Written By Unknown on Senin, 17 September 2012 | 10.11
Henry Baker drew this illustration of van Leeuwenhoek's microscopes in 1756.
1683: Anton van Leeuwenhoek writes a letter to Britain's Royal Society describing the "animalcules" he observed under the microscope. It's the first known description of bacteria.
Van Leeuwenhoek had a varied career in his hometown of Delft, Netherlands. He earned money with stints as fabric merchant, surveyor, wine assayer and minor city official. He also served as trustee of the estate of painter Jan Vermeer, who died bankrupt.
One thing he did not do was invent the microscope, regardless of his glorious association with that instrument. Nor did his well-known contemporary, the Englishman Robert Hooke. The compound microscope (using an ocular and an objective lens in series) was invented in the 1590s, some four decades before their birth.
Van Leeuwenhoek, in fact, didn't even use a compound microscope. Despite the eventual superiority of the concept, the compound designs of his time couldn't produce a clear image at much more than 20x or 30x magnification.
After seeing Hooke's illustrated and very popular book Micrographia, van Leeuwenhoek learned to grind lenses some time before 1668, and he began building simple microscopes. This jack-of-all-trades became a master of one.
His simple microscope design used a single lens mounted in a brass plate. A sharp point held the specimen for examination. One screw moved the specimen into position in front of the lens, and another screw moved it backward or forward into focus.
(Fewer than 10 of van Leeuwenhoek's original microscopes survive, but you can use these plans to build a replica if you're so inclined.)
Van Leeuwenhoek had to hold the 3- or 4-inch instrument close to his eye. Besides good lighting, it required sharp eyesight and a fair dose of patience. Van Leeuwenhoek had both. He built the best microscopes of his day, achieving magnifications above 200x.
Delft's deft optician also had a fair dose of curiosity. He started writing letters to England's Royal Society in 1673, with descriptions of what he saw. One letter in 1674 detailed his observations of lake water, in which he detected green spiral algae.
The Royal Society translated van Leeuwenhoek's letters from Dutch and published them in English and Latin. His missive of Sept. 17, 1683, detailed how he took plaque from between his teeth and from four other people, including two who had never cleaned their teeth. It was, he wrote, "a little white matter, which is as thick as if 'twere batter." Continuing:
I then most always saw, with great wonder, that in the said matter there were many very little living animalcules, very prettily a-moving. The biggest sort … had a very strong and swift motion, and shot through the water (or spittle) like a pike does through the water. The second sort … oft-times spun round like a top … and these were far more in number.
The "unbelievably great company of living animalcules … were in such enormous numbers," van Leeuwenhoek wrote, "that all the water … seemed to be alive." These are among the first recorded observations of living bacteria.
Van Leeuwenhoek was also the first to see foraminifera fossils in minerals. He discovered blood cells (confirming William Harvey's work on circulation a few decades earlier) animal sperm cells, nematodes and rotifers.
Van Leeuwenhoek sent more than just letters to London. He sent specimens, and some of his original samples were rediscovered in 1981 in the strong room of the Royal Society. Astonishingly, they were so well prepared that they could still be examined under modern microscopes.
So, van Leeuwenhoek's place in history is not as the inventor of anything, but as a scientist, the founder of experimental microbiology.
Source: University of California Museum of Paleontology
Whether you find the iPhone 5 boring or exciting, it's certainly struck a chord with consumers. The iPhone 5 sold a whopping 2 million units in its first day of pre-order sales, according to a Sept. 17 press release issued by Apple.
That's double the pre-order sales of the iPhone 4S, which sold one million units in its first 24 hours, and more than three times as many as first-day sales for the iPhone 4 (600,000 units).
On Friday, Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris told Wired, "Pre-orders for iPhone 5 have been incredible. We've been completely blown away by the customer response."
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster expects Apple to sell anywhere from 6 to 10 million units this month. The phone officially goes on sale Sept. 21.
The iPhone 5 features a longer 4-inch Retina display and a redesigned chassis with a largely brushed-aluminum rear plate. It is 18 percent thinner and 20 percent lighter than the iPhone 4/4S. Inside, it has LTE support, a speedier A6 processor, and an improved 8-megapixel camera.
One of the most talked about changes with the new iPhone is its reversible 8-pin Lightning dock connector, which could cause headaches for those who've grown attached to 30-pin dock connector accessories.
The attackers behind the nation-state espionage tool known as Flame accidentally left behind tantalizing clues that provide information about their identity and that suggest the attack began earlier and was more widespread than previously believed.
Researchers have also uncovered evidence that the attackers may have produced at least three other pieces of malware or variants of Flame that are still undiscovered.
The information comes from clues the attackers inadvertently left behind on two command-and-control servers they used to communicate with infected machines and steal gigabytes of data from them.
Flame, also known as Flamer, is a highly sophisticated espionage tool discovered earlier this year that targeted machines primarily in Iran and other parts of the Middle East. It's believed to have been created by the United States and Israel, who are also believed to be behind the groundbreaking Stuxnet worm that aimed to cripple centrifuges used in Iran's nuclear program.
The new clues show that work on parts of the Flame operation began as early as December 2006, nearly six years before Flame was discovered this year, and that more than 10,000 machines are believed to have been infected with the malware.
Although the 2006 date refers to the development of code used in the command-and-control servers and doesn't necessarily mean the malware itself was in the wild during all of this time, Vikram Thakur, a researcher with Symantec Security Response, says the details are still troubling.
"For us to know that a malware campaign lasted this long and was flying under the radar for everyone in the community, it's a little concerning," he says. "It's a very targeted attack, but it's a very large-scale targeted attack."
The new details about the operation were left behind despite obvious efforts the attackers made to wipe the servers of forensic evidence, according to reports released Monday by researchers from Symantec in the U.S. and from Kaspersky Lab in Russia.
The two security firms conducted the research in partnership with BUND-CERT, the federal computer emergency response team in Germany, and ITU-IMPACT, the cybersecurity arm of the United Nation's International Telecommunications Union.
Although the attackers clearly were part of a sophisticated nation-state operation, they made a number of mistakes that resulted in traces of their activity being left behind.
According to data gleaned from the two servers the researchers examined:
At least four programmers developed code for the servers and left their nicknames in the source code.
One of the servers communicated with more than 5,000 victim machines during just a one-week period last May, suggesting the total victims exceed 10,000.
The infections didn't occur at once, but focused on different groups of targets in various countries at different times; one server focused primarily on targets in Iran and Sudan.
The attackers stole massive amounts of data – at least 5.5 gigabytes of stolen data inadvertently left behind on one of the servers was collected in one week.
The four pieces of malware used different custom protocols to communicate with the servers.
The attackers used a number of means to secure their operation as well as the data they stole – although they left behind gigabytes of purloined data, it was encrypted using a public key stored in a database on the servers and an unknown private key, preventing the researchers and anyone else without the private key from reading it.
The attackers, perhaps suspecting that their operation was about to be uncovered last May, attempted a cleanup operation to wipe the Flame malware from infected machines.
Flame was discovered by Kaspersky and publicly disclosed on May 28. Kaspersky said at the time that the malware had targeted systems in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, Israel and the Palestinian Territories, as well as other countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Kaspersky estimated at the time that the malware had infected about 1,000 machines.
The malware is highly modular and can spread via infected USB sticks or a sophisticated exploit and man-in-the-middle attack that hijacks the Windows Update mechanism to deliver the malware to new victims as if it were legitimate code signed by Microsoft.
Once on machines, Flame can steal files and record keystrokes, as well as turn on the internal microphone of a machine to record conversations conducted over Skype or in the vicinity of the infected computer.
Previous research on Flame conducted by Kaspersky found that Flame had been operating in the wild undetected since at least March 2010 and that it might have been developed in 2007.
But the new evidence indicates that development of code for the command-and-control servers – servers designed to communicate with machines infected with Flame – began at least as early as December 2006. It was created by at least four programmers, who left their nicknames in the source code.
The Flame operation used numerous servers for its commmand-and-control activities, but the researchers were able to examine only two of them.
The first server was set up on March 25 and operated until April 2, during which it communicated with infected machines from 5,377 unique IP addresses from more than a dozen countries. Of these, 3,702 IP addresses were in Iran. The country with the second largest number was Sudan, with 1,280 hits. The remaining countries each had fewer than 100 infections.
Of the more than 5,000 unique IP addresses that contacted one Flame command-and-control center during a week last March, the vast majority came from Iran, though Sudan was a strong second place. Image courtesy of Kaspersky Lab
The researchers were able to uncover the information, because the attackers had made a simple mistake.
"The attackers played with the server settings and managed to lock themselves out of it," says Costin Raiu, senior security researcher for Kaspersky.
Left behind on the locked server were the http server logs, showing all of the connections that came in from infected machines. Researchers also found about 5.7 gigabytes of data stored in a compressed and encrypted file, which the attackers had stolen from victims' machines.
"If their collection of 6 gigabytes of data in a span of ten days in March is indicative of how prevalent their campaign was for multiple years in the past, they probably have terabytes of information that they collected from thousands and thousands of people across the globe," says Symantec's Thakur.
The second server was set up on May 18, 2012, after Kaspersky had discovered Flame, but before publicly disclosing its existence. The server was set up specifically to deliver a kill module, called "browse32," to any infected machine that connected to it, in order to delete any trace of Flame on the machine. It may have been set up after the attackers realized they'd been caught.
Raiu says the attackers may have realized Flame had been discovered after a honeypot machine belonging to Kaspersky reached out to the attackers' server.
"Around the 12th of May, we connected a virtual machine infected by Flame to the internet, and the virtual machine connected to the [attackers'] command-and-control servers," he says.
Five hours after the server with the kill module was set up, it received its first hit from a machine infected with Flame. The server remained in operation only about a week, communicating with a few hundred infected machines, says Symantec.
Four Coders
The four programmers who developed code for the servers and left their nicknames in the source code, were part of a sophisticated operation that likely included multiple teams – a coordinating team tasked with choosing the specific targets to attack and examining all of the data stolen from them; a team responsible for writing the malware and command modules; and a team of operators for setting up and maintaining the command-and-control servers, sending command modules out to infected machines and managing the stolen data once it came in.
Symantec and Kaspersky have redacted the nicknames of the four coders and identified them only by the first initial of their nicknames – D, H, O, and R.
Thakur said he's never seen nicknames left in malware except in low-level malware that's not sophisticated. But the coders in the Flame operation were clearly a higher caliber than this.
"Maybe they just never expected their server to reach the wrong hands," he says. "But considering that Flamer has links to Stuxnet and DuQu, we would have expected not to see these names. But also, at the end of the day, they're human."
Of the four coders, "D" and "H" were the more significant players, since they handled interactions with infected computers, and were responsible for creating two of the four protocols the servers used to communicate with malware on infected machines.
But "H" was the most experienced of the group, responsible for some of the encryption used in the operation. Raiu calls him a "master of encryption," and notes that he was responsible for implementing the encryption of data stolen from victim machines.
"He coded some very smart patches and implemented complex logic," Kaspersky writes in its report. "We think [he] was most likely a team lead."
"O" and "R" worked on a MySQL database used in the operation as well as the development of cleanup files that were used to wipe data from the servers.
Based on timestamps of activity on the server, Symantec think the coder operators are based in Europe, the Middle East or Africa.
Command-and-Control Server Setup
The command-and-control servers used a custom web application the programmers developed — called NewsforYou — to communicate with infected machines. Using the application's control panel, the attackers could send new modules to infected clients containing new commands and retrieving stolen data.
The control panel was disguised specifically to resemble a content management system that a news organization or a blog publisher might use, so that any outsider who gained access to the panel wouldn't suspect its real purpose.
While command-and-control servers used by cybercriminal groups generally had showy control panels with the words "bot" or "botnet" clearly labeled on them, making their malicious purpose immediately apparent, the control panel used in the Flame operation was barebones in design and used euphemistic terms to conceal its real purpose.
For example, file directories for holding malicious modules to send to infected machines were named "News" and "Ads." The "News" directory held modules meant to be sent to every machine, while "Ads" held modules intended only for select machines. Data purloined from infected machines was stored in a directory called "Entries."
The password for the control panel was stored as an MD5 hash, which the researchers were unable to crack.
The attackers used a number of security features to prevent an unauthorized party who gained control of the server from sending arbitrary commands to infected machines or reading stolen data.
Often, criminal control panels used a simple point-and-click menu of options for the attackers to send commands to infected machine. The Flame operation required someone to create a command module, place it in a file with a specially formatted name and upload it to the server. The server would then parse the contents of the file, and place the module in the appropriate location, from where it could be pushed out to infected machines.
Symantec said this complicated style, which prevented server operators from knowing what was in the modules they were sending out to victims, had the hallmarks of "military and/or intelligence operations," rather than criminal operations.
Similarly, data stolen from victim machines could only be decrypted with a private key that was not stored on the server, likely so that server operators could not read the data.
The researchers found evidence that the command-and-control servers were set up to communicate with at least four pieces of malware.
The attackers refer to them, in the order they were created, as SP, SPE, FL, IP. "FL" is known to refer to Flame, a name that Kaspersky gave the malware back in May, based on the name of one of the main modules in it (Symantec refers to the same malware Flamer). IP is the newest malware.
Aside from Flame, none of the other three pieces of malware have been discovered yet, as far as the researchers know. But according to Raiu, they know that SPE is in the wild because a handful of machines infected with it contacted a sinkhole that Kaspersky set up in June to communicate with machines infected with Flame. They were surprised when malware that was not Flame contacted the sinkhole as soon as it went online. They only recently realized it was SPE. The SPE infections came in from Lebanon and Iran.
Each of the four pieces of malware uses one of three protocols to communicate with the command-and-control server – Old Protocol, Old E Protocol, or SignUp Protocol. A fourth protocol, called Red Protocol, was being developed by the operators but had not been completed yet. Presumably, the attackers planned to use this protocol with yet a fifth piece of malware.
Clean-Up and Coding Gaffes
The attackers took a number of steps to delete evidence of their activity on the servers, but made a number of mistakes that left telling clues behind.
They used a script called LogWiper.sh to disable certain logging services and delete any logs already created by those services. At the end of the script, there was even an instruction to delete the LogWiper script itself. But the researchers discovered the script contained an error that prevented this from occurring. The script indicated that a file named logging.sh should be deleted, not LogWiper.sh, leaving the script behind on the server for the researchers to find.
They also had a script designed to delete temporary files at a regularly scheduled time each day, but the script had a typo in the file path, so that it couldn't find the tool it needed to erase the files.
It's hard to imagine what we'd all do if "evolutionary" didn't rhyme with "revolutionary." Certainly Apple announcements, like the latest iPhone, would leave press and pundits alike at a loss for words. Apparently every new Apple product is either a deeply controversial rejiggering of an entire category of gadgets, or "evolutionary, not revolutionary."
So fine, we all hate Apple for merely selling a thinner device with a bigger screen and more microphones. If Apple doesn't make us clutch at our genitals in surprise and alarm with EVERY SINGLE PRESS RELEASE, we're all going to pull our Zunes out of the kitchen drawer just to spite them. So here are five things Apple could have announced to be truly and utterly revolutionary.
1. Skipper
Siri is kind of, I dunno, sterile. She lacks the one indicator of a true human soul: the ability to cringe. Skipper, the replacement for Siri, can detect an increase in your voice volume, a sharpness of tone, or even scan your furrowed eyebrows, responding with an appropriate measure of cowering and pleading. The new flexible polymerinium body of the iPhone even allows skipper to quake with fear, flinch from your commands, or hang its front-facing camera in shame.
2. Tesseract
The problem with mobile devices is that you have to sacrifice speed and power to make them tiny. Apple has finally solved this problem by shunting the bulk of the new iPhone's components into a pocket dimension, allowing you to carry around a phone as thin as a beggar's dreams that weighs only two and a third pixie kisses. However, the new device is incompatible with all purely material peripherals, requiring you to buy an adapter about the size and weight of a Kia.
3. Panopticon
Why stop at three microphones and two cameras? Panopticon technology incorporates over 2 million nano-recorders into the surface of the new iPhone, allowing you to capture not only audio and video, but a full three-dimensional rendering of the exact state of your immediate vicinity, both physically and psychically. It captures every blade of grass and discarded candy wrapper at your feet, as well as the weird feeling you had that there used to be a different store on the corner, but you can't remember what store it was, maybe a florist?
4. Eclair Interface
At this point, we all have a dozen or more accessories for the various devices we've bought over the years. Maybe you've got a cable that appears to be a 30-pin connector on one end and one of those things swimmers put on their noses on the other, and you can't for the life of you figure out what it was for, but you feel bad just throwing it away. Well, Apple's new interface standard requires that all devices designed to work with the new iPhone must be completely edible, and at least marginally delicious. Soon you'll look forward to clearing out your electronics drawer while enjoying wild cherry charging stations and bacon-flavored earbuds.
5. The iFabber
We all know that products like music and movies can't bring true happiness: That requires physical possessions. The iFabber is a device about the size of a Rubik's cube that can create small sculptures of whatever you want, provided you want something approved by Apple. For instance, you can create a teaspoon, or a small bust of Saint Jobs, but not a keyboard because YOU DON'T NEED A KEYBOARD, DAMMIT.
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Born helpless, naked and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg overcame these handicaps to become an innovator, an ennervator, and a inferferometer.
Tercek's original designs are on the left, the production units on the right.
Petco was searching for a new way to re-energize the pet-friendly toy line of their nationwide chain when they found Kristin Tercek. The NYU film school grad started her career producing animations for Coca-Cola, Cartoon Network, and Saturday Night Live. But it wasn't her on-screen endeavors that caught the pet supply store's attention. It was her line of hand-sewn plushies, with a following among collectors, gallery owners, and a category manager at Petco.
The buyer at Petco had seen a series of horror-movie inspired big-headed creatures that Tercek had created and thought they would be a great fit for their upcoming "Howloween" line of dog toys. The company agreed and proposed a collaboration.
"I was flattered and intrigued, and being a dog-owner, it seemed like a great idea," she describes.
For the line, Tercek provided some design options and collaborated with the manufacturing team at Petco to bring her original vision to reality. "The specifics of which fabrics, what weight and what squeakers to put in, I left up to Petco since they're the experts. I had approval along the way but made very minor style changes."
Overall, the final designs are very similar to Tercek's originals with small modifications. Petco ditched the button eyes in favor of embroidery, rounded the heads out a bit, chose drool-resistant fabrics — concessions for manufacturing and dog-resistant durability. But the designs represent Tercek's vision.
And the reception has been good. "I've gotten such positive feedback about them already — people without dogs are even buying them."
Tercek's toys have range – some are displayed at galleries, others hung on peg boards.
When asked how other artists could transition from gallery shows to suburban strip malls, Tercek says, "I have no hints or tricks. It all seems like dumb luck from where I sit!" Her story should inspire indie artists and will hopefully spur creators to consider nontraditional venues for their work. It's hard to get a show at the Met, much less the pet store.
Not one to stay on one project for too long, Tercek has already started refocusing her energies on painting and bringing bizarre new characters to life in two dimensions. "I have nine gallery shows lined up — Spoke Art, Gallery 1988, Swoon Gallery, Auguste Clown Gallery — and more that I'm working on." Can't make it to any of these hip gallery shows? Just give it a year until the traveling exhibition lands on a store shelf near you.
Well, OK, not all of it. Let's start with the freeways. They look permanent, sure, but most highways, especially the ones cutting through city centers, aren't that old — only a few decades. And in some towns, they do more harm than good. They don't decrease traffic, they cut sterile swaths through once-vibrant neighborhoods (or cut parts of the city off from what could be useful public spaces). So how about we all make like San Francisco, or Boston, or Seoul, and tear down the freeways we don't need.
This week on Observation Deck I'm thinking about what could happen if we tear up some of those ribbons of roads and start over again. We might end up with better cities.
When Doug Caldwell went to see the movie X-Men, he wasn't thinking about his day job. But what he saw would change his life ... and the way the U.S. military makes war.
In the movie, the heroes map out a potential battlefield in 3-D on a table made of pins, like the pin screens you can use to take an imprint of your face. Caldwell, who worked on topography for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, realized that such a dynamic, re-purposeable topographic display could be built and used to better model battlefields than the static relief maps the Army was using. Part of the future imagined in the movie would go on to become part of the future in reality.
There's a lesson here (several, in fact) that Chris Noessel and Nathan Shedroff use as the basis for their book, Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction, which goes on sale Sept. 17 from Rosenfeld Media.
Inspired by their lessons, Wired Design dug up seven of our favorite designs — some found in Make It So, others not. See them in the photos above.
"We know we enjoy [science fiction], culturally, individually," says Noessel, managing director of interaction design at Cooper, a San Francisco design agency. "But you can actually take a look at it with a critical eye, and use that to think about the future, think about technology in the future, and consider if that's the way we want it to be."
It's a theme that appears frequently throughout design and pop culture. Plenty of famous products can trace their origins to ideas seen in sci-fi (and in this gallery, Wired Design wants to share our favorite seven). What Noessel and Shedroff have done is to point out the lessons designers can learn from science fiction in a sort of textbook format (only more enjoyable).
Shedroff is program chair of the California College of the Arts' MBA in Design Strategy, and between his expertise and Noessel's, the emphasis of the book leans heavily toward interface design. That is, it's all about how you interact with stuff, be it a button, a touchscreen, a voice-response system, or a direct-to-brain interface (The Matrix). Okay, that one may not appear anytime soon, but that's not the point. It's about what we can learn from the movie — in this case, we can posit that when designing a virtual space, the things that make us comfortable in real life can do so in virtual reality as well, but when we mess with the familiar, we can expect users to get confused. (See: déjà vu.)
Yes, that's pretty academic. And the book's target audience is designers, science fiction fans (and creators), and business strategists, Noessel says. But hey, did we mention science fiction movies?
Science fiction is the providence of imagination, which, says Shedroff, is just like design.
"Everything that happens in the design process is fiction until it gets on the market," he says. "We create prototypes; nobody ever sees them. They're inspirational, we learn from them, but they don't exist."
Science fiction movies are a shortcut for design prototypes. Something that works for audiences — or appears to work — from a narrative fictional standpoint, is likely to be an effective interface in real life.
"It doesn't mean that everything you see in science fiction is right," says Shedroff. "That's why it's a prototype, and it may or may not survive, like any other prototype in the real world."
And there are some notable examples of failed prototypes. Noessel and Shedroff point to Minority Report, the canonical gesture-control model, as an interface that will never actually appear. (At least as a whole. Components of it, like swiping to move images, already appear in plenty of places.)
"The whole gesture interface, which everyone loves, if they're a nerd, won't [work]," Shedroff says. "We won't ever see interfaces like that ... The simple reason is, what you don't see there, that's not depicted in the scene, is all the cuts, all the takes that they had to take, the breaks between filming, because Tom Cruise's arms would get tired."
It's an example, says Noessel, of how science fiction reminds us of human constraints. It's a feedback loop that pushes both fields forward.
"It's sort of a subset of art reflects life reflects art," says Noessel. "Science fiction never truly reflects the future, it only reflects an extension of the modern paradigm."
Thus, the responsibility to innovate lies as much on designers as on their science-fiction muses.
Xenotran, the company contracted to build Caldwell's pin map, did just that. Their XenoVision device actually expanded on the idea put forth in X-Men. They laid a vacuum-sealed rubber sheet over the pins, and projected satellite imagery on it. And from that story, Noessel and Shedroff got their simplest rule: Use Science Fiction. It's a tool, a foundation, a way to think about what's possible, what's not, and how it can be better.
This summer it was announced that the WELL, a revolutionary online community founded nearly 30 years ago, had been put up for sale by its current owner, web magazine Salon. If no buyer emerges, this historic online watering hole will likely have to close up shop. It would mark the end of an era—but no matter what happens, the WELL's legacy will continue to live on all around us, in the rollicking conversations we enjoy every day on social networks and comment threads.
In that regard, the WELL is just one of many world-bending triumphs in the long, strange career of its cofounder, Stewart Brand. A Merry Prankster in the early 1960s, Brand went on to found the Whole Earth Catalog, a bible for both the back-to-the-land movement and the first computer hackers. Indeed, the community that sprang up around the catalog was what formed the seed of the WELL (an acronym of Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), an early BBS that became an Internet service provider at the dawn of the web.
In addition to his many entrepreneurial ventures, Brand has also been a vocal visionary on technology and its future, famously coining the phrase "Information wants to be free" (though it also wants to be expensive, he immediately added in a far less-quoted caveat). He's written extensively and perceptively about alternative energy, the environment, and bioengineering. Today Brand heads the Long Now Foundation, a group devoted to thinking about what humanity and Earth will look like in 10,000 years.
As part of our 20th-anniversary Icons series, we sent Kevin Kelly—a longtime writer and editor for Wired as well as an early member of the WELL and a former contributor to the Whole Earth Catalog—to chat with Brand about the legacy of his online community and the challenges of trying to peer into the future.
Kevin Kelly: There was an event in San Francisco in 1968 that has come to be called "the mother of all demos"—when Stanford's Doug Engelbart showed off a computer with a mouse and graphical interface. You were there. What significance did that event have for you?
Stewart Brand: It made me perpetually impatient. I saw a bunch of things demonstrated that clearly worked, and I wanted some right now, please! That demo gave a really accurate look at what was coming and made it seem so easy. But decades would go by, and it just kept not coming.
Kelly: Does that give you pause that maybe all kinds of things that look to be around the corner today—drones, magic glasses, self-driving cars—are just premature promises?
Brand: The lesson was that this is exponential technology. I don't mean that just in terms of power or capacity—driven by Moore's law—but also in that it starts out slow as consumers find ways to put it to use.
Kelly: Another harbinger of the digital age is on the ropes right now. In June, Salon announced it was selling the WELL, which you cofounded. How would you describe the WELL?
Brand: My first impulse is to say it was a jumped-up bulletin board, a teleconference system using dialup modems, running on a minicomputer. But no one knows what those are now! Best to say it was an early version of social email, with themed threads of messages you could read whenever. We liked to think of it as a digital pub—a "great good place" you got to by typing.
Kelly: I think of it now as community text messaging. Regardless, it was ahead of its time.
Brand: There is a common feeling that when you're making something new you had better get the structure of it right, because it may wind up being the structure of everything important in the future. Computer scientist Jaron Lanier describes that feeling as "karma vertigo."
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Blog anda akan kebanjiran traffic pengunjung secara luar biasa hari demi hari, tanpa anda harus repot-repot memikirkan SEO atau capek-capek melakukan promosi keberbagai tempat di dunia online.
Blog anda juga akan kebanjiran backlink secara signifikan hari demi hari, tanpa perlu repot-repot berburu link keberbagai tempat di dunia internet.
Hal yang harus anda lakukan adalah ikuti langkah-langkah berikut :
Buatlah postingan artikel seperti posting saya ini, atau copy-paste artikel ini. Lalu beri Judul sesuka anda (karena itu merupakan SEO buat web/blog anda sendiri).
Anda cukup hanya meletakkan Link-Link di bawah ini pada artikel anda tersebut pada blog/web anda.
Sebelum anda meletakkan Link-Link tersebut ditas ke dalam postingan web/blog anda, harap hapus Link nomor 1 , Sehingga link no 1 hilang dari daftar link dan setiap link anda naikkan 1 level ke atas. Yang tadinya no 2 naik menjadi no 1, yang tadinya no 3 menjadi no 2, yang tadinya no 4 menjadi no 3 dan begitu seterusnya. Setelah itu masukkan Link anda pada urutan Paling bawah ( no 15 ).
Ingat!!! Jangan Merubah Urutan daftar link.. Buktikan kejujuran anda.. Karena ini demi keuntungan bersama, kita sesama blogger
Apabila setiap blogger yang ikut dalam metode ini berhasil di duplikasi ole hblogger lain yang akan bergabung, andaikan 5 blogger yang bergabung maka Backlink yang anda dapat adalah Ketika:
Posisi anda 15, jumlah backlink = 1 Posisi 14, jumlah backlink = 5 Posisi 13, jumlah backlink = 25 Posisi 12, jumlah backlink = 125 Posisi 11, jumlah backlink = 625 Posisi 10, jumlah backlink = 3.125 Posisi 9, jumlah backlink = 15.625 Posisi 8, jumlah backlink = 78.125 Posisi 7, jumlah backlink = 390.625 Posisi 6, jumlah backlink = 1.953.125 Posisi 5, jumlah backlink = 9.765.625 Posisi 4, jumlah backlink = 48.828.125 Posisi 3, jumlah backlink = 244.140.625 Posisi 2, jumlah backlink = 1.220.703.125 Posisi 1, jumlah backlink = 6.103.515.625
Dan semua Dari kata kunci yang anda inginkan, bayangkan jika ini bisa berjalan dengan sempurna maka anda akan memperoleh 6.103.515.625 external link yang berasal dari berbagai blog yang anda tidak akan pernah bayangkan sebelumnya. Belum lagi apabila ada pengunjung blog anda dari Link List tersebut diatas maka otomatis anda akan memperoleh traffic ke web/blog anda juga. Ingat!!! Aturuan mainnya, Anda harus memulai dari urutan paling bawah (no 15) sehingga hasil backlink anda bisa Maksimal. Jangan salahkan saya apabila anda tidak mengikuti metode ini dengan benar dan Link anda tiba-tiba berada pada urutan no 1 dan menghilang pada Link daftar. Jadi mulai lah pada urutan paling bawah(no 15). Bisakah Anda melakukan tindakan tidak fair atau tidak jujur dengan menyabotase metode ini, misalkan saja "menghilangkan semua link asal" lalu di isi dengan link web/blog anda sendiri…? ….Bisa, dan metode ini menjadi tidak maksimal. Kejujuran adalah strategi/politik terbaik…..Tapi saya yakin bahwa kita semua tak ingin menjatuhkan kredibilitas diri sendiri dengan melakukan tindakan murahan seperti itu… —- SELESAI —-
Semoga metode ini bisa berjalan sesuai harapan kita bersama. . . ! ! !
Mendapatkan Pagerank Tanpa Backlink mudah bukan? Beri tahu kepada kawan2 blogger yang lain agar pagerank anda naik, naik, dan terus naik
Written By Unknown on Selasa, 27 Maret 2012 | 01.30
Warna Merah Siap takut Warna merah selalu diasumsikan sebagai warna yang berani. Tapi bagi pria, warna merah bisa menjadi petanda gairah seksual yang tinggi.
Ketika melihat wanita mengenakan gaun berwarna merah, pria cenderung akan tertarik secara seksual. Mereka menganggap wanita dengan balutan busana merah memiliki daya tarik seksual lebih tinggi dibanding yang berbalut busana warna lain.
"Keterkaitan ini bisa berakar dari fungsi utama biologi kita sebagai manusia," ujar peneliti Universitas Rochester, dikutip YourTango.
Pada penelitian terakhir yang diterbitkan Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, peneliti menunjukkan foto dari wanita yang sama terhadap 25 pria. Foto tersebut menunjukkan wanita yang sama menggunakan kaus berwana merah atau putih. Setelah melihat foto tersebut, mereka ditanya bagaimana model wanita tersebut dalam hubungan asmara.
Menanggapi pertanyaan tersebut, mereka memberikan penilaian daya tarik seksual yang lebih tinggi pada wanita dengan pakaian berwarna merah. Meskipun model yang ada adalah orang yang sama, wanita berpakaian merah tampak menarik secara seksual dan tampak mampu melakukan hal-hal yang "nakal".
Para peneliti melihat hal ini berhubungan dengan interaksi seksual yang terjadi pada monyet. Kulit hewan primata betina ini akan menjadi merah untuk menunjukkan bahwa mereka memasuki masa subur dan siap untuk dikawinkan dengan pejantan.
Tak beda dengan manusia, menurut peneliti, ketika wanita mengenakan pakaian berwarna merah berarti mereka ingin mengatakan maksud terselubung. Karena ketika memasuki masa subur, secara instingtif mereka akan menggunakan pakaian-pakaian yang dapat meningkatkan rasa percaya diri untuk menggoda pria. Dan, warna merah selalu menjadi pilihan wanita untuk tampil percaya diri dan berbeda.
Jadi, melangkahlah percaya diri dengan pakaian berwarna merah untuk mencuri hati pria idaman Anda Warna Merah Siap takut
