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New Site: New Changes

We’ve upgraded the site. Hopefully it will be a bit neater and more organized for you to find what you need here.

Greylodge Occult Review (GLOR) Archives

Back online, the archives of the legendary Greylodge Occult Review

The Alterati Archives

The gigantic podcast archives of Alterati. The Inside Scoop on the Outside Culture.

Teens, Social Media, and Privacy

Teens share a wide range of information about themselves on social media sites;1 indeed the sites themselves are designed to encourage the sharing of information and the expansion of networks. However, few teens embrace a fully public approach to social media. Instead, they take an array of steps to restrict and prune their profiles, and [...]

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LA Times – The future of wiretapping

Pushed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Obama administration may ask Congress for the power to snoop on more types of communication online. The timing couldn’t be worse, given the outcry over the Justice Department secretly grabbing journalists’ phone records and emails in its pursuit of government leakers. The bigger issue with what the [...]

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FLABBER-JASTED: It’s ‘jif’, NOT ‘.gif’, says man who should know • The Register

The internet – and especially the recently-sold content sausage machine Tumblr, epicentre of the animated gif rebirth – is reeling today at the news that when referring to image files formatted as .gifs one should pronounce it “jif”. That’s according to no less an authority than Steve Wilhite, the man who invented the Graphics Interchange [...]

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Should Palestine switch from the shekel to Bitcoin? — RT Op-Edge

The money that circulates most in the Palestinian Authority (PA) is the Israeli new shekel; guided by an interest rate policy set monthly by the Bank of Israel, which dictates Palestinian finances. Palestine has tried for decades to establish independence, but Israel has not been willing to give up its colony, so the occupation continues. [...]

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Hollywood Asks Google To Stop Listing Piracy Documentary, Claiming It’s Piracy Too

  inShare The recently released TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay – Away from Keyboard, a documentary that sympathizes with the founders of the infamous file sharing website The Pirate Bay, has become the target of fraudulent link takedown requests from major Hollywood Studios, including Viacom, Paramount, Fox and Lionsgate. After its February release on The [...]

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From VKhUTEMAS to MARKhI, 1920-36 (2005) [English/Russian]

This album contains exercises, diploma works and projects of graduates and professors of the Moscow schools that graduated architects in the 1920s and 1930s: VKhUTEMAS-VKhUTEIN, MPI-MIGI, MVTU, and ASI-MAI. The book includes both original works and photos of projects and models gathered by the MARKhI Museum in 1989-2004. Most materials are published for the first [...]

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Robert Darnton: Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1985-)

When the apprentices of a Paris printing shop in the 1730s held a series of mock trials and then hanged all the cats they could lay their hands on, why did they find it so hilariously funny that they choked with laughter when they reenacted it in pantomime some twenty times? Why in the eighteenth-century [...]

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David Rothenberg: Bug Music: How Insects Gave Us Rhythm and Noise (2013)

In the spring of 2013 the cicadas in the Northeastern United States will yet again emerge from their seventeen-year cycle—the longest gestation period of any animal. Those who experience this great sonic invasion compare their sense of wonder to the arrival of a comet or a solar eclipse. This unending rhythmic cycle is just one [...]

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Stockholm hit by third day of rioting – Telegraph

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Rioting spread across Stockholm’s suburbs on Wednesday in the third day of unrest to hit the Swedish capital, as Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt blamed the violence on “hooliganism” and appealed for calm. Stockholm police began rounding up suspected ringleaders behind the riots, leaving cars and buildings ablaze. The unrest is believed to have been sparked [...]

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An increasingly unchecked surveillance state – Al Jazeera English

The US government extensively monitors its citizens’ internet activities, with dangerous effects on personal liberties. The most egregious rights violations tend to happen against the voiceless; those who have neither the platform nor resources to articulate their grievances to the broader world. Last week, however, the US Department of Justice was caught in a very [...]

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Hackers Who Breached Google in 2010 Accessed Company’s Surveillance Database | Threat Level | Wired.com

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Hackers who breached Google’s network in 2010 obtained access to the company’s system for tracking surveillance requests from law enforcement, according to a news report. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/05/google-surveillance-database/

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Nicola Anne Candlish: The Development of Resources for Electronic Music in the UK, with Particular Reference to the bids to establish a National Studio (2012)

This thesis traces the history and development of the facilities for electronic music in the UK. It covers the early attempts to experiment with electronic music and create studios in less than ideal circumstances and the subsequent bids to create a national centre. It also covers some elements of worldwide development of electronic music and [...]

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Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, The Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet (2013)

Hacking Politics is a firsthand account of how a ragtag band of activists and technologists overcame a $90 million lobbying machine to defeat the most serious threat to Internet freedom in memory. The book is a revealing look at how Washington works today – and how citizens successfully fought back. Written by the core Internet [...]

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U.N. Urges Eating Insects; 8 Popular Bugs to Try

Ants are sweet, nutty little insects, aren’t they? I’m not talking about their personalities, but how they taste. Stinkbugs have an apple flavor, and red agave worms are spicy. A bite of tree worm apparently brings pork rinds to mind. This information will come in handy for those of us following the latest recommendation from [...]

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Privacy, public health and the moral hazard of surveillance | Cory Doctorow

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If online oversharing is a public health problem, then the state’s decision to harness it for its own purposes means that huge, powerful forces within government will come to depend on it http://m.guardiannews.com/technology/2013/may/21/privacy-public-health-surveillance

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Empowering Our Digital Sixth Sense with Google Glass, Augmented Reality and Wearable Health Gadgets | TIME.com

We all know about our five senses: sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing. Many people believe we also have a kinesthetic sense, which is what some folks believe is a sort of spiritual sense — for instance, when they perceive another person is in a room with them even though the other person is behind [...]

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Wang Hui: The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity (2009)

A compelling examination of the future of Chinese modernity by the leading member of China’s “New Left.” Challenging both the bureaucratic one-party regime and the Western neoliberal paradigm, China’s leading critic shatters the myth of progress and reflects upon the inheritance of a revolutionary past. In this original and wide-ranging study, Wang Hui examines the [...]

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Richard Sennett: The Craftsman (2008)

Craftsmanship, says Richard Sennett, names the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake, and good craftsmanship involves developing skills and focusing on the work rather than ourselves. The computer programmer, the doctor, the artist, and even the parent and citizen all engage in a craftsman’s work. In this thought-provoking book, [...]

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