Another frustration of science news-following – the contradictory stories. According to the BBC, a conference in Vienna saw the launch of “the world’s first computer network protected by unbreakable quantum encryption“. [Hat tip to Darren ‘Orbit’ Turpin]
Meanwhile, at Trondheim in Norway, another researcher has discovered that quantum cryptography can be hijacked by shining a bright light into the equipment. Someone sort these people out with an RSS reader!
The longer you follow science and tech news, the more you start noticing the stories that resurface time and time again in slightly different forms. Point in case: OMG new material works on same principle as gecko feet but is ten times stickier!!1
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not refuting the science. I’m just frustrated by the perpetual teasing… I don’t want to hear about it until I can schlepp on out to my nearest shoe-shop and buy trainers that’ll let me walk up and down the sides of buildings, OK? [original LOL-free image by Mataparda]
Hey, remember me mentioning a kind of Mundane SF/futurist social media roleplaying game back in July? Well, The Superstruct Game finally kicked off this week, and you can get involved on a number of levels – hundreds of participants (including a number of Futurismic staffers) are already helping to invent the future, so hop in and join them.
What are the requirements? That you can imagine what the world might be like in 2019… so ideal for science fiction fans, I’d have thought. Get involved!
Regular readers (including, embarrassingly enough, The Man Himself) will be aware of my status as a card-carrying Bruce Sterling fan-boy, but as it’s a fandom I know many Futurismic readers share I feel I can more than justify linking to a recent interview with Sterling conducted by David de Beer at the Nebula Awards website.
As usual, you get both sides of the Sterling coin: the lengthy and discursive answers:
The Commercial vs the Artistic in writing – is there a genuine difference between these two philosophies or are they artifical attributes? Are they in opposition, and if so, can they meet?
Well, I hang out a lot in countries where the creatives write in minority languages, and really, that’s just not an issue for them. They know what American commercial writing looks like, but they themselves don’t HAVE any “commerce.” There aren’t enough potential readers to establish a market.
What they DO commonly have is “political writing,” the kind of stuff that gets your fingertips broken by the secret police. So: take a guy like recent Nobel-Prize winner Orhan Pamuk — super-popular worldwide, a real old-school deep-thinking artsy literatus, and the crazy-fascist wing of the Turkish secret police are trying hard to kill him. Now that guy is a writer’s writer. He’s got all those supposed oppositions stuffed into one refugee valise. You know, fretting about a commercial sell-out is the least of Orhan’s problems.
Furthermore, it’s dead obvious that the writing problems that matter in America now are political rather than “commercial” or “artistic”. America’s suffering a Civil Cold War. Or at least, they were until the Right’s culture-warriors started losing it.
And the short sharp punches-in-the-nose:
Electronic vs Print publishing – any thoughts on the matter?
You should talk to my colleagues in newspapers. If you can find any newspapers left.
Go read – even if you’re not a fan of his fiction, Sterling keeps an ear to the ground of reality better than any sf writer of his generation, and that alone makes him worth paying attention to.
Yet more evidence that scammers are always way out in front of the businesses they defraud… not to mention the enforcement agencies who are supposed to stop them. You’ve heard of credit-card skimmers, right – unofficial extras glued on to an ATM to store card details from the magnetic stripes as the machine is used? [image by Wrote]
Well, now it seems the things can simply text the captured data to the user, saving them the risk of getting busted when they turn up to collect it. As the Hack-A-Day blog (where the story was spotted) remarks:
ATM skimmer manufacturers have so far been really successful because of their commitment to security, from the paint they use to cover their skimmers to their exclusive clientèle. The manufacturer of this particular model claims that none of their clients who’ve used this new ATM skimmer has been arrested, and they only accept business from “recommended” clients. We think it’s interesting and ironic how these criminals have adapted their security procedures to deal with institutions we wish were more secure.
Quite. [image by Mathias Klang]