Sausage sauvage!

Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute is working on a new ebook DRM dubbed SiDiM that would prevent piracy by changing the actual text of a story, swapping out words to make individualized copies that could be tracked by the original owner of the ebook. […]

The idea behind SiDiM is similar to the way rights holders have been trying to protect music and video for some time. Instead of trying to lock down copies through technical measures that prevent copying, so-called fingerprinting measures simply add markers to a work that make it possible to identify the original purchaser. In theory, this prevents people from sharing their works for the fear of being caught.

However, in music files, these types of changes are a lot less notable than a machine rewriting a book, which is why it’s unlikely that authors and literature friends would embrace SiDiM. The system is currently in testing, and Fraunhofer secured some state funding to run these tests and even got a subsidiary of the German book publisher’s association to join.

New ebook DRM will change the text of a story to prevent piracy — paidContent, via Dan W. (via new-aesthetic)

(via new-aesthetic)

Facebook’s first data center ran into problems of a distinctly ironic nature when a literal cloud formed in the IT room and started to rain on servers.

Though Facebook has previously hinted at this via references to a “humidity event” within its first data center in Prineville, Oregon, the social network’s infrastructure king Jay Parikh told The Reg on Thursday that, for a few minutes in Summer, 2011, Facebook’s data center contained two clouds: one powered the social network, the other poured water on it.

“I got a call, ‘Jay, there’s a cloud in the data center’,” Parikh says. “‘What do you mean, outside?’. ‘No, inside’.”

There was panic.

“It was raining in the datacenter,” he explains.

Facebook’s first data center DRENCHED by ACTUAL CLOUD • The Register (via new-aesthetic)

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BR: Kuwait is a crazy mix: a super-affluent country, yet basically a welfare state, though with a super neo-liberal consumer economy.

FQ: We consume vast amounts of everything. Instagram businesses are a big thing in Kuwait.

BR: What’s an Instagram business?

FQ: If you have an Instagram account, you can slap a price tag on anything, take a picture of it, and sell it. For instance, you could take this can of San Pellegrino, paint it pink, put a heart on it, call it yours, and declare it for sale. Even my grandmother has an Instagram business! She sells dried fruit. A friend’s cousin is selling weird potted plants that use Astroturf. People are creating, you know, hacked products.

magazine / issue / Fatima Al Qadiri & Lauren Boyle | MOUSSE CONTEMPORARY ART MAGAZINE (via new-aesthetic)

(via new-aesthetic)

One of my favourite Steve Jobs stories was the time the engineers working on the iPod brought their finished prototype to him in his office. He said it was too big, they needed to make it smaller. They said it was as small as they could make it, it couldn’t be made any smaller. So he took the prototype over to his aquarium and dropped it in. The iPod sank to the bottom, and as it did, tiny little bubbles came out. ‘See those bubbles,’ he asked. ‘They’re air inside the iPod. Make it smaller.’ “Another story about Steve Jobs was when they brought the prototype for the iPad 2 to his office. The engineers told him it was faster than the first iPad. He took it over to his aquarium and dropped it in. ‘Look how slowly it sank,’ he told them. ‘Make it faster.’ “One time a newly hired intern had been sent out to get Steve a sandwich. When she brought it to him, he looked at it. ‘I thought I ordered the beef on rye,’ he asked. She told him it was indeed beef on rye. He took it over to his fish tank and dropped it in. ‘Does that look like beef on rye?’ “He was always dropping things in that fish tank. We couldn’t stop him. We told him he had to stop, he wouldn’t listen. It was full of stuff that shouldn’t be in an aquarium. “The fish had all died years ago. One had been crushed under an early generation iMac. The others were all poisoned. He didn’t care. “It got to the point where there was no room for anything in the fish tank. When we emptied it after he died, we found a body in there. We never found out who it was.

Ex-Tabula Rasa: Steve Jobs’ Aquarium 

I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg, say, in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.

Highlighted by Julian Stahnke in The Awful German Language by Mark Twain

I once heard a gentle and lovely old German lady say to a sweet young American girl, “The two languages are so alike—how pleasant that is; we say “Ach! Gott!” you say “ Goddam.

Highlighted by Julian Stahnke in The Awful German Language by Mark Twain