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🔗 Mass surveillance 🔗 Espionage 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Military history/Maritime warfare 🔗 Cold War

Operation Ivy Bells was a joint United States Navy, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and National Security Agency (NSA) mission whose objective was to place wire taps on Soviet underwater communication lines during the Cold War.

🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing

Word2vec is a technique for natural language processing (NLP) published in 2013. The word2vec algorithm uses a neural network model to learn word associations from a large corpus of text. Once trained, such a model can detect synonymous words or suggest additional words for a partial sentence. As the name implies, word2vec represents each distinct word with a particular list of numbers called a vector. The vectors are chosen carefully such that they capture the semantic and syntactic qualities of words; as such, a simple mathematical function (cosine similarity) can indicate the level of semantic similarity between the words represented by those vectors.

🔗 Books 🔗 Computer Security 🔗 Computer Security/Computing

The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier is a work of nonfiction by Bruce Sterling first published in 1992.

The book discusses watershed events in the hacker subculture in the early 1990s. The most notable topic covered is Operation Sundevil and the events surrounding the 1987–1990 war on the Legion of Doom network: the raid on Steve Jackson Games, the trial of "Knight Lightning" (one of the original journalists of Phrack), and the subsequent formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The book also profiles the likes of "Emmanuel Goldstein" (publisher of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly), the former assistant attorney general of Arizona Gail Thackeray, FLETC instructor Carlton Fitzpatrick, Mitch Kapor, and John Perry Barlow.

In 1994, Sterling released the book for the Internet with a new afterword.

🔗 Poetry

"The Gods of the Copybook Headings" is a poem by Rudyard Kipling, characterized by biographer Sir David Gilmour as one of several "ferocious post-war eruptions" of Kipling's souring sentiment concerning the state of Anglo-European society. It was first published in the Sunday Pictorial of London on 26 October 1919; in America, it was published as "The Gods of the Copybook Maxims" in Harper's Magazine in January 1920.

In the poem, Kipling's narrator counterposes the "Gods" of the title, who embody eternal truths, against "the Gods of the Market-Place", who represent an optimistic self-deception into which it supposes society has fallen in the early 20th century.

The "copybook headings" to which the title refers were proverbs or maxims, often drawn from sermons and scripture extolling virtue and wisdom, that were printed at the top of the pages of copybooks, special notebooks used by 19th-century British schoolchildren. The students had to copy the maxims repeatedly, by hand, down the page. The exercise was thought to serve simultaneously as a form of moral education and penmanship practice.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

Norton Commander (NC) is a discontinued prototypical orthodox file manager (OFM), written by John Socha and released by Peter Norton Computing (later acquired in 1990 by the Symantec corporation). NC provides a text-based user interface for managing files on top of MS-DOS. It was officially produced between 1986 and 1998. The last MS-DOS version of Norton Commander, 5.51, was released on July 1, 1998.

A related product, Norton Desktop, a graphical shell for MS-DOS and Windows, succeeded Norton Commander. It came in two variants, Norton Desktop for DOS and Norton Desktop for Windows.

🔗 Lists 🔗 Industrial design

The following is a list of adhesive tapes with pressure-sensitive adhesives:

🔗 Internet 🔗 Computing 🔗 Freedom of speech 🔗 Computing/Websites

GitHub has been the target of censorship from governments using methods ranging from local Internet service provider blocks, intermediary blocking using methods such as DNS hijacking and man-in-the-middle attacks, and denial-of-service attacks on GitHub's servers from countries including China, India, Russia, and Turkey. In all of these cases, GitHub has been eventually unblocked after backlash from users and technology businesses or compliance from GitHub.

🔗 Athletics 🔗 Running 🔗 Equine

The Man versus Horse Marathon is an annual race over 22 miles (35 km), where runners compete against riders on horseback through a mix of road, trail and mountainous terrain. The race, which is a shorter distance than an official marathon road race, takes place in the Welsh town of Llanwrtyd Wells every June. There are other Man versus Horse races — in Scotland based at Dores, near Loch Ness, in Central North Island, New Zealand and in Prescott, Arizona.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Medicine/Society and Medicine 🔗 Cambodia 🔗 Medicine/Reproductive medicine

Lucky Iron Fish are fish-shaped cast iron ingots used to provide dietary supplementation of iron to individuals affected by iron-deficiency anaemia. The ingots are placed in a pot of boiling water to leach elemental iron into the water and food. They were developed in 2008 by Canadian health workers in Cambodia, and in 2012 a company, The Lucky Iron Fish Project, was formed to develop the iron fish on a larger scale, promote them among rural areas, and distribute them to non-governmental organization partners. Notably, recent research found that the iron ingot had no effect on anemia. It therefore recommended against its use in Cambodia and other countries with low levels of iron deficiency.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Electronics 🔗 Electrical engineering

Charlieplexing (also known as tristate multiplexing, reduced pin-count LED multiplexing, complementary LED drive and crossplexing) is a technique for accessing a large number of LEDs, switches, micro-capacitors or other I/O entities, using very few tri-state logic wires from a microcontroller, these entities being wired as discrete components, x/y arrays, or woven in a diagonally intersecting pattern to form diagonal arrays.

The method uses the tri-state logic capabilities of microcontrollers in order to gain efficiency over traditional multiplexing, each I/O pin being capable, when required, of rapidly changing between the three states, logical 1, logical 0, and high impedance.

This enables these I/O entities (LEDs, switches etc.) to be connected between any two microcontroller I/Os - e.g. with 4 I/Os, each I/O can pair with 3 other I/Os, resulting in 6 unique pairings (1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 2/3, 2/4, 3/4). Only 4 pairings are possible with standard x/y multiplexing (1/3, 1/4, 2/3, 2/4). Also, due to the microcontroller's ability to reverse the polarity of the 6 I/O pairs, the number of LEDS (or diodes) that are uniquely addressable, can be doubled to 12 - adding LEDS 2/1, 3/1, 4/1, 3/2, 4/2 and 4/3.

Although it is more efficient in its use of I/O, a small amount of address manipulation is required when trying to fit Charlieplexing into a standard x/y array.

Other issues that affect standard multiplexing but are exacerbated by Charlieplexing are:

• consideration of current requirements and the forward voltages of the LEDs.
• a requirement to cycle through the in-use LEDs rapidly so that the persistence of the human eye perceives the display to be lit as a whole. Multiplexing can generally be seen by a strobing effect and skewing if the eye's focal point is moved past the display rapidly.