The Department of Homeland Security is investigating Mt. Gox, the largest Bitcoin exchange, for violating laws on US money exchange and money transfers—and it’s grabbing the exchange’s money in the process.

DHS officials refused to comment on the ongoing investigation, but they did provide a copy of the warrant that was used yesterday to seize funds that Mt. Gox had in Dwolla, a money transfer service. Dwolla is a Des Moines, Iowa company that provides one of the most popular ways to move US dollars to Mt. Gox, where they can be used to buy bitcoins.

via Feds reveal the search warrant used to seize Mt. Gox account | Ars Technica.

In the terrifying wake of 2011 the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan, funerals become a commonplace ordeal as the nation dealt with unprecedented loss. Like most cultures, Japanese funerals are somber affairs punctuated with black and white with any deviation considered taboo or inappropriate. Reflecting on the enormity of recent events, funeral home Nishinihon Tenrei approached Tokyo-based ad agency I&S BBDO to create an ad for a trade show that would buck the trend of muted colors so prevalent in the industry. The agency responded with this unprecedented figure of a skeleton made with pressed flowers that overtly celebrates the cycle of life by introducing color and elements of nature that are often avoided in such services. The image was considered so successful it went on to win a design merit award from the 2013 One Club Awards. You can see it in even higher resolution here. (via spoon & tamago)

via A Japanese Ad Agency Reinvents Advertising for Funeral Services | Colossal.

This is the language of the future: tiny, intelligent things all around us, coordinating their activities. Coffeepots that talk to alarm clocks. Thermostats that talk to motion sensors. Factory machines that talk to the power grid and to boxes of raw material. A decade after Wi-Fi put all our computers on a wireless network—and half a decade after the smartphone revolution put a series of pocket-size devices on that network—we are seeing the dawn of an era when the most mundane items in our lives can talk wirelessly among themselves, performing tasks on command, giving us data we’ve never had before.Imagine a factory where every machine, every room, feeds back information to solve problems on the production line. Imagine a hotel room like the ones at the Aria in Las Vegas where the lights, the stereo, and the window shade are not just controlled from a central station but adjust to your preferences before you even walk in. Think of a gym where the machines know your workout as soon as you arrive, or a medical device that can point toward the closest defibrillator when you have a heart attack. Consider a hybrid car—like the new Ford Fusion—that can maximize energy efficiency by drawing down the battery as it nears a charging station

via In the Programmable World, All Our Objects Will Act as One | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.

Achingly beautiful piece of ambient drone:

Hayashi Drag Track | hibernate.

What if Conan the Barbarian was your spirit guide?

As you walk through modern life, you might need a no-nonsense voice to guide you away from self-pity, doubt, and the secret rites of blood donation volunteers. In By Crom! artist Rachel Kahn imagines that she is in constant consultation with the pulp hero Conan the Cimmerian.

Although some of Kahn’s By Crom! comics juxtapose the fictional Hyborian Age that Conan comes from with the modern era and its coffee shops, public transit, and clothing that didn’t come from an animal you killed yourself. But for the most part, it is about Conan as spirit guide; his warrior values are a chasm apart from Kahn’s artist lifestyle, but she imagines a wisdom in his droll (and occasionally head-knocking) advice.

via What if Conan the Barbarian was your spirit guide?.

[ WHAT? WHAT?!? -egg]

Weirdest Chemical Reaction I have Ever Freaking Seen!! – YouTube.

[This is just fantastic. -egg]

We often fall into a trap: if we make net life just like real life, we can write about it! But net life is real life. It deserves its own aesthetic of language, and it only suffers the paucities it’s accused of when clumsily translated to our old ways of being in the world.And if ever we needed evidence, it is this: when it steps back into real life it brings its strange back with it. These are examples of graffiti from the Egyptian revolution, they are values of an incorporeal world, made corporeal, to the great disruption of accepted political structures. This is the Polish parliament, taking on the momentary identity of a 4chan based non-group that first materialized four years earlier to harass the Church of Scientology, to protest an intellectual property treaty. These protests eventually destroyed the international treaty, and no one really knows how it happened.

via ACM Web Science talk, as written | Quinn Said.

[Take note: this is The Guardian, not some fringe left- or right-wing source. -egg]

Let’s repeat that last part: “no digital communication is secure”, by which he means not that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications – meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like – are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is.

There have been some previous indications that this is true. Former AT&T engineer Mark Klein revealed that AT&T and other telecoms had built a special network that allowed the National Security Agency full and unfettered access to data about the telephone calls and the content of email communications for all of their customers. Specifically, Klein explained “that the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T” and that “contrary to the government’s depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas terrorists . . . much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic.” But his amazing revelations were mostly ignored and, when Congress retroactively immunized the nation’s telecom giants for their participation in the illegal Bush spying programs, Klein’s claims (by design) were prevented from being adjudicated in court.

That every single telephone call is recorded and stored would also explain this extraordinary revelation by the Washington Post in 2010:

Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.

It would also help explain the revelations of former NSA official William Binney, who resigned from the agency in protest over its systemic spying on the domestic communications of US citizens, that the US government has “assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about US citizens with other US citizens” (which counts only communications transactions and not financial and other transactions), and that “the data that’s being assembled is about everybody. And from that data, then they can target anyone they want.”

via Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government? | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

For confirmation we need only look at the Google Play store, where the Facebook Home app, which can be installed on select Android phones, has now fallen to the No. 338 ranking in the category of free apps. That’s 200 spots lower than it ranked just two weeks ago.

Even worse: More than half of Facebook Home’s 15,000 user reviews give the app just one star. A typical review:

Uninstalled after 1 min

Just takes a nice phone and ruins the interface. Waste of time.

The numbers represent a remarkable rejection of an initiative that Facebook pushed with a high-profile national advertising campaign and a dog-and-pony rollout at its Menlo Park headquarters. Smartphone users are announcing, loud and clear, that they do not want Facebook in charge of their interface with the mobile universe.

via The Facebook Home disaster – Salon.com.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) have introduced a landmark technology bill called The Unlocking Technology Act of 2013 [PDF] that reforms the way our devices our regulated. It fixes a glaring hole in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), changing the rules so that you are allowed to remove restrictions and locks from your devices provided that you don’t violate other laws (as it stands, removing a lock, even to do something legal, like installing unapproved software on your iPhone or change carriers, is banned by the DMCA). The bill clarifies that security researchers don’t violate the law by publishing information about flaws in the devices we trust and depend upon, and makes it legal to break “lock-out codes” that stop mechanics from fixing cars.

This is a watershed moment in 21st century technology law, and it’s desperately needed. Every day that goes by sees us more dependent on devices that are increasingly designed to be as opaque as possible — devices made by companies whose business-model treats customers as adversaries who undermine profits when they turn to third parties for software, repairs and services. It is only the presence of the terrible rules in the DMCA that makes this business attractive — without these rules, technology locks would be quickly broken in the marketplace and competition — as well as transparency — would thrive. If you want to be sure that the devices that fill your rooms, your pockets — and increasingly, your body — are well-behaved and trustworthy, please support this bill.

via New law will fix the DMCA, make jailbreaking, unlocking and interoperability legal – your help needed! – Boing Boing.