This is “Chicago”, the fake Arab town built in the middle of the Negev desert by Israel to train its military forces in urban warfare.
Though artificial, our hometown's dessicated twin is “highly realistic.” Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, whose photographs of “Chicago” collected in their eponymous book and replicated here, wrote: “To create this alternative universe, Palestinian architecture has been carefully scrutinized. Roads and alleyways have been constructed to mimic the layout of towns like Ramallah and Nablus. In one corner the ground has been covered in sand, a reference to unpaved refugee camps like Jenin. Graffiti has been applied to the walls with obscure declarations in Arabic: 'I love you Ruby' and 'Red ash, hot as blood'. Burned-out vehicles line the streets.”
Perhaps more interesting than its spatial authenticity is the fact that the history of this ghost town “directly mirrors the history of the Palestinian conflict.”
The first and second Intifada, the Gaza withdrawl, an attempted assassination of Saddam Hussein, the Battle of Falluja; almost every one of Israel's major military tactics in the Middle East over the past three decades was performed in advance here.
This is where generations of Israeli soldiers rehearse over and over again like actors in a Hollywood studio set, with props on hand or littered about, before stepping out in front of live television cameras, the whole world their captive audience, to play out their well-choreographed routines.
Meanwhile, “Chicago” is so named because its bullet-ridden fake walls apparently recall the punctured real walls of Al Capone's Chicago. While still acknowledging the dizzying complexity of Arab-Israeli relations, one wonders if a small yet meaningful step towards lasting peace could be taken if, on Israel's side, it stops vicariously engaging with the Palestinians in secret, replicant cities after first exorcising this mythological, gangster-infested Chicago from their collective memory and replace it with something real and true?
Not everyone was a mobster then, the same way not everyone offered something to our former governor for Obama's senate seat. The same way not all Palestinians are terrorists.
In any case, should the ultranationalist Avigdor Lieberman and his party's racist ideology get their way in a ruling coalition with Benjamin Netanyahu, and all Israeli-Arabs get expelled from Israel, their homes and cities dismantled and resettled over, at least part of history, albeit one written by others, has been recorded for future archaeologists to reconstruct.
Un peu hors topic, mais cette fausse ville esquissée et pourtant bâtie, quelque part entre le terrain d'entraînement et l'environnement de jeu vidéo (et qui en passant commente sur la nature de la relation entre israéliens et palestiniens) dégage une atmosphère suffisamment étrange pour être postée ici, une sorte de Las Vegas noir, remplie de clichés.
We’ve noted Facebook’s gradual crawl into the realm of lifestreaming – showing friends’ activities from outside services like YouTube, Flickr, and Delicious in your News Feed. Today, AOL’s $850 million social network Bebo is piling into the space too, with a slew of new aggregation features that build on the additions made back in December.
The big new twist on Bebo’s lifestreaming features is that it will automatically import all of your friends’ activity on the different services you register, even if those friends aren’t Bebo users. This functionality comes by way of Socialthing, the social aggregator that AOL acquired last summer, and is a similar but more automated concept to FriendFeed’s “imaginary friends.”
At launch, Bebo is offering support for Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and Delicious. That’s a smaller number of services than the competitors, but the company is hoping that with its unique ability to pull in activities from your disparate friends automatically, it can make up ground. Another way the company hopes to do that is by getting celebrities into lifestreaming – they tout the fact that a number of prominent artists like Miley Cyrus and All-American Rejects are already using the features.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Socialthing hadn’t even left private beta when it was purchased by AOL, but it did seem to make social aggregation a lot easier to get excited about, since it leveraged your existing social networks and didn’t entail having to find a whole bunch of new people to follow, ala FriendFeed. There’s also AIM integration coming, wherein AIM profiles become Bebo profiles, which could lure millions of new people into the site.
AOL and Bebo have a huge audience and in many ways a better, more mainstream take on an idea that has proven successful so far with early adopters. Will it be enough to get the masses into social aggregation and prove that AOL didn’t massively overpay for Bebo? Probably only if tens of millions of people cling to it, versus the hundreds of thousands that use existing social aggregators.
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Les liens additionnels de l'article de Mashable pointent vers tout une série d'"aggrégateurs sociaux". C'est évidemment une nouvelle tendance pour tous les réseaux sociaux, nouvellement labellée "Lifestreaming". Toute sa vie, en stream et en ligne, pour ses "friends"!
Fluxxlabs work to date has been focused on sustainable energy harvesting, specifically in the form of converting small amounts of human energy into electricity. The design firm consists of two partners, Jennifer Broutin and Carmen Trudell. Both Jennifer and Carmen graduated from Columbia University�s Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design program, where they began research and collaboration.
Sony’s AIBO may be defunct, but the little robotic dogs still have a loyal fanbase. On February 7th in Japan, a bunch of AIBO owners (37 of them) got together and put on a show, conducted by what else but a Sony Rolly. It looks like the Rolly was set up to play an audio command, which the AIBOs would all respond in unison… Have a look:
Retina scanning, face recognition and fingerprint reading are common biometric systems for physical security accesses or computer logon systems, and in recent years the latter has become more widespread in consumer products such as laptops or handheld devices. Fingerprint readers, despite being nearly ubiquitous on notebooks these days, aren’t exactly popular mainly due to the concerns of public hygiene. Fujitsu’s approach, palm vein scanning, on the other hand, is non-invasive and contactless scanning: PalmSecure advanced biometric authentication technology comes in the form of a standard PC mouse and offers highly secure and reliable personal identity verification. SlashGear caught up with Dan Miller, business development manager at Fujitsu, to find out more.
The PalmSecure biometric sensor does not register age-lines or anything like fingerprints, in fact it reads and records the unique vein pattern inside your hand. A near-infrared beam goes sub-layer into the palm of your hand, recording the unique patterns into a digitally encrypted file. Data is stored and secured with an in-house two-way encryption algorithm of up to 256 bits, or alternatively Fujitsu will let you apply the encryption method of your choice.
Its accuracy, according to Miller, far exceeds fingerprint scanning and is in fact up near iris and DNA levels, with just 0.00008 percent false acceptance and 0.01 false rejection. “It’s a very highly accurate device which you can’t forge” Miller explained, “and you’re getting it at the fraction of the cost compared to an iris.” The technology has been successfully implemented in various industries worldwide including banks, big-name corporations, healthcare organizations and, now, is expanding into the PC industry with the sensor built into the body of a standard USB mouse.
The PalmSecure’s LogonDirector is designed to work with Windows based desktops and laptops, integrating with the Windows sign-on screen and replacing the standard username and password boxes with a palm-scan prompt. No password entering or card swiping is needed: with spread fingers, you just raise you palm a couple of inches above the mouse, then slowly bring it down. Within the space of an inch, the reader should be able to scan the veins and automatically log you right in. Miller says a single user authentication happens almost instantly, while large multiuser organizations, requiring database access, may require at least a second or more.
The hardware is a standard USB 2.0 PC mouse, and since it’s bus-powered it doesn’t require any sort of battery. When asked about an alternate wireless version, Miller said it’s not currently on the roadmap.
In Fujitsu’s defense, due to low demand in Vista deployment, large enterprises are still using XP thus the device currently only supports Windows 2000 and XP. Nonetheless, Miller assured us that Vista is definitely on the roadmap and, in fact, a new version supporting the OS should be released this quarter. Unfortunately he couldn’t promise anything for Apple or Linux users. “Right now it’s supporting XP; Vista is going to be out very shortly, this quarter. Apple and Linux are not on the target list yet” he continued, “down the road it is, but we don’t have any dates yet.”
The Fujitsu PalmSecure LogonDirector has a suggested retail price of $427 for the hardware and an additional $40 for the app. Standalone versions can be purchased with groups of 1, 10 or 25 user licences; meanwhile volume licenses are available for the Enterprise version, with similar pricing from 1 to 100 users. The Enterprise version includes additional management software, that requires installation on an existing server. That allows for centralized administrative and management control, letting large organizations manage palm vein patterns to an authentication server for more robust security and fine-tuned user privileges.
Right now, Fujitsu seem to be aiming resolutely at business and enterprise users - and with the hardware alone costing as much as an entry-level notebook, we’re not surprised. However we’d expect the PalmSecure technology to filter down to consumer products relatively soon, given the benefits of palm-vein authentication over fingerprint technology.
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