March 4, 2011
A joe job is a spamming technique that sends out unsolicited e-mails using spoofed (falsified) sender data. Early joe jobs aimed at tarnishing the reputation of the apparent sender or inducing the recipients to take action against him, but they are now typically used by commercial spammers to conceal the true origin of their messages.
The name ‘joe job’ originated from such a spam attack on Joe Doll, webmaster of Joe’s Cyberpost. One user’s joes.com account was removed due to advertising through spam. In retaliation, the user sent another spam with the ‘reply-to’ headers forged to make it appear to be from Joe Doll. Besides prompting angry replies, it also caused joes.com to fall prey to denial-of-service attacks that temporarily took the web site down.
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March 4, 2011
In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into a desired emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion. In addition to the offending poster, the noun troll can also refer to the provocative message itself.
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March 4, 2011
Pogo is an electronic music artist living in Perth, Western Australia. His work consists of recording small sounds from a film or a specific scene, and sequencing the sounds together to form a new piece of music, a method of sampling first made popular by House music producer and UK Garage influence Todd Edwards in the 1990s.
His track Alice is a composition of sounds from the Disney film Alice in Wonderland. Pogo took part in a project hosted by Disney/Pixar to produce a track based on their film, Up. He has later since produced two more mixes, ‘Toyz Noize’ and ‘Buzzwing,’ based on the movie Toy Story. Pogo has since produced tracks using samples from films such as Mary Poppins, Snow White, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, The Sword in the Stone, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Hook, Toy Story, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
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March 3, 2011
Faxlore refers to humorous texts, folk poetry, folk art, and urban legends that are circulated, not by word of mouth, but by fax machine. ‘Xeroxlore’ or ‘photocopylore’ is similar material circulated by photocopying. Cartoons and jokes often circulate as faxlore; the poor graphic quality becoming worse with each retransmission.
Because faxlore and xeroxlore is the (mis)appropriation of technology owned by the employer, it is often mildly subversive of the workplace and its values.
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March 3, 2011
Lim Yo-Hwan (b. 1980) of South Korea, known by the pseudonym Boxer, is one of the most successful players of the real-time strategy computer game StarCraft to date. Dubbed The Emperor by his fans, he is the most popular Starcraft player with a fan club of more than 1,000,000 members.
Lim has a record of 547 wins and 416 losses (56.80%) in his professional career. He is one of the highest-paid professional gamers, with annual earnings that exceed $300,000 US Dollars and endorsement contracts that bring in an additional $90,000 per year.
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March 3, 2011
Lee Jae-Dong (b. 1990), nicknamed The Tyrant, is a South Korean professional StarCraft player representing team Hwaseung Oz. He is currently ranked second in the world by the Korean E-Sports Association and by ELO ranking (a rating system invented by Arpad Elo, used in chess to place players into categories – 2500 and above is grandmaster level). He is one of two players to achieve a winning percentage above 66% with a career record of 482 wins and 219 losses (68.76%).
The computer game StarCraft has an active professional competition circuit, particularly in South Korea. Two major television game channels, Ongamenet and MBCGame, each run a league viewed by millions of fans. Starting in about 2002, pro-gamers started to become organized into teams, sponsored by large South Korean companies like Samsung and SK Telecom. StarCraft is also the most popular computer game competition during the annual World Cyber Games thanks to its Korean fanbase, and it is among the world’s largest computer and video game competitions in terms of prize money, global coverage and participants.
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March 3, 2011
Electronic Sports, abbreviated e-Sports is used as a general term to describe the play of video games competitively. Other terms include competitive gaming, professional gaming, cybersports and V-Sports. Games that are played as electronic sports normally belong to the real-time strategy (RTS), fighting, first-person shooter (FPS), massively-multiplayer online (MMOG), and racing genres. They are played competitively at amateur, semi-professional and professional levels including in leagues and tournaments.
Recently, the massively-multiplayer online roleplaying (MMORPG) subgenre in particular has generated online tournaments. The most notable is perhaps World of Warcraft, which holds annual leagues with cash prizes for their tournaments. The prizes for 2010 World of Warcraft Global Arena totaled over US$200,000, with a first prize of $75,000.
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March 3, 2011
Frag is a video game term originating from the word fragging, a term indicating to kill an unpopular superior officer with a fragmentation grenade. A frag is roughly equivalent to ‘kill,’ with the typical main difference that the player being ‘”fragged’ can instantly respawn (play again) in most games, i.e. the ‘kill’ is only temporary. In games it is mainly used as a kill count and score system. The term is used in various first-person shooter games like Quake by software developer Id.
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March 3, 2011
Hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking‘) is a process that results in the creation of fractures in rocks. The most important industrial use is in stimulating oil and gas wells, where hydraulic fracturing has been used for over 60 years. The fracturing is done from a wellbore drilled into reservoir rock formations to increase the rate and ultimate recovery of oil and natural gas.
Considerable controversy surrounds the current implementation of hydraulic fracturing technology in the United States. Environmental safety and health concerns have emerged and are being debated at the state and national levels. Natural hydraulic fractures include volcanic dikes, sills and fracturing by ice as in frost weathering. Man-made fractures are typically maintained after the injection by introducing a proppant, a material, such as grains of sand, ceramic, or other particulates, that prevent the fractures from closing when the injection is stopped.
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March 2, 2011
Lamborghini Aventador LP700-4 is the name of the high-performance two-door, two-seat sports car that replaces the Murciélago in the Italian automaker’s lineup. It was launched at the 2011 Geneva Motor Show. It features a brand new 6.5 litre V12 engine, producing 700 hp. It was designed by Filippo Perini of Lamborghini Centro Stile under the direction of Lamborghini chief of design Manfred Fitzgerald.
The etymology of the name comes from Lamborghini’s traditional fascination with the world of bullfighting. In this case, the Aventador was named for a Spanish fighting bull, that bore the number 32 singed on his hide, from the breeding stables of the sons of Don Celestino Cuadri Vides. Aventador gained fame in 1993 in the town of Zaragoza, Spain after a notably spirited, bloody and violent battle with a torero that led to the bull’s death.
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March 2, 2011
Transcendent Man is a documentary film by filmmaker Barry Ptolemy. The film chronicles the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil, inventor, futurist, and author of ‘The Singularity is Near.’ ‘Transcendent Man’ presents his vision of technological singularity, the point in the future in which technology will be advancing so rapidly that humans will have to enhance themselves with artificial intelligence in order to keep up.
Kurzweil predicts the dawning of a new civilization in which humans will no longer be dependent upon their physical bodies, will become trillions of times more intelligent, and lose the ability to distinguish between real and virtual reality. He believes this will cause human aging and illness to be reversed, world hunger and poverty to be solved, and death to be ‘cured.’ Critics accuse him of being too optimistic, and argue that the dangers of the Singularity far outweigh the benefits, pointing out the apocalyptic implications.
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March 2, 2011
Kenneth Knowlton (b. 1931), is a computer graphics pioneer, artist, mosaicist and portraitist, who worked at Bell Labs. In 1963, Knowlton developed the BEFLIX (Bell Flicks) programming language for bitmap computer-produced movies, created using an IBM 7094 computer and a Stromberg-Carlson 4020 microfilm recorder. Each frame contained eight shades of grey and a resolution of 252 x 184. In 1966, Knowlton and Leon Harmon were experimenting with photomosaic, creating large prints from collections small symbols or images.
In Studies in Perception I they created an image of a reclining nude (the dancer Deborah Hay), by scanning a photograph with a camera and converting the analog voltages to binary numbers which were assigned typographic symbols based on halftone densities. It was printed in The New York Times on 11 October 1967, and exhibited at one of the earliest computer art exhibitions, The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, held Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1968.
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