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

We added some graphics and expanded the text areas of several pages to make it more “shiny”.
We made the site mobile friendly so you can browse it on your phone easily.
We’re updating news more often and we’ll be announcing new books and other media projects here in the future.
We’ve updated the library page with a bevy of book recommendations for you to read and enjoy.

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Enjoy,
-The Management

Can playing more games improve your life and save the world?

When American game designer Jane McGonigal wasn’t healing from a serious concussion more than a month after she slammed her head on the corner of a cabinet door in July 2009, she turned her recovery into a game. She earned points for facing obstacles (“bad guys” like drinking coffee) and for doing things that made [...]

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Introducing Strongbox, a Tool for Anonymous Document-Sharing : The New Yorker

This morning, The New Yorker launched Strongbox, an online place where people can send documents and messages to the magazine, and we, in turn, can offer them a reasonable amount of anonymity. It was put together by Aaron Swartz, who died in January, and Kevin Poulsen. Kevin explains some of the background in his own [...]

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The Asymmetry Between Past and Future, and Why it Means Mass Surveillance Won’t Work | American Civil Liberties Union

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Former Senator Joseph Lieberman recently charged that mistakes by U.S. security agencies were responsible for failing to stop the Boston Marathon bombing. I recently wrote about how mass surveillance makes this kind of recrimination inevitable, because once a government agency spies on a person, they become in a sense responsible for any actions that that [...]

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A video game about mass surveillance in the age of Big Brother and Little Brothers | Polygon

We live in a hyperconnected, technologically turbo-charged world of mass surveillance and “digital shadows” that is so subtly controlling, that it makes the notion of Big Brother seem quaint. http://www.polygon.com/2013/5/13/4326718/a-video-game-about-mass-surveillance-in-the-age-of-big-brother-and

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Wendy Hui-Kyong Chun: Control And Freedom: Power And Paranoia In The Age Of Fiber Optics (2006)

How has the Internet, a medium that thrives on control, been accepted as a medium of freedom? Why is freedom increasingly indistinguishable from paranoid control? In Control and Freedom, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun explores the current political and technological coupling of freedom with control by tracing the emergence of the Internet as a mass medium. [...]

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Climate change ‘will make hundreds of millions homeless’

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Carbon dioxide levels indicate rise in temperatures that could lead agriculture to fail on entire continents http://m.guardiannews.com/environment/2013/may/12/climate-change-expert-stern-displacement

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New study suggests we may see ice-free Arctic in our lifetime | Science Recorder

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A new study published in the current issue of Science suggests that an ice-free Arctic may very well become a reality in the near future. The research team set out to study Lake El’gygytgyn, “Lake E” for short, which was formed 3.6 million years ago when a meteorite hit earth. Because it has not been [...]

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Finn Brunton: Spam: Shadow History of the Internet (2013)

The vast majority of all email sent every day is spam, a variety of idiosyncratically spelled requests to provide account information, invitations to spend money on dubious products, and pleas to send cash overseas. Most of it is caught by filters before ever reaching an in-box. Where does it come from? As Finn Brunton explains [...]

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Bitcoin scam turns online gamers into unwitting accomplices – NBC News.com

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It’s a thoroughly 21st-century heist: An online gaming service secretly leveraged thousands of users’ computers to acquire money in the form of online-only crypto-currency Bitcoin. http://m.nbcnews.com/technology/bitcoin-scam-turns-online-gamers-unwitting-accomplices-6C9743685

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Mumbai’s Parsi cafe culture

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Mumbai’s grand old Parsi cafes are a symbol of the city’s diverse cuisine and culture, but on a foodie tour of the city our writer finds out they are a dying breed http://m.guardiannews.com/travel/2013/may/10/mumbai-parsi-cafes-indian-food

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Johannes Itten: The Art of Color / The Elements of Color (1961-) [English/Spanish]

This is the most complete document of one of the landmarks of modern education in art – the famous Basic Course at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Itten was the teacher who organized it at the invitation of Walter Gropius. First published in 1961 when Itten was still alive, the book has been revised and [...]

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Gerald Janecek: Zaum: The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism (1996)

This is the most comprehensive treatment of a significant episode of the historical avant-garde period to which many refer but with little concrete background. According to Charlotte Douglas (Russian and Slavic Studies, NYU), Zaum “is an encyclopedic account of zaum or ‘beyonsense,’ the most distinctive feature of Russian avant-garde art and poetry early in the [...]

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Wary of Bitcoin? A guide to some other cryptocurrencies | Ars Technica

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It might have passed you by, but an essential part of the Internet’s infrastructure took a heavy knock last week. The Silk Road—you know, the website where you can buy any drug imaginable”—was subjected to a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Calling the Silk Road “essential” might seem an exaggeration, but it [...]

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5 Russian-Made Surveillance Technologies Used in the West | Danger Room | Wired.com

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We all know surveillance is big in Putin’s Russia. What you may not know is that Russia’s surveillance tech is being used all over — even here in the U.S. The Kremlin is up to its domes in spy technology. One reason is fear, provoked by the Arab Spring, of a growing and diffuse protest [...]

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National Security Agency: Untangling the Web: A Guide to Internet Research (2007)

“The manual just released by the NSA following a FOIA request filed in April by MuckRock, a site that charges fees to process public records for activists and others. The book is filled with advice for using search engines, the Internet Archive and other online tools.” (source) Publisher Center for Digital Content of the National [...]

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Our Response to Google Glasses

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Kobo Experiments With Experiential Game

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Kobo has ventured into new territory, creating an alternate reality game called The Descent for a three-week contest to help promote the launch of Dan Brown’s new novel Inferno. The Canadian-based company enlisted U.K. self-published author J. F. Penn to write three original short stories in a similar style to Brown’s mysteries, which can be [...]

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Thieves Steal $45 Million from ATMs (To Be Fair: ATMs in Delis and Bars Must “Steal” About That in $3 ATM Fees) | Vanity Fair

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Law enforcement officials now believe that earlier this winter, a troupe of tech-savvy thieves—a handful of whom are now in police custody—pilfered $45 million from ATMs in 27 different countries. (And the Belgian jewel plunderers thought they already had on lockdown this week’s “No, We’re Not Condoning Crime But If You Had to Describe Something [...]

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