Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors. "Lower Manhattan’s 60 Hudson Street is one of the world’s most concentrated hubs of Internet connectivity. This short documentary peeks inside, offering a glimpse of the massive material infrastructure that makes the Internet possible."
posted by twirlip
on Nov 10, 2011 -
18 comments
This weekend marks the time of
the Hajj, a core pillar of Islam in which
great tides of humanity venture to the ancient city of Mecca to honor God.
Predating Mohammed's birth by centuries, the pilgrimage comprises
several days of rites, from congregation like snow on
Mount Arafat and the ritual
stoning of Shaitan to the circling of the sacred
Kaaba (the
shrouded cubical monolith Muslims
pray toward daily) and kissing the
Black Stone (colored by the absorption of myriad sins, and believed by some to be a
fallen meteorite).
While the city has
modernized to handle this largest of annual gatherings -- building highway-scale ramps,
gaudy skyscrapers for the ultra-rich, and
tent cities the size of Seattle -- it remains mysterious, as unbelievers are
forbidden from entering its borders.
Richard Francis Burton became famous for
touring the city in disguise to write
a rare travelogue, but contemporary viewers have a more immediate guide:
Vice Magazine journalist Suroosh Alvi, who smuggled a minicam into the city to record
The Mecca Diaries [alt], a 14-minute documentary of his own Hajj journey.
Browse the manual to see what goes into a Hajj trip, or
watch the YouTube livestream to see the Grand Mosque crowds in real time.
posted by Rhaomi
on Nov 4, 2011 -
31 comments
Internet and telecom infrastructure in northern Canada is so bad it threatens the whole region. That’s the conclusion from a new
report cited in a
Globe and Mail article, which notes: “The government of Nunavut bought new digital cameras to produce photos for driver’s licences. But the photo files were too large for local E-mail systems and so must be loaded onto memory sticks and flown to Iqaluit for processing.”
[more inside]
posted by joeclark
on Sep 8, 2011 -
78 comments
Through purchasing Viagra, herbal remedies, and replica watches, computer scientists explain how modern spam works. The spam business model consists of three components: advertising, click support (i.e., delivering the customer to an actual website), and realization (i.e., receiving payment and delivering the product to the customer). Different firms located across the globe carry out the various tasks. For example, the website domains are registered in Russia, the credit card payments are handled by banks in Azerbaijan, and the pills are sent from manufacturers in India. The spam business infrastructure appears to be organized around a small number of affiliate programs that coordinate the activities among the different firms.
Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain (A 16 page PDF). [
via]
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear
on May 21, 2011 -
31 comments
PBS's excellent weekly news magazine,
Need to Know,
explains why European broadband speeds are racing ahead of the USA. Britain now has 400 broadband suppliers with service available for as little as $6/month. Bonus: Harvard's Berkman Center
reports on broadband supply trends around the world.
posted by anigbrowl
on May 13, 2011 -
53 comments
Mr. Kearney, who says he has spent thousands of dollars renovating the leased building, said: “If these people had such fond memories of this place, then they should be ashamed — because it was falling apart.”
Bob Kearney, an out-of-work electrician, and his partner, Travis Funneman, have turned the former Pioneer Elementary School at Zike's Corner, east of Neoga, Illinois, into a strip club.
[more inside]
posted by kipmanley
on Jun 4, 2010 -
56 comments
A Glimpse of the World All across Africa, new tracks are being laid, highways built, ports deepened,
commercial contracts signed -- all on an unprecedented scale, and led by China, whose
appetite for commodities seems
insatiable. Do China's grand designs promise the transformation, at last, of a star-crossed continent? Or merely its exploitation?
The author travels deep into the heart of Africa, searching for answers.
[more inside]
posted by kliuless
on Apr 26, 2010 -
20 comments
The Guardian ran a series of articles looking at the state of high-speed rail travel today. France intends to
double its length of track over the next decade, and China is planning
a massive rail-building programme, including a high-speed line which will halve the travel time between Beijing and Shanghai to 4 hours.
In Germany, domestic air travel is rapidly going extinct, and Spain's network has made
day trips between Madrid and Barcelona a possibility. The USA, which has long neglected its rail network, is
planning up to 10 high-speed lines. Meanwhile, Britain's only high-speed line goes to France, but there is talk of
a 250mph line from London to Birmingham and beyond, possibly by the early 2020s. Meanwhile, the CEO of France's rail operator, SNCF,
weighs in on what the UK should do.
posted by acb
on Aug 7, 2009 -
49 comments
The globe’s networked ecologies of food, water, energy, and waste have established new infrastructures and forms of urbanism. While these ecologies exist at the service of our contemporary lifestyles, they have typically remained hidden from view and from the public conscience.
Infranet Lab is studying the shifting / changing conditions.
[more inside]
posted by netbros
on Apr 20, 2009 -
2 comments
"California has a decision to make. We either brace ourselves for long-term [water] cuts that threaten our economy and our very way of way of life, or we invest in a solution to fix the
[San Francisco Bay] Delta and expand our
water toolbox so we can meet future challenges head-on.”
[more inside]
posted by salvia
on Sep 16, 2007 -
41 comments
Roads To Riches (or We've Got a Bridge in Brooklyn to Sell You--Seriously) -- Why investors are clamoring to take over America's highways, bridges, and airports—and why the public should be nervous.--
...a slew of Wall Street firms—Goldman, Morgan Stanley, the Carlyle Group, Citigroup, and many others—is piling into infrastructure ... Assets sold now could change hands many times over the next 50 years, with each new buyer feeling increasing pressure to make the deal work financially. It's hardly a stretch to imagine service suffering in such a scenario; already, the record in the U.S. has been spotty. ...
posted by amberglow
on Apr 29, 2007 -
107 comments
"
[Vitek] Boden had waged a three-month war against the Scada (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system of Maroochy Water Services in Australia beginning in January 2000, which saw millions of gallons of sewage spill into waterways, hotel grounds and canals around the Sunshine Coast suburb." A 2002
Washington Post story on possible al-Qaeda attacks also mentions the Boden case: "Specialists in cyber-terrorism have studied Boden's case because it is the only one known in which someone used a digital control system deliberately to cause harm."
posted by russilwvong
on Feb 16, 2006 -
3 comments
Polar Inertia is an online photojournal devoted to exploring and documenting contemporary nomadism, urban architectural typology, and the oft-hid-in-plain-sight infrastructure of contemporary existence.
posted by Chrischris
on Jun 14, 2005 -
6 comments
Halliburton out of the running for the $600 billion contract to rebuild Iraqs infrastructure. Andrew Natsios, director of the USAID, which is handing out most of the postwar contracts, is keen to counter any allegations of favoritism or political influence. "If I got a phone call from anybody putting any political pressure on me, I would report it immediately". Halliburton is the company formerly run by Dick Cheney, VP of the United States.
posted by stbalbach
on Mar 28, 2003 -
19 comments
There's a lot of news coverage this morning about Afghanistan going live with their official country domain ".af" - the first two advertised sites are
here (?) and
here (via the BBC). There's a less publicized, and much better site
here via google. I guess you know you've made it as a civilization these days when the
glass is lit. I remember how excited I was when the ADSL synchronized and my pop up adventure began. . .
I hope this isn't our farewell present to this country, though.
posted by jdaura
on Mar 10, 2003 -
11 comments
E-mail Reaches the Unreachable via Shortwave in the Solomons
PFNet is an innovative development project which deploys a growing network infrastructure across the largely rural and remote communities of the Solomon Islands.
"PFnet is based on a model where community-managed, operator-assisted email facilities provide all groups (even illiterates) the means to send messages and Internet emails. ... Owing to the formidable logistical barriers in this scattered island nation, the mainstay of the network uses HF/Wavemail; a well proven system short-wave radios in Pactor 2 mode." The organization is a finalist for the
Stockholm Challenge, an award for innovation in IT development.
All a community needs is a shortwave radio, solar panels, and a computer running
Wavemail to send email, and potentially more. The results are quite impressive:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6
posted by rschram
on Jul 3, 2002 -
5 comments
"No national railway of a developed country has ever run a profit. They're not supposed to. The correlative economic and social benefits they throw off -- bringing commuters to taxpaying corporations daily, for one thing -- more than offset any net loss they suffer."
[via camworld]
You don't run your home's central heating, air conditioning or plumbing at a profit, so why should a country try to run its infrastructure that way, be it rail, health service, water, ...? Is it forced on us because nationalised services always seem to become fantastically inefficient and bureaucratic?
posted by southisup
on Jun 26, 2002 -
63 comments
Next move - nationalizing the internet infrastructure in Europe ? 300 staff and union officials have blockaded themselves at the network operations centre in Belgium following Dutch telecoms company KPNQwest bankruptcy filing. Stocked up on provisions, taking shifts unpaid to keep the centre fully operational. "If we leave, then in three to five days there will be the largest internet slowdown in European history." From the article - KPNQwest's infrastructure covers 60 cities around Europe, estimated between one third and one half of all European internet traffic.
posted by Voyageman
on Jun 7, 2002 -
10 comments
Want to know when the T3 will get set up in Chad, or how much access costs in Djibouti? Check out
African Information Infrastructure. It's guaranteed to make you glad you don't live in the Third World and can connect at higher than 14.4.
posted by tdecius
on Sep 8, 1999 -
0 comments
