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π Razor 1911
Razor 1911 (RZR) is a warez and demogroup founded in Norway, 1986. It was the first ever such group to be initially founded exclusively as a demogroup, before moving into warez in 1987. According to the US Justice Department, Razor 1911 is the oldest software cracking group that is still active on the internet. Razor 1911 ran the diskmag 'Propaganda' until 1995.
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- "Razor 1911" | 2023-10-30 | 242 Upvotes 118 Comments
π CALEA requires telecoms to install surveillance equipment in their datacenters
The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), also known as the "Digital Telephony Act," is a United States wiretapping law passed in 1994, during the presidency of Bill Clinton (Pub. L. No. 103-414, 108 Stat. 4279, codified at 47 USC 1001-1010).
CALEA's purpose is to enhance the ability of law enforcement agencies to conduct lawful interception of communication by requiring that telecommunications carriers and manufacturers of telecommunications equipment modify and design their equipment, facilities, and services to ensure that they have built-in capabilities for targeted surveillance, allowing federal agencies to selectively wiretap any telephone traffic; it has since been extended to cover broadband Internet and VoIP traffic. Some government agencies argue that it covers mass surveillance of communications rather than just tapping specific lines and that not all CALEA-based access requires a warrant.
The original reason for adopting CALEA was the Federal Bureau of Investigation's worry that increasing use of digital telephone exchange switches would make tapping phones at the phone company's central office harder and slower to execute, or in some cases impossible. Since the original requirement to add CALEA-compliant interfaces required phone companies to modify or replace hardware and software in their systems, U.S. Congress included funding for a limited time period to cover such network upgrades. CALEA was passed into law on October 25, 1994 and came into force on January 1, 1995.
In the years since CALEA was passed it has been greatly expanded to include all VoIP and broadband Internet traffic. From 2004 to 2007 there was a 62 percent growth in the number of wiretaps performed under CALEAΒ β and more than 3,000 percent growth in interception of Internet data such as email.
By 2007, the FBI had spent $39 million on its Digital Collection System Network (DCSNet) system, which collects, stores, indexes, and analyzes communications data.
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- "CALEA requires telecoms to install surveillance equipment in their datacenters" | 2013-06-11 | 39 Upvotes 7 Comments
π Golden parachutes: Record severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation
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- "Golden parachutes: Record severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation" | 2023-05-22 | 412 Upvotes 394 Comments
π Glacier Mice
Glacier mice are colonies of mosses found on some glaciers and adjacent ecosystems. They are composed of multiple species of moss and can also host other species, such as nematode worms, springtails, and water bears. Although what preconditions are necessary for glacier mice to form has yet to be determined, they have been observed in Alaska, Chile, Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard, Uganda and Venezuela, as well as several Subantarctic islands. In at least some cases, glacier mice apparently reproduce asexually due to the effect of the harsh glacier environment on traditional moss reproduction strategies.
Glacier mice are notable for their movement across the ice, which appears to be non-random, taking the form of herd-like behavior. This movement is as yet unexplained, and does not appear to be solely the product of wind or the direction of a slope.
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- "Glacier Mice" | 2026-08-24 | 334 Upvotes 72 Comments
π Ready Player One β what Oculus + FB will look like?
Ready Player One is a 2011 science fiction novel, and the debut novel of American author Ernest Cline. The story, set in a dystopia in 2045, follows protagonist Wade Watts on his search for an Easter egg in a worldwide virtual reality game, the discovery of which would lead him to inherit the game creator's fortune. Cline sold the rights to publish the novel in June 2010, in a bidding war to the Crown Publishing Group (a division of Random House). The book was published on August 16, 2011. An audiobook was released the same day; it was narrated by Wil Wheaton, who was mentioned briefly in one of the chapters.Ch. 20 In 2012, the book received an Alex Award from the Young Adult Library Services Association division of the American Library Association and won the 2012 Prometheus Award. A film adaptation, screenwritten by Cline and Zak Penn and directed by Steven Spielberg, was released on March 29, 2018.
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- "Ready Player One β what Oculus + FB will look like? " | 2014-03-26 | 31 Upvotes 16 Comments
π The Prisoner
The Prisoner is a 1967 British television series about an unnamed British intelligence agent who is abducted and imprisoned in a mysterious coastal village, where his captors designate him as Number Six and try to find out why he abruptly resigned from his job. Patrick McGoohan played the lead role as Number Six. The series was created by McGoohan with possible contributions from George Markstein. Episode plots have elements of science fiction, allegory, and psychological drama, as well as spy fiction. It was produced by Everyman Films for distribution by Lew Grade's ITC Entertainment.
A single series of 17 episodes was filmed between September 1966 and January 1968, with exterior location filming in Portmeirion, Wales. Interior scenes were filmed at MGM-British Studios in Borehamwood, north of London. The series was first broadcast in Canada beginning on 5 September 1967, in the UK on 29 September 1967, and in the US on 1 June 1968. Although the show was sold as a thriller in the mould of the previous series starring McGoohan, Danger Man, its combination of 1960s countercultural themes and surrealistic setting had a far-reaching influence on science fiction and fantasy TV programming, and on narrative popular culture in general. Since its initial screening, the series has developed a cult following.
A six-part TV miniseries remake aired on the US cable channel AMC in November 2009. In 2016, Big Finish Productions reinterpreted the series as an audio drama.
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- "The Prisoner" | 2022-12-14 | 20 Upvotes 10 Comments
π World's largest functioning musical instrument: Wanamaker Organ in Philadelphia
The Wanamaker Grand Court Organ, located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is the largest fully functioning pipe organ in the world, based on the number of playing pipes, the number of ranks and its weight. The Wanamaker Organ is located within a spacious 7-story Grand Court at the John Wanamaker Store (originally Wanamaker's and most recently Macy's) and was played twice a day Monday through Saturday. The organ was featured at several special concerts held throughout the year, including events featuring the Friends of the Wanamaker Organ Festival Chorus and Brass Ensemble.
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- "World's largest functioning musical instrument: Wanamaker Organ in Philadelphia" | 2025-12-28 | 84 Upvotes 24 Comments
π Negative Temperature
Certain systems can achieve negative thermodynamic temperature; that is, their temperature can be expressed as a negative quantity on the Kelvin or Rankine scales. This should be distinguished from temperatures expressed as negative numbers on non-thermodynamic Celsius or Fahrenheit scales, which are nevertheless higher than absolute zero.
The absolute temperature (Kelvin) scale can be understood loosely as a measure of average kinetic energy. Usually, system temperatures are positive. However, in particular isolated systems, the temperature defined in terms of Boltzmann's entropy can become negative.
The possibility of negative temperatures was first predicted by Lars Onsager in 1949, in his analysis of classical point vortices confined to a finite area. Confined point vortices are a system with bounded phase space as their canonical momenta are not independent degrees of freedom from their canonical position coordinates. Bounded phase space is the essential property that allows for negative temperatures, and such temperatures can occur in both classical and quantum systems. As shown by Onsager, a system with bounded phase space necessarily has a peak in the entropy as energy is increased. For energies exceeding the value where the peak occurs, the entropy decreases as energy increases, and high-energy states necessarily have negative Boltzmann temperature.
A system with a truly negative temperature on the Kelvin scale is hotter than any system with a positive temperature. If a negative-temperature system and a positive-temperature system come in contact, heat will flow from the negative- to the positive-temperature system. A standard example of such a system is population inversion in laser physics.
Temperature is loosely interpreted as the average kinetic energy of the system's particles. The existence of negative temperature, let alone negative temperature representing "hotter" systems than positive temperature, would seem paradoxical in this interpretation. The paradox is resolved by considering the more rigorous definition of thermodynamic temperature as the tradeoff between internal energy and entropy contained in the system, with "coldness", the reciprocal of temperature, being the more fundamental quantity. Systems with a positive temperature will increase in entropy as one adds energy to the system, while systems with a negative temperature will decrease in entropy as one adds energy to the system.
Thermodynamic systems with unbounded phase space cannot achieve negative temperatures: adding heat always increases their entropy. The possibility of a decrease in entropy as energy increases requires the system to "saturate" in entropy. This is only possible if the number of high energy states is limited. For a system of ordinary (quantum or classical) particles such as atoms or dust, the number of high energy states is unlimited (particle momenta can in principle be increased indefinitely). Some systems, however (see the examples below), have a maximum amount of energy that they can hold, and as they approach that maximum energy their entropy actually begins to decrease. The limited range of states accessible to a system with negative temperature means that negative temperature is associated with emergent ordering of the system at high energies. For example in Onsager's point-vortex analysis negative temperature is associated with the emergence of large-scale clusters of vortices. This spontaneous ordering in equilibrium statistical mechanics goes against common physical intuition that increased energy leads to increased disorder.
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- "Negative Temperature" | 2024-07-08 | 30 Upvotes 15 Comments
- "Negative Temperature" | 2022-03-13 | 121 Upvotes 71 Comments
π Light Pillar
A light pillar is an atmospheric optical phenomenon in which a vertical beam of light appears to extend above and/or below a light source. The effect is created by the reflection of light from tiny ice crystals that are suspended in the atmosphere or that comprise high-altitude clouds (e.g. cirrostratus or cirrus clouds). If the light comes from the Sun (usually when it is near or even below the horizon), the phenomenon is called a sun pillar or solar pillar. Light pillars can also be caused by the Moon or terrestrial sources, such as streetlights and erupting volcanoes.
π No U-Turn Syndrome (NUTS)
No U-Turn Syndrome (NUTS) is a term first coined by Singaporean entrepreneur Sim Wong Hoo to prominently describe the social behaviour of Singaporeans having a mindset of compliance to higher authorities before proceeding with any action. He makes a comparison of traffic rules in Singapore to those found overseas, to describe the phenomenon. In Singapore, drivers are not allowed to make a U-turn unless a sign specifically allows them to do so, while in some other countries drivers may make U-turns freely so long as a "No U-turn" sign is not present. Following that, this analogy is used to explain the red tape he has encountered with hard-nosed bureaucrats, which in turn stifles the very creativity that the Singaporean government has been trying to promote in the recent years.
NUTS is also considered as one of the major criticisms of the rigid Singapore education system, where students are taught from a young age to obey instructions in an unquestioning manner, in a society where grades and paper certification are emphasised at the expense of some life skills.
In 2003, the term was referred to by Singaporean MPs during discussions about encouraging entrepreneurship. Five MPs said that "the biggest hurdle for Singaporeans in creating a pro-enterprise environment is the Nuts mentality."
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- "No U-Turn Syndrome (NUTS)" | 2010-06-06 | 73 Upvotes 33 Comments