The St. Petersburg Times has a Hacking history article. Weird. Hacking has been around for more than a century. In the 1870s, several teenagers were flung off the country’s brand new phone system by enraged authorities. Here’s a peek at how busy hackers have been in the past 35 years. I’d say hacking has been part of our culture since there were humans around. Link.
Wow, $30k a year too! This Fall, Eyebeam R&D will launch the OpenLab, a new facility dedicated to public domain R&D. We are seeking inaugural fellows to join us at Eyebeam. The ideal fellow has experience creating innovative creative technology projects, a love of collaborative development, and a desire to distribute his or her work as widely as possible. We encourage artists, hackers, designers and engineers to apply.[via] Link.
“Secure optical data storage could soon literally be at your fingertips thanks to work being carried out in Japan. Yoshio Hayasaki and his colleagues have discovered that data can be written into a human fingernail by irradiating it with femtosecond laser pulses. Capacities are said to be up to 5 mega bits and the stored data lasts for 6 months – the length of time it takes a fingernail to be completely replaced.” [via] Link.
Seems like everyone is tired of waiting for others to fix the problems, so they’re doing it themselves, even if it’s not quite perfect. The UK is turning into a nation of unwilling DIY desktop-security installers, research has revealed. ISPs’ failure to provide desktop protection against internet threats has forced two-thirds of home PC users to take the DIY option, despite the majority lacking the necessary know-how to ensure they are not left vulnerable. Link.
Mac SE/30 running an Apache web server on Debian Linux (woody). It was quite easy to set up this system. Here are some details. Mac SE/30 with 4 GB Quantum FireBall hard drive, and 80 MB of RAM (using MODE32). There is an 80 MB Mac OS partition for System 7.5.3 Revision 2 and a Mac application that is required to boot Linux, called ‘Penguin’. You cannot boot the Mac directly into Linux – it must be done from the Mac OS. Link.
Here’s an ethernet-powered alarm clock. It was made from an old ethernet-to-serial connector and POE wires run to the battery terminals. As someone noted on in the comments, it would be cool to have the clock grab time from time.gov and set the clock that way too… Link. See the other alarm clock hacks here.
MAKE in NYC for a couple days- Hacking and Building. In this session, Torrone shows, hacks and builds dozens of projects from the popular do-it-yourself pages of Make magazine. Make brings the DIY mindset to all technology and is loaded with projects to make the most of technology in and outside the home. Torrone talks about a magazine that “celebrates your right to tweak, hack, and bend any technology to your own will.” Link.
