In a mind-boggling world first, a team of biologists and security researchers have successfully infected a computer with a malicious program coded into a strand of DNA.
Environmentalism used to be about defending the wild – not any more
Even environmentalism, which was once motivated by a love of the natural world, now seems more concerned with finding slightly less destructive ways of enabling an overprivileged civilisation to carry on surfing the internet and buying laptops and yoga mats than it does with protecting wildlife from its ravenous jaws.
This is very true, the change has been insidious but it happened. Read the full article.
The Bucket
This is very soothing, I could watch it for hours…
The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked
This sounds like something out of a tin foil hat conspiracy but seems, sadly, to be all too real.
There are three strands to this story. How the foundations of an authoritarian surveillance state are being laid in the US. How British democracy was subverted through a covert, far-reaching plan of coordination enabled by a US billionaire. And how we are in the midst of a massive land grab for power by billionaires via our data. Data which is being silently amassed, harvested and stored. Whoever owns this data owns the future.
It's a long read but worth it, head over to The Guardian for the full story.
Slomo: The man who skated right off the grid
Dr. John Kitchin quit a medical career to pursue his passion: skating along the boardwalk of San Diego's Pacific Beach. He calls himself "Slomo."
Read the story at The New York Times
Bikes vs Cars
This looks interesting.
Belgium and The Netherlands swap land over a headless corpse
From Cyprus to Ukraine, Israel to the Balkans, conflicts over land have long turned bloody. But on Monday, the Netherlands and Belgium managed to settle a festering territorial problem, without firing a single bullet and with an unlikely spur: a headless corpse.
Belgium and the Netherlands Swap Land, and Remain Friends
Don’t Connect to a Public Wi-Fi Network Anywhere You Wouldn’t Go Barefoot
You can’t see the gross stuff on the airport floor, but you wouldn’t walk there barefoot. (Would you? Please don’t.) Similarly, you can’t always see the icky things on public Wi-Fi, but often, they’re there.
I'll be using this analogy. I spend my time warning people about public wifi networks, but it's mostly ignored.
JG Ballard's daughter on her father's prescience
"Reality is now a kind of huge advertising campaign, selling television’s image of what life is about." That could be a response to recent events, but JG Ballard said those words in 1988. As readers of my father will know, he was fascinated by the way advances in technology and the mass media revolutionised our lives.
Passenger warning
I spent a couple of days in London last week.
While on a tube journey, this lovely little stealth intervention on a carriage wall caught my eye.