Which VPN Providers Really Take Anonymity Seriously? As detailed in yesterday’s article, if a VPN provider carries logs of their users’ activities the chances of them being able to live up to their claim of offering an anonymous service begins to decrease rapidly. There are dozens of VPN providers, many of which carry marketing on their web pages which suggests that the anonymity of their subscribers is a top priority. But is it really? Do their privacy policies stand up to scrutiny? Over the past two weeks TorrentFreak contacted some of the leading, most-advertised, and most talked about VPN providers in the file-sharing and anonymity space. 1. 2. This article does not attempt to consider the actual quality of service offered by any listed provider, nor does it consider whether any service is good value for money. P2P Supporting VPN providers NordVPN Response to Q1: As stated in our terms of service, we do not monitor, record or store any VPN user logs. NordVPN website Private Internet Access Private Internet Access website BTguard TorGuard 1.
Retronaut - See the past like you wouldn't believe Girl Turk: Mechanical Turk Meets Girl Talk's "Feed the Animals" Girl Talk's Feed the Animals is one of my favorite albums this year, a hyperactive mish-mash sampling hundreds of songs from the last 45 years of popular music. Gregg Gillis created a beautiful, illegal mess of copyright clearance hell, which you should download immediately. (It's free, but I kicked in $20 for Gregg's legal fund and a copy of the CD.) Last month, Rex Sorgatz asked about collecting metadata on the album for data crunching. So I compiled all the data into spreadsheets, used Amazon's Mechanical Turk to collect some additional information, and pulled out a few charts. Update (October 30): Here's the official sample list. Results Here's the final spreadsheet with all the collected data. There are 14 tracks on Feed the Animals, with a total of 264 sampled songs. The timeline below shows where each sample was triggered across the entire album, as a percentage of the song's duration. The chart below shows the sample release years in more detail, telling another story. Methodology
Matt Richardson has invented a camera that tells you what you're seeing Matt Richardson: Descriptive Camera (pictures from www.mattrichardson.com) I love this project so much it makes me a bit dizzy. Right, I’m sitting down now. New York-based developer Matt Richardson has created a camera which provides a text description of the scene focussed on rather than capturing it visually. Brilliantly this means that the camera doesn’t necessarily just record objectively what is in front of it, it can also have opinions such as “Looks like a cupboard which is old and ugly” adding a fascinatingly fun edge to Matt’s invention. For the full lowdown (and what shampoo adverts might call the science part) head over to Matt’s blog and then spend the rest of the day revelling in the possibilities, maybe looking through your Facebook images and imagining what this amazing little contraption might spew out. Some of the print-outs from The Descriptive Camera (pictures from www.mattrichardson.com)
Wind turbine creates water from thin air The turbine can produce up to 1,000 liters of drinking water every day, according to Eole Water. French company, Eole Water, has invented a wind turbine that can generate water from humid air. The technology offers a clean and sustainable way to provide water to rural communities, says Eole Water director of marketing, Thibault Janin. A view inside the technological processes of the Eole Water turbine. The 24-meter tall structure also filters and purifies the water it produces ensuring it is suitable to drink straight away. Water from thin air The Eole Water Turbine Self sufficient villages Technological specifications Purification process Makers of a wind turbine claim it can generate power and water from humid airDevelopers hope the device will bring water to rural communities in arid countriesThe technology could be adapted to meet the needs of small cities in the future, say manufacturers See also: Wind powers new energy age See also: Can hot air be the free fuel of the future?
Printic: Print & Share - Available for free on the AppStore I'm 3"x4", I'm glossy, and I'm attractive. I rock the color orange. Once my tattooed exterior comes off, people immediately fall in love with me. Currently, there are millions of me out there in the world. Printic has partnered with the best photo labs around to ensure great service for your photos. That's what your pictures deserve. CrowdForge: Crowdsourcing Complex Tasks Work marketplaces like MTurk are great for accomplishing small, well defined nuggets of work, such as labeling images and transcribing audio, but terrible for many more complex and labor intensive real world tasks. Over the last year, Robert Kraut, Niki Kittur and I formalized a general process of solving such complex problems using MTurk. We proposed three basic types of tasks and explored them in two neat experimental applications. Solving complex problems on MTurk has always involved partitioning the complex task into simpler sub-tasks. partition tasks split a problem into sub-problems (one to many)map tasks solve a small unit of work (one to one)reduce tasks combine multiple results into one (many to one) CastingWords uses human intelligence only for their map tasks, which consist of transcribing speech samples to text. Writing Articles In the first experiment, turkers generated encyclopedia-style articles on a given subject. Product Comparisons Sweet Applications
Télécharger gratuitement Adobe Creative Suite 2 Photoshop, Illustrator ou même inDesign font partie des logiciels les plus piratés à travers le monde. Faut dire aussi qu’ils sont bien conçus et qu’ils coûtent très cher, alors ceci explique sans doute cela. Toutefois, si vous avez envie de profiter de ces solutions en toute légalité et sans rien payer, alors le bon plan qui suit risque de vous intéresser. Et attention, les filles, parce qu’il s’agit en plus de la version premium de la suite, version qui contient une dizaine d’outils très sympathiques : Acrobat Standard 7.0, Acrobat Pro 7.0, Acrobat Pro 8.0, Audition 3.0, GoLive CS2, Illustrator CS2, inCopy CS2, InDesign CS2, Photoshop CS2, Photoshop Elements 4.0/5.0 et Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0. Télécharger gratuitement la Adobe CS2, c’est maintenant possible et en toute légalité ! Le seul truc un peu dommage, finalement, c’est qu’il sera impossible de profiter ensuite de la Creative Suite 6. Bref, pour récupérer gratuitement la CS2, c’est par ici que ça se passe ! Via
Plasma Rocket Could Travel to Mars in 39 Days (PhysOrg.com) -- Last Wednesday, the Ad Astra Rocket Company tested what is currently the most powerful plasma rocket in the world. As the Webster, Texas, company announced, the VASIMR VX-200 engine ran at 201 kilowatts in a vacuum chamber, passing the 200-kilowatt mark for the first time. The test also marks the first time that a small-scale prototype of the company's VASIMR (Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket) rocket engine has been demonstrated at full power. "It's the most powerful plasma rocket in the world right now," says Franklin Chang-Diaz, former NASA astronaut and CEO of Ad Astra. But Ad Astra has bigger plans for VASIMR, such as high-speed missions to Mars. Chang-Diaz has been working on the development of the VASIMR concept since 1979, before founding Ad Astra in 2005 to further develop the project. More information: www.AdAstraRocket.com Connect to PhysOrg.com on Facebook via: New Scientist © 2009 PhysOrg.com
ModernMantra, Drawings in Which Every Object is Covered with the Word Describing It In his “ModernMantra” series, Swedish artist Thomas Broomé illustrates rooms using words as textures—for instance, a wall is covered with the word “wall.” The series is meant to convey the absuridity of how messages are communicated in film, music, advertising, and other media: In his work, Thomas Broomé uses repetition as a recurring technique, making the viewer realize how absurd certain messages created with different media such as image, film, music and advertisement may be. The repetition becomes a mantra designed to create needs and arouse desires so strong that they overshadow existential issues of far greater importance. via Visual News
Design Patterns of Crowdsourced Art Sometimes I try to google "crowdsourced art" in hopes that I'll find a comprehensive list of all such projects. Maybe there's something out there that I'm unaware of... that'll be on that list... that will really make my day or something. What I'm finding instead is either stuff that I've already heard about or things that fits into the same general pattern, one that I'm frankly getting a little tired of. So, I'm going to share my own Comprehensive List. (Organized by how people contribute) Drawing Flat Contribution Model (v1) The Life in a Day project is a great example of how tons of effort and creativity were filtered down into one consumable artifact. The gist of the model is this: There's some prompt, people go out and do it on their own, submit their creations, and then some curator accepts or denies their contribution and integrates it into the One True Artifact. Flat Contribution Model (v2) While I may have been too snarky about Life in a Day, I reaallly like the Johhny Cash Project.