Baker's willingness to admit the technical incoherence of crypto bans is great, a massive step forward, but American legal officials shouldn't even be debating whether or not it's possible to ban crypto. If Barr managed to produce a working "solution" to the problems that Baker raises, we still shouldn't use it, because Americans have the right to make choices that enhance their own security, privacy and integrity, even if that makes cops work harder. — Read on boingboing.net/2019/10/28/san-bernadino-conversion.html

Every now and then, my brain clamps on to obscure trivia like this. It takes so much time. “Because the paper beds of banknote presses in 1860 were 14.5 inches by 16.5 inches, a movie industry cartel set a standard for theater projectors based on silent film, and two kilobytes is two kilobytes” is as far back as I have been able to push this, but let’s get started. — Read on exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/10/23/80x25/

Getting Tough on the Corporate Snoopers | Irreal — Read on irreal.org/blog/

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Imagine if Facebook were prohibited from collecting its users’ information without their permission and that Zuckerberg could go to jail for ignoring the ban.

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Steam Remote Play Together will let you play local multiplayer games online with pals who aren’t, y’know, local. You can try it in a beta today. — Read on www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/10/21/steam-remote-play-together-takes-local-multiplayer-games-online/

WHEN a Greek sponge diver called Elias Stadiatos discovered the wreck of a cargo ship off the tiny island of Antikythera in 1900, it was the statues lying on the seabed that made the greatest impression on him. He returned to the surface, removed his helmet, and gabbled that he had found a heap of dead, naked women. The ship's cargo of luxury goods also included jewellery, pottery, fine furniture, wine and bronzes dating back to the first century BC. But the most important finds proved to be a few green, corroded lumps—the last remnants of an elaborate mechanical device.

 

The Antikythera mechanism, as it is now known, was originally housed in a wooden box about the size of a shoebox, with dials on the outside and a complex assembly of bronze gear wheels within. X-ray photographs of the fragments, in which around 30 separate gears can be distinguished, led the late Derek Price, a science historian at Yale University, to conclude that the device was an astronomical computer capable of predicting the positions of the sun and moon in the zodiac on any given date. A new analysis, though, suggests that the device was cleverer than Price thought, and reinforces the evidence for his theory of an ancient Greek tradition of complex mechanical technology.

The Antikythera mechanism | The clockwork computer | Economist.com

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