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🔗 Military history 🔗 China 🔗 Urban studies and planning 🔗 Military history/Fortifications 🔗 Military history/Asian military history 🔗 Hong Kong 🔗 Military history/Chinese military history 🔗 Organized crime

Kowloon Walled City was an ungoverned, densely populated settlement in Kowloon City, Hong Kong. Originally a Chinese military fort, the Walled City became an enclave after the New Territories were leased to the UK by China in 1898. Its population increased dramatically following the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during World War II. By 1990, the walled city contained 50,000 residents within its 2.6-hectare (6.4-acre) borders. From the 1950s to the 1970s, it was controlled by local triads and had high rates of prostitution, gambling, and drug abuse.

In January 1987, the Hong Kong municipal government announced plans to demolish the walled city. After an arduous eviction process, demolition began in March 1993 and was completed in April 1994. Kowloon Walled City Park opened in December 1995 and occupies the area of the former Walled City. Some historical artefacts from the walled city, including its yamen building and remnants of its southern gate, have been preserved there.

🔗 Biography

Gregory F. Packer (born December 18, 1963), is a retired American highway maintenance worker from Huntington, New York, best known for frequently being quoted as a "man on the street" in newspapers, magazines and television broadcasts from 1995 to the present. He has been quoted in hundreds of articles and television broadcasts as a member of the public (that is, a "man on the street" rather than a newsmaker or expert). Although he always gives his real name, he has admitted to making things up to get into the paper.

Packer's status as a frequent interviewee is due to a number of factors, including seeking out members of the press and appearing friendly, although mostly it is due to his hobby of attending public appearances of celebrities and other media events and attempting to be first in line on such occasions. This has led to him being dubbed a professional line sitter. It has also led to Packer's other claim to fame: being the first person in the world to buy an iPhone, on June 29, 2007 at Apple Fifth Avenue in New York City, after having camped out for five days in front of the store. (He tried to similarly be the first to buy an iPad in 2010, but was bumped from the first position in line due to not having a reservation.) His efforts to be first in line have also allowed him to meet people including Mariah Carey, Garth Brooks, Dennis Rodman and Ringo Starr, as well as at least four presidents of the United States: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and (before he became president) Donald Trump.

🔗 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.

🔗 Electronics 🔗 Electrical engineering

The trancitor as the combined word of a "transfer-capacitor" is to be considered as another active-device category besides the transistor as a "transfer-resistor". As observed in the table shown, four kinds of active devices are theoretically deduced. Among them, trancitors are missing to be the third and fourth kinds, whereas transistors, such as bipolar junction transistor (BJT) and field-effect transistor (FET), were already invented as the first and second kinds, respectively. Unlike the transistor switching the current at its output (i.e., current source), the trancitor transfers its input to the voltage output (i.e., voltage source), so an inverse relationship with each other.

🔗 Mass surveillance 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Intelligence 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 Military history/Australia, New Zealand and South Pacific military history 🔗 Military history/Canadian military history 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history

The Five Eyes (FVEY) is an anglophone intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. These countries are parties to the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence.

The origins of the FVEY can be traced back to the post–World War II period, when the Atlantic Charter was issued by the Allies to lay out their goals for a post-war world. During the course of the Cold War, the ECHELON surveillance system was initially developed by the FVEY to monitor the communications of the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, although it is now used to monitor billions of private communications worldwide.

In the late 1990s, the existence of ECHELON was disclosed to the public, triggering a major debate in the European Parliament and, to a lesser extent, the United States Congress. As part of efforts in the ongoing War on Terror since 2001, the FVEY further expanded their surveillance capabilities, with much emphasis placed on monitoring the World Wide Web. The former NSA contractor Edward Snowden described the Five Eyes as a "supra-national intelligence organisation that does not answer to the known laws of its own countries". Documents leaked by Snowden in 2013 revealed that the FVEY has been spying on one another's citizens and sharing the collected information with each other in order to circumvent restrictive domestic regulations on surveillance of citizens.

In spite of continued controversy over its methods, the Five Eyes relationship remains one of the most comprehensive known espionage alliances in history.

Since processed intelligence is gathered from multiple sources, the intelligence shared is not restricted to signals intelligence (SIGINT) and often involves defence intelligence as well as human intelligence (HUMINT) and geospatial intelligence (GEOINT). The following table provides an overview of most of the FVEY agencies involved in such forms of data sharing.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware

N8VEM was a homebrew computing project. It featured a variety of free and open hardware and software. N8VEM builders made their own homebrew computer systems for themselves and shared their experiences with other homebrew computer hobbyists. N8VEM homebrew computer components are made in the style of vintage computers of the mid to late 1970s and early 1980s using a mix of classic and modern technologies. They are designed with ease of amateur assembly in mind.

In November 2015 the N8VEM project was ended by its creator Andrew Lynch and the community reconvened under the new name of Retrobrew Computers.

🔗 New York (state) 🔗 Islands

Just Room Enough Island, also known as Hub Island, is an island located in the Thousand Islands chain, belonging to New York, United States. The island is known for being the smallest inhabited island, which appears to be around 3,300 square feet (310 m²), or about one-thirteenth of an acre. Purchased by the Sizeland family in the 1950s, the island has a house, a tree, shrubs, and a small beach.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/19th century 🔗 Novels/Science fiction 🔗 New Zealand 🔗 Sociology

Erewhon: or, Over the Range () is a novel by English writer Samuel Butler, first published anonymously in 1872, set in a fictional country discovered and explored by the protagonist. The book is a satire on Victorian society.

The first few chapters of the novel dealing with the discovery of Erewhon are in fact based on Butler's own experiences in New Zealand, where, as a young man, he worked as a sheep farmer on Mesopotamia Station for about four years (1860–64), and explored parts of the interior of the South Island and wrote about in his A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863).

The novel is one of the first to explore ideas of artificial intelligence, as influenced by Darwin's recently published On the Origin of Species (1859) and the machines developed out of the Industrial Revolution (late 18th to early 19th centuries). Specifically, it concerns itself, in the three-chapter "Book of the Machines", with the potentially dangerous ideas of machine consciousness and self-replicating machines.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Slovenia

Alamut is a novel by Vladimir Bartol, first published in 1938 in Slovenian, dealing with the story of Hassan-i Sabbah and the Hashshashin, and named after their Alamut fortress. The maxim of the novel is "Nothing is an absolute reality; all is permitted". This book was one of the inspirations for the video game series Assassin's Creed.

Bartol first started to conceive the novel in the early 1930s, when he lived in Paris. In the French capital, he met with the Slovene literary critic Josip Vidmar, who introduced him to the story of Hassan-i Sabbah. A further stimulation for the novel came from the assassination of Alexander I of Yugoslavia perpetrated by Croatian and Bulgarian radical nationalists, on the alleged commission of the Italian fascist government. When it was originally published, the novel was sarcastically dedicated to Benito Mussolini.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Computer Security 🔗 Computer Security/Computing

Foldering is the practice of communicating via messages saved to the "drafts" folder of an email or other electronic messaging account that is accessible by multiple people. The messages are never actually sent.

Foldering has been described as a digital equivalent of a dead drop.