Astral Physics

Because We All Need To Remember Why We Started Doing This In The First Place

jordan.snyder — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:34:00 +0000

File: archives/7/p7_0x03_Hacker’s Manifesto_by_The Mentor.txt
==Phrack Inc.==

Volume One, Issue 7, Phile 3 of 10

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The following was written shortly after my arrest…

\/\The Conscience of a Hacker/\/

+++The Mentor+++

Written on January 8, 1986
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Another one got caught today, it’s all over the papers. “Teenager
Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal”, “Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering”…
Damn kids. They’re all alike.

But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950′s technobrain,
ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what
made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?
I am a hacker, enter my world…
Mine is a world that begins with school… I’m smarter than most of
the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me…
Damn underachiever. They’re all alike.

I’m in junior high or high school. I’ve listened to teachers explain
for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. “No, Ms.
Smith, I didn’t show my work. I did it in my head…”
Damn kid. Probably copied it. They’re all alike.

I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is
cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it’s because I
screwed it up. Not because it doesn’t like me…
Or feels threatened by me…
Or thinks I’m a smart ass…
Or doesn’t like teaching and shouldn’t be here…
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They’re all alike.

And then it happened… a door opened to a world… rushing through
the phone line like heroin through an addict’s veins, an electronic pulse is
sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought… a board is
found.
“This is it… this is where I belong…”
I know everyone here… even if I’ve never met them, never talked to
them, may never hear from them again… I know you all…
Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They’re all alike…

You bet your ass we’re all alike… we’ve been spoon-fed baby food at
school when we hungered for steak… the bits of meat that you did let slip
through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We’ve been dominated by sadists, or
ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us will-
ing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the
beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying
for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and
you call us criminals. We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek
after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color,
without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us
and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is
that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me
for.

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual,
but you can’t stop us all… after all, we’re all alike.

+++The Mentor+++

jordan.snyder — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:37:13 +0000

jordan.snyder — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 05:57:08 +0000

jordan.snyder — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 05:52:51 +0000

Portland Cello Project – ‘Denmark’ from Two Penguins on Vimeo.

Sensing Your Environment

jordan.snyder — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 04:10:00 +0000

Lately I’ve noticed a lot of need for sensors in my environment. I would like to have cameras in certain places to notify me of thieves or tampering or wildlife; I would like to have GPS in my car, and on my motorcycle; I would like my phone to know where I go and potentially the things that I say in daily conversation when it’s in earshot, but I want it to do something clever with that information, and I don’t want any one else to have it. I would like to have temperature and humidity sensors in various places to warn of potential mold or mildew situations. And I would like to have a beautiful interface that tied everything together on all of my devices.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, as I have only just mentioned consumer applications. I know that industrial applications are available for some of these things, but they are not easy to use and not very accessible (in my opinion). These thoughts have led me to more thoughts around the future of devices, sensors, networks, and people and their interactions with each other and with the environment. I have a simple product idea that I’m trying to develop. Anyone who is seriously ready to start today on some embedded work should contact me jordan**at**jordansnyder.com

Facade Projection

jordan.snyder — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:36:03 +0000

555 KUBIK | facade projection | from urbanscreen on Vimeo.

555 KUBIK
“How it would be, if a house was dreaming”

The conception of this project consistently derives from its underlying architecture – the theoretic conception and visual pattern of the Hamburg Kunsthalle. The Basic idea of narration was to dissolve and break through the strict architecture of O. M. Ungers “Galerie der Gegenwart”. Resultant permeabilty of the solid facade uncovers different interpretations of conception, geometry and aesthetics expressed through graphics and movement. A situation of reflexivity evolves – describing the constitution and spacious perception of this location by means of the building itself.

Production: www.urbanscreen.com

Art Direction: Daniel Rossa – www.rossarossa.de
Technical Director: Thorsten Bauer
3D Operator: David Starmann www.shineundsein.de
Sound Design : Jonas Wiese

Realized with www.mxwendler.net mediaserver

A extended version of this documentation can be found here: vimeo.com/5677104

Fontaine

jordan.snyder — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:49:18 +0000

I have now publicised my musical alter-ego, Fontaine. The sound is not quite where I want it yet, but I am posting my progress as I create with new tools: Logic Studio 8 and Live 7.

Check out the “Drop It Like It’s Hot” (Snoop Dogg) Remix!

Fontaine on Virb

Crossdomain Security and GIF Images in Silverlight 2

jordan.snyder — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 01:59:03 +0000

As mentioned in my brief talk at Microsoft MIX 09 a few weeks ago, we are working on a Silverlight application for a major photo-sharing website. This is the first post of a couple that will explain a few issues we ran into while developing a Silverlight 2 application.

First, Silverlight does not support rendering of GIF images with the component. You can use a component from ComponentOne to display GIF’s, but it uses WebClient or HTTPRequest to grab the raw image data to process, and therefore becomes restricted by cross-domain security policies. You can find a very clear explanation of Silverlight’s URL security restrictions here, but to summarize, the and components are more lax when loading from one domain to another (they do not require that crossdomain policy files live on the server) so you are allowed to load content from domains other than the one that the Silverlight app was served from. However, when using WebClient or HTTPRequest directly (or direct sockets, for that matter), you must have crossdomain policy files on the deploying server.

So, how is this worked around? You can do a few things:

1. Set up a web server proxy solution – Server-side code does not have crossdomain restrictions, so you can deploy server-side code (on the server that is serving the Silverlight application) that will broker requests from the Silverlight client application, go out and get data from wherever you need it, and then tunnel it back through to Silverlight. This has been done for years with Flash and AJAX server requests, but in my opinion, it’s still as messy as ever. Thinking about it just makes me feel a bit dirty.

2. Deploy crossdomain policy files to ALL servers hosting image content – This means that the “major photo-sharing website” that I mentioned above will have to do some work. Fortunately for us, they are in the process of doing this anyway, but if they weren’t, this wouldn’t quite be an option. Quite a few public API’s do have crossdomain policy files in place for this very reason, but many don’t (including Twitter’s API).

3. Host the Silverlight application on a subdomain off of the same domain as the images? – In other words, can we host the application on http://search.yourphotosite.com and access images on http://images1.yourphotosite.com and http://images32.yourphotosite.com? The short answer is no, not without crossdomain policy files…which, according to #2 above, would solve our problem anyway. So, that doesn’t get us anywhere either!

4. When the API returns with a list of images, filter out all images ending in “.gif” – Okay, this is easy to filter out, but not so easy when dealing with the total number of results. We pagination results and show the total, so if the API says there are 4000 images and 2000 of those are GIF’s, we’re going to have a completely incorrect count at all times. Since this is public and popular image-sharing, there are A LOT of GIF’s. This option definitely does not solve the problem.

As far as I know, these are the only options available in this particular instance. We are hoping that the photo-sharing site will expedite the installation of the crossdomain policy files on their image content servers, but without that, we’d be out of luck.

The Beginning of Something Beautiful

jordan.snyder — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 06:40:22 +0000

Work in progress…this was actually an accident while trying to create something that will hopefully be much more badass. Stay tchuned!

Tendrils (make your own!)

Inspired by:
Like Spinning Plates (Live) – Radiohead

Processing Hearts AIR While Merapi Lends a Hand

jordan.snyder — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 06:35:09 +0000

As promised at my brief demo at 360|Flex San Jose last week, I’m now releasing the Merapi library for Processing.

Processing is a Java-variant built mostly for artists or for anyone who wants to create quick prototypes.

Merapi is an opensource Java library that gives access to Java from AIR – Adobe’s own OS-agnostic runtime (for the desktop, not a browser plugin) built around the Flash Player.

But most of you already knew that.

It’s really nothing too complicated (just wrapping the JAR file correctly), but it will make it a bit easier for you to get started with Merapi in Processing.

What to do:
1) ~~Download Merapi Processing Lib Beta~~ – Merapi is not being publicly released yet.
2) Wherever your actual Processing binary resides, you will find a folder called “libraries”. Unzip merapi.zip into this directory. (Your directory structure should be {ProcessingDir}/libraries/merapi/library/… which will contain all the necessary JAR files for Merapi.)
3) Open your Processing IDE (restart if it’s already open), go to the Menu->Sketch->Import Library->merapi. This will import the necessary packages, but there’s one last step before you’re in the clear. The way that Processing imports all of the packages becomes a bit troublesome. If you simply try to create an instance of the Merapi “Bridge” class, you will get a compile error. To resolve this… (See Step 4)
4) Change the import line import merapi.*” to “import merapi.Bridge;”

Also, Adam Flater whipped up this quick video demonstrating the Lego Mindstorm robot cruising around thanks to Bluetooth<->Java/Merapi<->AIR.