep Web activity. Because the tools required to access Dark Web sites help protect user—and server—anonymity, in the past decade the Dark Web has become a magnet for criminal activity. The Silk Road, an eBay-like market for drugs and weapons, famously helped establish the market for peer-to-peer anonymous criminal commerce. The site grabbed mainstream headlines in 2013 when it was taken down by the FBI. In its place rose a number of copycat markets. The negative press, coupled with YouTube horror stories, glued the Dark Web’s reputation to illicit behavior. Today, the Dark Web markets sell drugs, weapons, malicious software, and piles of consumer and sensitive corporate data. But the Dark Web is not all bad news. ProPublica, a well-respected investigative news organization, has a Dark Web site to help the company securely communicate with sources. The United Nations law enforcement department, the Office on Drugs and Crime, monitors the Dark Web and shares data with the public and global police organizations. Even Facebook, the world’s largest social network, has a Dark Web site relied on by more than one million users per month…”

Posted by at

Sunday, September 22, 2019

“Endless Crucifixion”

“Just as there is nothing more boring than boredom, nothing more exciting than excitement, nothing more lovable than love or hateful than hatred, so is there nothing that arouses interest so much as interest. Interesting people are interested people, and an enthusiasm—be it as thankless as birdwatching or as bizarre as philately—marks out the enthusiast as a source of curious learning and a person with a mind that glows.”


~ Roger Scruton, On Hunting (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)


Dust storm blankets parts of NSW after cold front

A cold front has moved across the state on Saturday whipping up dust and leaving some stunning images.




 Sometimes you only notice things when seeing from a different angle
Death and the Labyrinth MS PAINT HELP
The Crisis for Birds Is a Crisis for Us AllNew York Times. Resilc: “Big falloff in my Vermont pasture.” Moi: Now that I think of it, fewer crows in Maine in the last two years…and they are omnivores and even eat carrion.

Webster Adds Gender-Neutral Pronouns to Dictionary | Time



This would seem to have some bearing in this:  How identity politics drove the world mad.
As Mencken said, “There is no idea so stupid that you can't find a professor who will believe it.” Or, as George Orwell put it, “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”


Greek Poet Nanos Valaoritis Crucified by Time

 by  Leave a Comment

Nanos Valaoritis has died. He was 98.
Read one of his poems: “Endless Crucifixion”







Nanos Valaoritis: July 5, 1921 – September 13, 2019
Posted by at

Art Currents

YouTube Says It Will Crack Down On Manipulation Of Music Charts


This form of advertising lets the advertiser, like the artist or the label, play a shortened version of a music video as an advertisement in front of other videos. Under some conditions — like if a YouTube user interacts with the video or watches it for a certain amount of time — it would count toward the video’s overall view count. – TechCrunch







 'Our terrifying world': What drives young people to fight for change?


Resisting Conservative Narratives in Culture



All Our Pasts and Futures

When David Bowie came back with his "The Next Day" album it was knowingly an album that mined the various stages of his career. Not because that was all he could do (as the future-gazing "Blackstar" would prove) but because it was some of the things he could do. The cover of that album was a pop art collage recreation of "Heroes", belatedly (since it didn't sell that well), one of his most iconic records.

 He is not alone. Zappa's first three albums were cut up collage affairs that mined a multifaceted musical past and pasted them together. In the years to come he would separate out these instincts - so "Hot Rats" was his funky jazz album, "Cruisin' with Ruben and the Jets" his doo wop album etc. There are artists who have a thin seam they mine - maybe Dylan is like this, but he mines it deep. In retrospect the reviled double album "Self Portrait" is the most emblematic of this. Here is Dylan explicitly as magpie. Mark E. Smith was similar: always sounding like the Fall whether he took in garage rock, rockabilly, disco, cheesy '70s pop. British Beat, Krautrock or even Zappa.
Posted by at

Saturday, September 21, 2019

How do you get your Cold River screenwriting to Hollywood


"Remember the difference between a boss and a leader; a boss says "Go". A leader says "Lets Go" -
George E. M. Kelly



Consider the bathtub. "Baths are transformative or transportative, as though they might stroll away on their own claw-footed legs"Transformative bathtub 




Film and Influence


In the week of the Oscars its worth thinking on reversing the usual formula - that much film takes its inspiration from literary sources - and thinking of the other way round: how film has and can influence literature. When I occasionally get asked what influences my own fiction, I inevitably mention certain writers, or certain tropes, but cinema is also a key 
part of my artistic back story; both in terms of the cultural reference points that accumulate for a person of my age and background, but also in terms of narrative style. . C



Film, and in particular how film plays with narrative, remains one of the primary sources for my writing - it also makes me less forgiving of bad films, or ones that are predictable in the way they show their story; how many superhero origin stories can I cope with? But that's the same with bad novels as well. The relationship between book and film is not just of the first being a cheap first draft of the second; but it is fascinating which stories appeal to film makers - often obscure stories or novels that have in them something that the film maker can use - similarly as a writer, its very easily to be jealous of the resources - sound, vision, acting, soundtrack - at the film maker's (expensive) command, whilst then remembering that our budget doesn't change whether its four men in a room (like "Reservoir Dogs") or the end of the world that we're portraying





Budapest, Andrassy ut, Terror Háza, Eiserner Vorhang - Budapest, Andrassy ut, Terror Háza, Iron Curtain Stock Photo



  

Border Patrol, CSSR, German shephard, Iron Curtain Stock Photo

Border Patrol, CSSR, German shephard, Iron Curtain
Contributor: CTK / Alamy Stock Photo
Image ID: BX55ED
File size: 
17.3 MB (0.5 MB Compressed download) 
Dimensions: 2592 x 2338 px | 21.9 x 19.8 cm | 8.6 x 7.8 inches | 300dpi
Releases: Model - no | Property - no   Do I need a release?

More information: 
This image could have imperfections as it’s either historical or reportage.
After the Communist putsch in 1948 the frontier to West Germany and Austria was sealed to prevent escapes of Czechoslovak citizen from behind Iron Curtain. The Border Patrol was accompanied by trained German shephards and was ordered by the Communist goverment to aprehend or shoot and kill any perpetrators. Czechoslovakia 1963. (CTK Photo / Jiri Krulis) - special instructions - NO ARCHIVE, NO THIRD PARTY SALES
Photographer: Krulis Jiri
Date taken: 31 December 1963
Location: CESKOSLOVENSKO
Cold River: The Cold Truth of Freedom by Jozef Imrich - Goodreads


imrich cold from www.goodreads.com

Cold River: a survivor's story is about man's desire for freedom during a time when none existed. Jozef describes the village in which he grew up with such emotion and sadness that the reader can hear the snow  ...

How do you get your screenwriting to Hollywood

The Man Who Would Be Beckett

Bill Irwin finds Beckett’s remarkable use of language something of a balm at a time when the use of words has grown so imprecise. “Our culture runs away from words,” he bemoaned. “It seems to me one of the things this language can do is help us reconnect with human intelligence, as distinct from artificial intelligence. A lot of Beckett’s language is a portrait of consciousness — of how the mind works.” – Los Angeles Times

How to make a book last for millennia 

MIT News – Study of Dead Sea Scroll sheds light on a lost ancient parchment-making technology. “First discovered in 1947 by Bedouin shepherds looking for a lost sheep, the ancient Hebrew texts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls are some of the most well-preserved ancient written materials ever found. Now, a study by researchers at MIT and elsewhere elucidates a unique ancient technology for parchment making and provides new insights into possible methods to better preserve these precious historical documents.The study focused on one scroll in particular, known as the Temple Scroll, among the roughly 900 full or partial scrolls found in the years since that first discovery. The scrolls were found in jars hidden in 11 caves on the steep hillsides just north of the Dead Sea, in the region around the ancient settlement of Qumran, which was destroyed by the Romans about 2,000 years ago. The Temple Scroll is one of the largest (almost 25 feet long) and best-preserved of all the scrolls, even though its material is the thinnest of all of them (one-tenth of a millimeter, or roughly 1/250 of an inch thick). It also has the clearest, whitest writing surface of all the scrolls. These properties led Admir Masic, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career Development Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and a Department of Materials Science and Engineering faculty fellow in archaeological materials, and his collaborators to wonder how the parchment was made. The results of that study, carried out with former doctoral student Roman Schuetz (now at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science), MIT graduate student Janille Maragh, James Weaver from the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, and Ira Rabin from the Federal Institute of Materials Research and Testing and Hamburg University in Germany, were published today in the journal Science Advances [full text no paywall]. They found that the parchment was processed in an unusual way, using a mixture of salts found in evaporites — the material left from the evaporation of brines — but one that was different from the typical composition found on other parchments…”

The Girl Who Published Her First Novel At 12, And Then Disappeared At 25


Barbara Newhall Follett saw her first book – about a wild little girl who longs to be free from structures of brick and glass – published when she was 12. By the time she was 25, “Barbara began to feel her dreams slipping away to the familiar tune of work and domesticity. She still wrote, but her work was no longer in favour with publishers and the rejections hurt. And then, in 1939, on 7 December, Barbara Rogers, née Newhall Follett, walked out of the apartment she shared with her husband. She left no note, took only a few dollars and some shorthand notes. She was never seen again.” – The Guardian (UK)


Should You Really Go To A Book-Adapted Movie Before You Read The Book?

It’s an important question as The Goldfinch, based on a rather lengthy novel, hits theatres. And then … what about movies based on Stephen King books? “The more sophisticated the source material, the stronger the obligation felt: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl were mere airport novels, I told myself, so no pressure there.” – Los Angeles Times


 Should Ghost Writers Speak Out Against Their Subjects?

“It’s like a lawyer: if you find that the person you’re representing is a murderer you can’t then go around bewailing







InsideHook – That DIY project you’ve been putting off for months just got a whole lot easier – “Need audio equipment to record a podcast? Want to make your own tagliatelle pasta? Lacking the right wire strippers to build your own quadcopter drone? The new Chicago Tool Library has your back, so you can explore your inner Leonardo DaVinci without having to buy and store gear you use once in a blue moon. Just launched this summer in Bridgeport, The Chicago Tool Library is a community-driven nonprofit organization that rents out donated tools. The inventory is stacked, ranging from power drills to masonry to woodworking to food-preparation hardware.  To earn the right to check out gadgets, you just need to pay an annual fee set on a sliding scale: it’s $1 for every $1,000 you make in annual income. No surprise, you must also be a Chicago resident. Hours are 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays, and the library is located at 1048 W. 37th Street…”
See also: The West Philly Tool Library loans tools to community members so they can perform simple home maintenance, tend their yards and gardens, build furniture, start projects, and learn new skills in a safe and affordable manner.
Posted by at
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)