Does Not Equal is a webcomic by Sarah Ennals – check out the pre-Futurismic archives, and the strips that have been published here previously.
[ Be sure to check out the Does Not Equal Cafepress store for webcomic merchandise featuring Canadians with geometrically-shaped heads! ]
Wherever there’s a fast buck to be made, there you’ll find phishing scams and internet fraudsters. Some enterprising souls evidently decided that phishing for the credit card details of ordinary people was insufficiently ambitious, so they turned their attention to the nascent carbon credits market:
The hackers launched a targeted phishing attack against employees of numerous companies in Europe, New Zealand and Japan, which appeared to come from the German Emissions Trading Authority. The workers were told that their companies needed to re-register their accounts with the Authority, where carbon credits and transactions are recorded.
When workers entered their credentials into a bogus web page linked in the e-mail, the hackers were able to hi-jack the credentials to access the companies’ Trading Authority accounts and transfer their carbon credits to two other accounts controlled by the hackers.
[…]According to the BBC, it’s estimated the hackers stole 250,000 carbon credit permits from six companies worth more than $4 million. At least seven out of 2,000 German firms that were targeted in the phishing scam fell for it. One of these unidentified firms reportedly lost $2.1 million in credits in the fraud.
Now, in no way do I condone this sort of criminal activity… but I can’t help but feel that any organisation dealing with big-money transactions that doesn’t train its employees in decent email security procedures in this day and age is only getting what it deserves. Phishing is essentially a mediated version of the social engineering hack, and that’s an old enough phenomenon that you’d think any organisation with a lot to lose would take a little more care over it… I wonder if we’ll ever learn, or if we’re hardwired to fall for confidence tricks and bluff deceptions in perpetuity? [image by foto43]
I usually try very hard to think up my own headlines when passing on items like this, but sometimes you just have to concede that the one you found can’t be improved upon. So, enter the newest candidate for the ultimate in environmentally-friendly building materials – fungal mycelium [via MetaFilter; image by James Jordan].
Mycelium doesn’t taste very good, but once it’s dried, it has some remarkable properties. It’s nontoxic, fireproof and mold- and water-resistant, and it traps more heat than fiberglass insulation. It’s also stronger, pound for pound, than concrete. In December, Ross completed what is believed to be the first structure made entirely of mushroom. (Sorry, the homes in the fictional Smurf village don’t count.) The 500 bricks he grew at Far West Fungi were so sturdy that he destroyed many a metal file and saw blade in shaping the ‘shrooms into an archway 6 ft. (1.8 m) high and 6 ft. wide.
[…]
A promising start-up named Ecovative is building a 10,000-sq.-ft. (about 930 sq m) myco-factory in Green Island, N.Y. “We see this as a whole new material, a woodlike equivalent to plastic,” says CEO Eben Bayer. The three-year-old company has been awarded grants from the EPA and the National Science Foundation, as well as the Department of Agriculture–because its mushrooms feast on empty seed husks from rice or cotton. “You can’t even feed it to animals,” says Bayer of this kind of agricultural waste. “It’s basically trash.”
[…]
Ecovative’s next product, Greensulate, will begin targeting the home-insulation market sometime next year. And according to Bayer’s engineering tests, densely packed mycelium is strong enough to be used in place of wooden beams.
There are so many possible punchlines that I think I’ll leave you to pick your own…
People can be very quick to make jokes about the lack of knowledge some Americans have about the countries beyond their borders, but the opposite can also be true. Damien Walter recalls a discussion he had with Neil Gaiman at last year’s Clarion writer’s workshop about “Americaland” – the bundle of cultural shorthands and cliches that go to make up the fictional USA where British (and other) writers tend to set their stories:
Americaland is real place for British writers, it is built from thousands of fragments of American TV, films, music, comics and other cultural artefacts. It’s a place filled with 1950’s dinners and long desolate highways among other things. And its just as imaginary as a Britain filled with red telephone boxes and bowler hatted business men.
(One draw of Americaland is the British tendency towards naffness…IE…any story that seems fascinating and dark in Americaland becomes utterly naff if you transplant it to the UK. Batman in Gotham = Dark Knight. Batman in Birmingham = mentalist in tights. If you are British and want to write Batman, or any other American archetype, then welcome to Americaland.)
[Batman in Birmingham… I’d buy that comic, personally. DC should give the franchise to Grant Morrison for a few years… “Mentalist in Tights” = Best Tagline Ever.]
Americaland is as much a fantasy world as Middle Earth or Dune. Some of the most fascinating fantasy worlds are the ones that overlap our reality so closely that the reader can almost accept them as real. Perhaps that’s why Americaland, with all its inaccuracies and cliches, can be such a compelling place to set stories in. Whenever I turn my hand to any story of the horrific or dark fantasy variety, I find Americaland creeping in from the edges. However hard I try to root these stories in the Britain I know, American locations and characters crop up again and again. When I turned to my imagination for material this weekend, it gave me a man and woman meeting in a diner and going on a road trip. It’s a story that can only take place in Americaland. So do I accept where my imagination is taking me, for all its flaws, or rail against it and force myself to write in British settings?
It’s a good question – should you only write what you know? And if not, how would you recommend a non-native get a feel for the real USA without the expense of a pair of plane tickets and a few months of travelling? [image by dno1967]
And to our American readers: what are the most egregious Americaland cliches you see in the writing of non-American authors, and how should they be corrected?
(Thinking out loud here, folks, so do feel free to chip in and tell me why I’m completely wrong on any or all points raised… :))
The guys at TechDirt pointed toward a wryly tongue-in-cheek piece at Bloomberg that attempts to nominate Google, Inc as a presidential candidate. Obviously enough, it’s a response to the recent Supreme Court ruling that corporations should have the same “freedom of speech” as a person, something of a reductio ad absurdum… but it throws a light onto the increasing political clout of corporations in the States and elsewhere. A company running for political office is ridiculous (at least on the face of it), but a suite of corporate political rights and powers isn’t quite such an inconceivable idea.
After all, we’re already witnessing the decline in power of the nation-state as a political player, and there are numerous corporations whose yearly accounts eclipse the GDP of many countries. In some respects, it’s bizarre that corporate political power isn’t already enshrined in written legislation… if only because to legislate it would be a tacit admission that it exists, and that its boundaries need defining. As geography becomes anathema thanks to communications networks and climate change migration, the comparative security and reliability of the corporation as sovereign will start to make more sense to populations of rootless, landless and unrepresented people. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some corporations represented in the United Nations within my lifetime… assuming that the UN lasts long enough, that is.
Of course, the potential for corporations to abuse the trust placed in them by their citizen/employees will be immense… but will it be any more so than the potential for nation-states to do the same? Profit is just another ideology, after all… and much as the corporate mindset tends to set my teeth on edge, it’s an ideology with coherent logical underpinnings, which is more than I can say for most of my current political options here in the UK.
And don’t forget the point made by Jason Stoddard, namely that a profit-focussed corporation has no reason to enslave the population and make their lives miserable. Quite the opposite, in fact – corporations want happy people with expendable money in their pockets, and given that those two things are becoming very difficult for governments to provide in some parts of the world, the corporation as focus of political allegiance doesn’t seem as insane as it might at first glance. There’s precedent, too – East India Company, anyone? Hudson’s Bay Company?