Terrific speech by the godlike Adam Savage here; he's in his element surrounded by these hacker scofflaws.

Now German electronics company Siemens has gone a step further, developing a complete "surveillance in a box" system called the Intelligence Platform, designed for security services in Europe and Asia. It has already sold the system to 60 countries.

According to members of Congress, Attorney General Michael Mukasey is preparing to give the F.B.I. broad new authority to investigate Americans — without any clear basis for suspicion that they are committing a crime.

What kind of influence has being an IT security professional had on your general attitude towards life? What helps you stay out of pessimism and cynicism? Is protecting existing things really as good as building new ones?"

I chose as my subject the NSA's "secret room" at AT&T's Folsom Street facility. As part of the Bush administration's massive and illegal spying program, the communications of millions of ordinary Americans are illegally intercepted and copied via fiber-optic splitter, and diverted into this secret room, which is controlled by the NSA.

But I think the root of the problem (described in various media outlets over the past year or so) of snarky, or mean-spirited, or generally unhelpful comments becoming the norm has to do with the distance we’ve achieved from those original link-and-essay heavy blogs.

For example, our system can transfer photographic qualities such as high resolution, high dynamic range and better lighting from the photographs to the video. Additionally, the user can quickly modify the video by editing only a few still images of the scene. Finally, our system allows a user to remove unwanted objects and camera shake from the video.

Using techniques from the field of computer vision, Photosynth examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point each photo was taken from. With this information, we recreate the space and use it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos.

If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don’t need Photoshop. You don’t need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don’t need a computer. All you need to do is change the caption.

The Wiremap is an innovative projection technique that builds a real and interactive 3d image by manipulating light from a projector.

Jeffrey Birnbaum, discussed stateless computing and the evolution of the cloud. He envisions a future in which software processes are abstracted so far from the underlying hardware that companies will discuss processing capacity in terms of raw computational units rather than discrete servers.

What I found, though, was this design discouraged me from posting. If what I had to say couldn't be stretched to multiple paragraphs, I'd as likely not say it. The result was that maintaining my blog became a chore. A lot of things I could have said with just a link, a quote and a (hopefully) pithy comment were never said, or worse were stretched into posts too long to sustain their source material.

I warned you that blogging was inherently unstable. It's built on an unstable platform. How hard is that to understand? ... Man, that much was dead obvious from day one; commentary was the aspect of blogging that never, ever worked.

In Melbourne I developed a way-finding-system for the Eureka Tower Carpark. The distored letters on the wall can be read perfectly when standing at the right position.