This issue is called "Black and White" because I somehow picked a ton of images for this issue that almost all happened to be black and white, and then a bunch of images that are pretty pink. Content-wise, it's a nice smattering of underground web, killer robot, cybercrime, and e-culture goodness. Enjoy.
Stranger Robot Danger
Answer: fair to middling. I'm far less worried about these than I am about global warming, or or those autonomous people-tracking machine gun turret robots. Oh, did I not mention that?
My favorite part of this article is the engineer explaining that the customers had to ask for safeguards to be implemented in their turrets' “auto-firing system”. Well, OK, if you have to have that...
Frankly, I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner. We've had the technology to do this since we've had guns, Arduino, and quadcopters. Then again, it's probably been happening, but without being uploaded to YouTube for the internet to see.
This experimental material can change its surface texture between smooth, bumpy, ridged, or channeled based by applying pressure to it. Why would you want this? My mind leaps to certain applications like adventure or military wear being able to shift between different textures based on different environments.
Wild, Weird, Web
I wish I could get paid to make this kind of stuff for a living. Except maybe a little less of the terrorjuice and more of the conspiracy/puzzle smoothie.
Krebs on Security does a thorough (but bite-sized) breakdown of the different leaders of the underground cybercrime forum Darkode, including a particularly interesting individual who was apparently trying to social engineer other criminals into revealing their identities.
Two weeks ago a million federal fingerprint files were compromised by hackers. That's pretty bad, considering that fingerprints are probably the most established biometric that we trust for official things. This article runs over what could be done with those fingerprints.
THIS LOOKS SO COOL. Wow. I love it. I want it. It also just got Greenlighted on Steam, so we might be able to play it soon.
Seriously. I collected most of these images over the week. I don't know how so many of them are black and white. I'm into it. Here's the pink colors!
E-Culture
There's a really interesting article linked inside this one on how dumb networks propel innovation you should check out, as well.
Ever since reading the article on the rise of the stream, I've hated the idea more and more. The stream, the everflowing content that finds you the same stuff everyone else is looking at, or the things that the big publishers can make people look at. It's the tradeoff we make for ease of use. But I don't think that's necessarily a good thing.
There are so many great things hidden in plain sight across the wide and large internet. It's like an ocean; immeasurably deep and vast, but beyond the surface, almost invisible, difficult to see. But that's the way the web used to be, too. You'd go exploring, diving, spelunking, into the net and see what sort of wild websites you could find. Nowadays, it's easy to look at the same stuff that everyone else is looking at - and we all know you are what you read/watch.
Decentralization is important because it makes us broader explorers and thinkers. Effort is important because it forces us to process and grow. I'm going to try and go on more webventures.
When you restrict people from doing the things they expect to be able to do, they find interesting ways to circumvent it. I also found a journal in the comments called "It's Supposed to Look Like Shit: The Internet Ugly Aesthetic". Love it.
In the spirit of this article, I duplicated the heading image, but not before saving it with really shitty jpeg compression.