A fork in the road of life? Unsure what decision to take? Don’t leave an important life decision to things like logic – instead, use this neat "Fortune’s Navigator," an online compass that will confidently guide your decision-making process.

Link – Thanks Craig Conley!

Make your own headline at Add Letters’ Newspaper Headling Generator: Link – Thanks Spluch!

Can you park the new 107 Peugeot in this cute (and maddening) little Flash game?

Link – Thanks Kandra!

Italian artist Antonio Riello decorated real weapons to make them fashionably (yet deadly) chic:

"In 1998 I decided to focus my artistic research mainly about a "fashion-fiction" visual story regarding an old passion of mine: weapons – objects full of symbolic senses. I want to mix, in an artistic way, traditional ‘female stuff’ like fashion with very traditional ‘male stuff’ like guns. It consists in a restyling of real military weapons into fashion items for ladies".

Link – via Boing Boing – Thanks Yayo!

Related: Joanneke Meester’s Skin Gun

By now, y’all probably know that the Hungarian government is holding an Internet voting campaign to allow web users to to name a new bridge being built over the Danube in Budapest.

The front runner used to be a Hungarian humorist Geza Hofi, but that’s before Chuck Norris got on the ball. Fortunately for the Hungarian government, Chuck had fallen behind in the votes. Unfortunately for them, the leading contender is now Comedy Central talk-show host Stephen Colbert.

After explaining to viewers how to vote for him, in just 7 days, Colbert got 17 million votes [YouTube] (see the list)

Now, our pal YesButNoButYes has a neat Top Ten List of Other Things that Should be Named after Stephen Colbert. This one is no. 4: Cyclones

I keep reading how weather is big these days. Like, floods and hurricanes and stuff. I found this site that lets you recommend names for cyclones. Don’t hear too much about cyclones…could be our chance to break into the crappy weather market. One thing…the site’s based in Hong Kong, and names need to be submitted in English and Chinese. So whoever votes, remember to write Stephen AND Sleephen. (That was just wrong…childish and wrong…I apologize) But seriously, is there a more perfect match than Stephen and a whole lotta wind. Let’s get to the cyclone committee ASAP, while they’re still above water.

Link – Thanks Mario Marsicano!

If we take a look at the state of photography today, such as the advances of digital camera, artful image manipulation by photoshop, and even the role of paparazzi in media – and the pervasiveness of photographic images in our lives, it is easy to forget that the first photograph ever was taken just 180 years ago.

Photography was probably an inevitable invention – the surprise was that it took so long for it to develop, especially given that the scientific principles that are responsible for it – physical principles such as our understanding of lens and optics and chemical processes that are required to affix permanent images, have actually been known for long before the invention of the first photograph.

The development of photography was quite fast: since Niépce took the world’s first photograph in 1826, it took only about 30 years for photograph became a product for mass consumption with the introduction of carte-de-visite. Before long, the world’s first concealed cameras were introduced to help detectives document the dalliances of cheating spouses!

But enough small talk – let’s take a look at some fun facts about the development of early photography, famous and "first" photos, weird cameras, and more:

Camera Obscura

Before we talk about the birth of modern photography, let’s talk a little about an ancient technique that served as a precursor – say, "proto-photography" if you will.

This device is called a camera obscura (latin for dark chamber). It is literally a dark room or a box with a small hole in one wall. An inverted image from outside the hole would appear on the opposite wall. This device could thus be used to aid drawing (artist could trace the outline of the image on a canvas hung on the wall) and was considered quite significant in the development of proto-photography.

The invention of camera obscura (latin for dark chamber) was attributed to an islamic mathematician, astronomer, and physicist named Ibn al-Haitham [wiki] or better known as Alhazen, in the 11th century Egypt. However, the principle of camera obscura was probably known to thinkers as early as Aristotle (300 BC).

Camera obscura was widely known to early scientists: Roger Bacon, Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Kepler, and Athanasius Kircher [wiki] all wrote about this optical device.

Giphantie: Prediction of the Invention of Photography

In 1760, decades before the invention of photography, French author Charles-François Tiphaigne de la Roche predicted its invention.

In a story titled Giphantie (yes, an anagram of his name), Tiphaigne de la Roche wrote about a race of secret supermen in an imaginary wonderland who could fix a reflected image onto a canvas coated with a sticky substance!

Link [Google Translation]

World’s First Photograph

The grainy picture above is the world’s first photograph called "View from the Window at Le Gras" (circa 1826), taken and developed by French photographer pioneer Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. He called this process "heliography" or sun drawing – it certainly was a long process: the exposure time was about 8 hours.

Link | Nicéphore Niépce [wiki] | Niepce

World’s First Daguerreotype

Although daguerreotype [wiki] was not the first photographic process to be invented, it was the first commercially viable process (earlier techniques required hours and hours of successful exposure and therefore weren’t suitable for taking people’s photos).

This technique was developed by French chemist Louis Daguerre [wiki], with collaboration with Niépce (see above). The daguerreotype above, titled "L’Atelier de l’artiste" was probably the world’s first daguerreotype, made in 1837.

In 1839, the French government acquired Daguerre’s French patent and announced his invention "a gift free to the world" – but simultaneously, Daguerre had acquired patents abroad, where he stringently controlled the use of daguerreotype.

And just like with any technology, the first adopters turned out to be erotic photography [wiki, nsfw - obviously].

Posing for a daguerreotype wasn’t trivial: because the exposure time is about 15 minutes, the subject’s head had to be held still with a clamp!

World’s First Human Portrait

In 1839, Robert Cornelius, a Dutch chemist who immigrated to Philadelphia, took a daguerreotype portrait of himself outside of his family’s store and made history: he made the world’s first human photograph!

Robert Cornelius [wiki]

You’re looking at Dorothy Catherine Draper, sister of NYU professor John Draper and model for the first daguerreotype portrait of a woman in the United States in 1839. She was the first woman to be photographed with her eyes open!

The earliest American attempts in duplicating the photographic experiments of the Frenchman Louis Daguerre occurred at NYU in 1839. John W. Draper, professor of chemistry, built his own camera and made what may be the first human portrait taken in the United States, after a 65-second exposure. The sitter, his sister Dorothy Catherine Draper, had her face powdered with flour in an early attempt to accentuate contrasts.

Link

The Man Who Coined "Photography"

Also in 1839, the term "photography" was coined by Sir John Frederick William Herschel [wiki], a british mathematician and astronomer (side note: his father, Sir Frederick William Herschel, also a famous astronomer, discovered the planet Uranus!)

Herschel also coined the terms "negative" and "positive" in the context of photography, and also of the vernacular "snapshot."

Stereoscopy

The principle of stereoscopy (or 3D photo) actually preceded that of photography – it was described in as early as the 1500s by Giambattista della Porta [wiki].

In traditional stereoscopy [wiki], a pair of 2-D images – each representing a slightly different perspective of the same object, creates a perception of depth and tricks the brain into seeing a 3-D image.

The invention of daguerreotype sparked interest in stereoscopy in the Victorian era.

World’s First Photomontage

In 1858, Henry Peach Robinson [wiki] made the world’s first photomontage by combining multiple negatives to form a single image.

Robinson’s first and most famous composite photo, called "Fading Away", was a composition of five negatives. It depicted a girl dying of consumption (or tuberculosis), and quite controversial as some objected to the morbid subject of the photo.

World’s Oldest Surviving Aerial Photo

The first aerial photo was taken by Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, better known as Nadar [wiki], in 1858, using a tethered balloon over the Bievre Valley, France.

Unfortunately, Nadar’s aerial photos were lost – so the oldest surviving aerial photo, shown here, was that of Boston in 1860, taken by James Wallace Black [wiki], also using a balloon.

Carte-de-visite

In the late-1850s in Europe, Andre Disdéri popularized photos-as-calling-cards called carte-de-visite.

Carte-de-visite became popular and Disdéri became famous when French ruler Emperor Napoleon III en route to Italy with his army, stopped by his studio to pose for a photograph! (Never mind that the story might be apocryphal, it was still a good story!)

Because it is cheap to produce, carte-de-visite was mass produced for the public and became a huge fad in the Victorian era.

This carte-de-visite is of an interesting character called Eugen Sandow, dubbed the first modern bodybuilder who gained fame in late 1800s.

Do All of a Galloping Horse’s Hooves Leave the Ground?

In 1872, Eadweard Muybridge, a British-born photographer, was hired by Leland Stanford (who later founded the university), to settle a question (some people say a $25,000 bet) whether there was a point in a horse’s full gallop where all four hooves were off the ground.

Muybridge arranged 12 cameras alongside a race track and attached a string to the camera switches across the track. When the horse ran through the string, it triggered the shot. The series of photographs showed that indeed, all four hooves leave the ground when the horse is in full gallop.

Muybridge went on to develop systems and techniques to photograph motion of people and animal.

Eadweard Muybridge [wiki]

World’s First Color Photograph

The oldest known color photograph was taken by Louis Ducos du Hauron in 1872. The photo is of a view of Angouleme in Southern France.

The Birth of Photojournalism

Amongst many pioneering photographers of the era is John Thomson [wiki], a Scottish Victorian photographer and traveler, whose work documenting the street people in London laid the foundation of social documentary and photojournalism.

This photo is called The Crawlers (cir. 1876 – 1877), a part of Thomson’s work called Street Life of London, which documents in earnest the hardship of life of the transients and the poor in that era.

Photographic Gun

In the 1880s, French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey wanted to learn how birds fly, so he invented a photographic gun, which uses a rotating glass plate to take 12 consecutive pictures per second!

The Pioneers: Étienne-Jules Marey | EJ Marey [wiki]

Vintage Concealed and Gun Cameras

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, we saw a boom in the design and production of cameras concealed in everyday objects. Many of these cameras were sold for detective works, whereas some (like the matchbox camera) were designed specifically for spying activities.

For a fantastic collection of vintage cameras, it’s hard to beat George Eastman House’s online archive: Link

World’s First Underwater Photo

The first underwater camera system was developed by French scientist Louis Boutan in 1893.

The image on the left was the world’s first underwater photography – the model was so excited that he held the identification plate upside down!

Link | Another Link

Mammoth Camera

In 1900, George R. Lawrence built this mammoth 900 lb. camera, then the world’s largest, for $5,000 (enough to purchase a large house at that time!) It took 15 men to move and operate the gigantic camera.

The photographer was commissioned by the Chicago & Alton Railway to make the largest photograph (the plate was 8 x 4.5 ft in size!) of its train for the company’s pamphlet "The Largest Photograph in the World of the Handsomest Train in the World."

Link

World’s Most Expensive Photo

You’re looking at Edward Steichen’s photo of a pond in Long Island, New York, in 1904. Don’t laugh: this rare print has set the world record for most expensive photograph, sold for $2.9 million in February 2006!

BBC Article | Edward Steichen [wiki]

Thousands Posed for Mole and Thomas’ War Photos

In 1918, photographers Arthur S. Mole and John D. Thomas took a photograph of 30,000 military officers and men at Camp Custer, Michigan. A special 70-foot tower was built for this purpose.

Mole and Thomas actually specialized in taking these types of photographs – they took a total of 10 photos where thousands of soldiers were posed to form giant, living, symbols of the USA, including a portrait of Woodrow Wilson, the Liberty Bell, the Statue of Liberty, the Marine Corps emblem, and more.

Link

Watch the Birdie!

In the 1920s, a brass birdie was often used by photographers to grab the attention of children during a portrait session (hence the saying "Watch the birdie"):

The birdie would typically be held by an assistant or parent. A rubber hose and squeeze bulb were connected to the short length of open brass tubing. The brass base separates into two halves so the bottom of the base can be filled with water. Squeezing the rubber bulb causes the bird to make a whistling and warbling sound.

Link

_____________

The list above is by no means complete: we skipped many important milestones in the days of early photography, including the contributions of Fox Talbot [wiki], the development of other photographic processes (collodion, gelatin emulsion, and so forth), the birth of cinematography, and so on.

For those who are interested in learning more about the birth of photography, there are many wonderful websites, such as Robert Leggat’s History of Photography, and Photography [wiki].

After two weekends building a 7-foot tower of Pisa using over 12,000 Jenga blocks, Northern Michigan University student Bryant Varney was looking forward to getting a representative from Guiness World Records to come and check it out – but first, he has an interview with the world’s clumsiest reporter. You can guess what happened next …

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] | Bryant Varney’s website | Jenga Tower Project

Actually, before y’all point it out in the comment: it’s a setup – Bryant is famous for building large structures out of Jenga blocks (see Sears Tower in Jenga Blocks, previously on Neatorama), then have it all torn down in a spectacular crash. Mike Varney is the vice-president of NMU, and the tower was rigged to come down… Still, all-in-all, a very good clip.

The Virgin Mary has been busy lately, in the month of August alone, she has appeared in chocolate:

As a chocolatier to the rich and famous, Martucci Angiano has posed with many celebrities. But this month she held in her hand a figure that dazzles her more than any Hollywood star: a 2-inch-tall column of chocolate drippings that workers at her gourmet chocolate company believe bears a striking resemblance to the Virgin Mary. Since the discovery at Bodega Chocolates, Angiano’s employees have spent much of their time hovering over the tiny figure, praying and placing rose petals and candles around it. Since the discovery at Bodega Chocolates, Angiano’s employees have spent much of their time hovering over the tiny figure, praying and placing rose petals and candles around it. "I was raised to believe in the Virgin Mary, but this still gives me the chills," Angiano said as she balanced the figure in her hand. "Everyone should see this."

… on the stomach of a pet turtle named, of course, Mary:

An 81-year-old woman in Chicago said the image of the Virgin Mary appeared to her on the stomach of a pet turtle, according to a Local 6 News report. Shirley McVane said the image mysteriously appeared on a sand turtle given to her by a family member. McVane, said she had had the turtles for about a year and the image is plain to see. "I told some of our friends, you know I’ve got a turtle and I said it has the image of the Virgin Mary on it, and I said it’s getting plainer and plainer," McVane said. "And they said, ‘Yeah sure. Yeah, I know, you’re 81 years old, you think we believe that?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s the truth.’ So, now they all believe it."

… in a piece of wood paneling in the Souplantation restaurant in Grantville, California:

… and finally, on a George Forman Grill drip pan:

John Milanos was cooking a hamburger on his George Foreman Grill last week in Missouri. After he was done, he said the Holy Mother’s face appeared in the leftover grease. The grease was in a small plastic drip pan that catches the grease and other fluids that run off the grill.

Milanos saved the grease in his refrigerator so he could show his friends and the makers of the George Foreman Grill. So far, the company has not responded to Milanos.

She’s probably mad that someone stole her 700 year-old religious icon in Greece, by scaling a sheer cliff face!

Not to be outdone, her son Jesus also made a few appearances, like for example on an oyster shell (selling right now on eBay, of course):

(Pretty neat, though not as cool as the one found last year, also on an oyster shell)

… in an MRI scan of a woman’s spine (probably about to be sold on eBay)

A 34-year-old woman in Pittsburgh, Pa., claims the image of Jesus appeared to her in a recent magnetic resonance imaging scan of her body, according to a Local 6 News report. Rhonda Hodge of Duquesne had several X-rays taken of her spine because of a bulged disc, which has been causing numbness in her neck and left arm. One of the images caught her attention and that of her friends and co-workers. "What went through my mind?" Hodge said. "Just surprise. Oh my God, that’s the crucifixion." Hodge said there is no doubt in her mind that the image looks like the crucifixion.

… in an ultrasound scan of a baby:

After seven months of a difficult pregnancy, Laura Turner looked anxiously at the latest ultrasound picture of her unborn son. She was reassured to see not just the baby sucking his thumb – but what she believes is an image of Jesus watching over him.

… and on a shrimp:

The man wrote that he wanted to share with viewers a smile and a sense of hope. He claimed that when he finished his first shrimp, he disregarded the tail, but then looked at it again and saw the face of Jesus.

The writer said he believed it was a sign, as he’s currently going through a nasty divorce.

And God? He only appeared once in August, on the side of a man’s four-feet long pet alligator’s side:

Nike used the Phantom v5 digital camera, capable of 4,000 still shots per second, a hardware usually reserved for military research, to transform Tiger Wood’s perfect golf swing into this beautiful slow-motion video.

Link – via 30gms

What do you get when you mash up the name of a book with the name of a band?

Here’s a few examples:

The Things They Might Be Giants Carried*
The Who Moved My Cheese*
The Old Man and The Sea and Cake*
Charlie Daniels and the Chocolate Factory*
Catch 182*
Horton Hears a Hoobastank*
Of Mice and Men at Work*
Bare Naked Lunch Ladies*
The Agony and the XTC*

See more – much, much more: Link

PhysicsWorld has the list of the 20 Greatest Equation, listed in order of the number of people who proposed them.

The winner? Maxwell’s equations:

… most votes were given to Euler’s equation and to Maxwell’s equations, which describe how an electromagnetic field varies in space and time. Although Maxwell’s equations are relatively simple, they daringly reorganize our perception of nature, unifying electricity and magnetism and linking geometry, topology and physics. They are essential to understanding the surrounding world. And as the first field equations, they not only showed scientists a new way of approaching physics but also took them on the first step towards a unification of the fundamental forces of nature. A firm called Ocean Optics in Florida even sells T-shirts with Maxwell’s equations on.

Link – via Microsiervos

Feral robotic dog is an open source robotics project to mod toy robot dogs and release them in packs to "sniff out" environmental toxins: Link – via Interactive Architecture

From the website:

Call it Rick James’ final impression. A massive two ton jet-black tombstone, bearing an image of the funk legend clad in tight pants, jacket and clutching a guitar, was erected Sunday at his grave site in Buffalo, NY. The grand unveiling marked the second anniversary of James’ death.

The etching comes from a photo taken for his 1981 hit album "Street Songs," which included "Give It to Me Baby" and "Super Freak." The album sold three million copies and propelled him to superstar status.

Link

Fiddling with modern technology used to mean prank calling the Pope. (Hey, Steve Jobs did it, and now he’s the CEO of Apple!) But these days, it can mean hacking your way into some serious prison time, jeopardizing national security, or worse. So when exactly did this underground art form take a turn for the nefarious? And what’s a cereal-box toy got to do with it all? mental_floss takes a brief look at the godfathers of hacking, including the geniuses who think your antivirus software’s a joke.

In 1983, Mark Abene [wiki] was nothing more than a beanie-wearing mall rat with too much spare time. He didn’t own a computer, so one day he wandered into a Radio Shack, cozied up to one at the store, and tapped out a few commands. And that’s how his hacking habit began – as simple as that. By 1984, with echoes of Orwellian symmetry, he was already using his own PC to sneak into other people’s computer systems. While his parents were busy upgrading to a touch-tone phone, Abene was figuring out how to redirect traffic between switchboards.

Then the world learned what a pimple-faced intruder with simple Radio Shack gear was truly capable of. In 1991, in response to the AT&T telephone system crash that left 60,000 customers without a phone line for nine hours, federal authorities burst into Abene’s bedroom, guns drawn, and confiscated his computer equipment. Although Abene was ultimately acquitted in the scandal, authorities nailed him for related mischief. Today, his phone hacking, or "phreaking," is an infamous milestone in hacker history. At just 19 years old, Abene (a.k.a. Phiber Optik) became the first hacker to serve time in a federal prison.

Living the High-Tech Life

So, why do they do it? What motivates a suburban teen to hack into a university computer to chat with 40-something garbage collectors, or to compromise bank systems and steal credit card numbers? It’s hard to know for sure. But one thing’s certain: Not all hackers [wiki] are created equal. As technology has evolved, its human predators have evolved, multiplied, and diversified with it. Today, there are "phreakers [wiki]," who break into major telephone systems to make free phone calls, as well as "crackers [wiki]," who decode encrypted computer systems (often those belonging to major corporations) with alarming ease. Then there are your "spammers [wiki] " – the ones who remotely tap into "zombie" computers to send marketing emails to millions of unsuspecting dupes – and "phishers [wiki]," who con you with look-alike Web sites to steal your account information. Some of them are simply pranksters, out to do nothing more than upload a few erotic http://www.neatorama.com/images onto a government Web site just to prove they can. Others use their powers for good instead of evil, actually working for security agencies and helping define hacking as a worthwhile, productive endeavor. Yet, every hacker seems to have one underlying urge: to exist on the fringes of society and reveal vulnerabilities to all those coloring inside the lines. And it’s been that way wince the dawn of the computer age.

Super Phreaking

In the 1960s, computers were Pontiac-size behemoths encased in glass or housed in wax-floor laboratories accessible only to keycard-wielding geeks. The term "computer scientist" implied a Princeton degree and a government pedigree. Only accredited professionals were allowed the privilege of programming these powerful computers to track university enrollments, analyze medical anomalies, or monitor traffic conditions. Everyone else – the ostensibly computer-illiterate general populace – could only sit back and absorb the impact from the sidelines.

Cap’n Crunch Whistle, now a collector’s item.

This kind of elitism stuck in John Draper’s craw. A Vietnam veteran who loved to tinker with electronics, Draper [wiki] happened upon an opportunity to take the tech bigwigs down a peg. In 1972, one of Draper’s friends tipped him off to a curious discovery: a toy whistle from a Cap’n Crunch cereal box could be modified to emit a 2,600-hertz tone – the precise frequency needed to authorize Bell System long distance calls, thus making them free. For Draper, this unlocked a goldmine of vulnerabilities in major phone company systems, and to exploit it, he developed what was known as a blue box [wiki]. At the push of a button, Draper’s invention could produce a number of different sound frequencies to manipulate the telephone route and switching systems. Dubbed "Cap’n Crunch," Draper soon found himself the unlikely father of phone phreaking and – arguably – the founder of the modern hack. Interestingly, he shared the news of his invention with Steve Wozniak [wiki], future cofounder of Apple Computer, at a potluck supper for the People’s Computer Club in Menlo Park, Calif., where the two enjoyed a prankster rapport. Wozniak later used the blue box with his pal and future Apple head honcho Steve Jobs [wiki] to make untraceable prank phone calls, including one to the Pope.

Back then, phone phreaking offered hackers a potent allure. It meant unraveling a mystery and sharing the results with friends. It wasn’t as much about the nefarious phone exploitation as it was about understanding the complexity. Draper, for example, would revel in routing calls through multiple countries just to talk to his neighbor. But no matter how harmless some of his work might have been, Draper did damage to the profit margins of some major companies. In 1976, he was arrested on toll fraud charges and spent four months in prison.

Today, the blue box still works on some foreign phone lines and a few toll calls, but Draper says phone companies have become increasingly adept at spotting illegal usage. The 2,600-hertz tone – now almost meaningless in an age of fiber optics – is a kind of phone phreaking mascot. It even inspired the name of the well-known hacker rag, 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. Meanwhile, Draper has become a god to the hacking masses. To an extent, the concepts of beating the telephone conglomerates, scanning for security flaws, and exploiting a hack as far as possible all originate with Draper. He’s promoted the mystique with a hacker portal (www.webcrunchers.com – link not working?) that documents his early days. But now he’s working as a security software developer and running a security site (www.crunchtv.net) that seems to disavow hacker mantras.

The Birth of the Worm.

After Draper, there was a time shift in computing. While phreakers were still blowing whistles into phone receivers, a new type of delinquent emerged: the cracker. By the late 1980s, the home PC had become more prevalent but large corporations still cornered the market on the technology. In response, hackers tried even harder to get in on the fun. Hacker clubs surged in popularity – most notably, Germany’s Chaos Computer Club, a kind of think tank that fought for free access to computer infrastructure, and Masters of Deception [wiki], a New York hackers club fronted by the Radio Shack hack himself, Mark Abene. Code tinkering for sport was becoming nothing short of an epidemic, and in 1986, the U.S. government tried to thwart the problem by passing the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

Ironically, computers were about to fall victims to crime and abuse never before imagined. In 1988, Robert Tappan Morris [wiki], a Cornell University grad student (and son of the chief scientist at the National Computer Security Center), created the first Internet "worm [wiki]," a destructive program that replicates itself and moves through a computer network at breakneck speed. Partly to demonstrate his cracking prowess to classmates and partly to show how an MIT security system was vulnerable to attack, Morris wrote a software program that exploited a glitch in a Unix email program. Allegedly, Morris intended the worm program to infect only the MIT network. But during a 12-hour period, it spread rapidly, infecting thousands of systems and forcing some universities to shut down their computers altogether.

Shocked by how quickly the worm was spreading, Morris helped a friend send out an anonymous message with instructions for system administrators to stop the plaque. But it was too late; the worm had propagated beyond control. In the end, every university affected had to spend thousands of dollars to fix its infected computers. Morris became the first person indicted under the CFAA when the U.S. government fined him $10,000 and sentenced him to probation and community service. However, the source code for the worm remains in wide circulation today. Almost 18 years after the incident, hackers are still using Morris’ worm as a starting point for new viruses.

When Code Goes Criminal

By the 1990s, hacking had clearly transitioned from the child’s play of Cap’n Crunch toys to a brave new world of tech crime. And nothing underscored that shift more than when Kevin Mitnick [wiki] became the first hacker to earn an FBI Most Wanted distinction.

In 1976, while other Americans were celebrating the centennial, Mitnick was sweeping floors at a Radio Shack – not because he loved cleaning, but because he loved using their computers at night to hone his cracking skills. Before long, he’d developed a habit of unraveling computer code in order to see how an operating system worked or (later) how a cell phone connected to a network. Combine that kind of know-how and enthusiasm with a gregarious personality, and you’ve got a problem. Mitnick once called Motorola and charmed them into sharing their source code for free – information he promptly used to break into the computer systems at Motorola, Nokia, Sun Microsystem, and Fujitsu.

Kevin Mitnick’s Wanted Poster: First ever for computer crime.

The New York Times broke the story about Mitnick’s activities that ultimately led to his 1995 arrest and a five-and-a-half-year prison term. However, there remains widespread misunderstanding (and controversy) about the case. Mitnick denies causing any serious damage to the computer systems he hacked, though he admits sneaking into private networks was wrong. Regardless, the government – still uncertain of what hackers were capable of – treated him as a seriously dangerous man. Authorities were bombarded with claims that Mitnick had done everything from wiretapping the FBI to hacking his way ito NORAD. (He denies those allegations, as well.) They assumed he could crack anything, even fearing he could launch nuclear bombs or shut down the Internet by whistling into a phone. In fact, after he was released from prison, Mitnick was barred from owning or using any electronic communications devices. When he played the role of a computer whiz on a 2001 episode of "Alias," the producers would only allow him access to a dummy computer.

Mitnick has influenced an entire generation of hackers with his innovative and stealthy cracking tactics, such as using IRC (Internet Relay Chat) [wiki] technology, an Internet conferencing system. He’s also written treatises stating his belief that the future of hacking lies in "social engineering," in which sensitive computer and coding information is not obtained through people’s computers, but from the persons themselves, via false emails and the like. But Mitnick’s greatest legacy might be in setting a good example. Today, he’s on the straight-and-narrow. The master hacker now spends about 25 percent of his time earning primo consulting fees helping fellow specialists break into "secure" systems in order to show companies how their networks are vulnerable.

Hack to the Future

Perhaps because of the Mitnick case, government authorities in America and other foreign countries hurried to establish Internet crime division. In 1990, the U.S. Secret Service launched Operation SunDevil [wiki], a crackdown on telephone abuse and credit card fraud. Only months into its investigations, a task force raided the homes of several suspected hackers and confiscated their equipment.

Such dramatic courses of action may help protect the public, but combating hacker crime can be problematic because there remains so much uncertainty
about who is hacking and why. The term "hacking" is usually considered negative, but many security experts don’t classify attempting a cyber break-in as illegal – only the resulting crimes. What’s more, there are plenty of hackers devoted to protecting computer systems. A perfect example is the hacker collective "L0pht Heavy Industries [wiki]," which met in Boston throughout the 1990s to discuss security flaws on the Internet. In 1998, the group reported to Congress that it could shut down the entire World Wide Web in 30 minutes. (Note: This is only partially true, because the Internet consists of disparate zones. A hacker could conceivably shut down individual Internet zones, but not all of them at the same time. Nevertheless, it was a major eye-opener for the U.S. government.)

While helpful hacking is possible, there will always be the tech-savvy among us who have bad intentions. New phenomena such as "denial-of-service" [wiki] attacks, which flood a network with traffic to slow down targeted computer systems, and "phishing [wiki]," where hackers con unsuspecting customers into entering personal information on fake Web sites, have replaced phreaking as the big cracking techniques of the day. Also, because wireless hotspots are becoming so common, hackers now are working on programs that can de-encrypt various signals and wreak havoc on corporate networks without leaving a trace.

So, where will it end? No one really knows. But as long as technology continues advancing, you can bet the imagination and skills of hackers will advance right along with it.

__________

Hackers, Crackers, and Phreakers, Oh My!
Other Prominent Hackers

Ian Murphy (a.k.a. Captain Zap):
That "Sneakers" Guy

Ian Murphy is the king of the old-school hackers. One of the first phone phreakers to hit the scene in the mid-1960s, Murphy developed a device that allowed him to listen in on phone conversations – mostly eavesdropping on girls in the neighborhood. But in 1981, he and three accomplices broke into the AT&T phone system and changed its internal clocks so that customers would get midnight discounts in the midday, while late-night callers got stuck with outrageous bills. For the incident, Murphy became the first hacker to be charged with a computer crime. He also provided the inspiration for the 1992 film "Sneakers." Today, he runs his own data security company.

Kevin Poulsen (a.k.a. Dark Dante):
Wired for Success

Armed with self-taught lock-picking skills and a freakish knowledge of high-tech wiring, Kevin Poulsen [wiki] pulled off one of the most famous hacks in history. Poulsen hijacked all phone lines running into Los Angeles radio station KIIS-FM to ensure he would be the 102nd caller in its car giveaway contest. It worked. He won a Porsche 944 S2. Later, he used his talents to help a friend resurrect outdated phone numbers from the Yellow Pages in order to start an escort service. In April 1991, he was arrested on charges of fraud and money laundering, after being featured on an episode of "Unsolved Mysteries." After paying more than $50,000 in restitution and serving 51 months in prison, he revamped his bad-boy image by working as a journalist for tech publications. Today, he is the senior editor of Wired magazine.

Tsutomu Shimomura:
Kevin Mitnick’s Arch-Nemesis

Tsutomu Shimomura [wiki] is the famous anti-hacker who aided in the arrest of cracker kingpin Kevin Mitnick. Shimomura’s motivation for tracking down Mitnick was part work (he was a research scientists at the San Diego Supercomputer Center) and part revenge. In 1994, a hacker stole Shimomura’s personal files and distributed them over an online community for expert computer programmers. The culprit was Mitnick. Using a trace-dialing technique and locating telephone loop signals, Shimomura hacked his way to locating Mitnick for the FBI. In 1996, he co wrote about the experience in a book called Takedown, which was later adapted into a movie.

Jon Johansen (a.k.a. DVD Jon):
A Different Kind of Movie Enthusiast

Jon Johansen [wiki] was only 15 years old when he wrote the code for DeCSS, a program that de-encrypts a DVD so that you can save it – not just watch it – on your computer. The program is a large part of what allows average Joes everywhere to exchange DVD files through networks, which clearly violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. Authorities have arrested DVD Jon twice, but he’s never been convicted. His latest target? Apple Computer and the protected music files on its iTunes Music Store. and while media corporations may hate him, plenty of folks in his Norwegian homeland love him. Supporters marched in the Oslo May Day parade carrying "Free DVD Jon" signs and even made T-shirts advertising his software code.

David Smith: Not-So-Sweet Melissa

If you’d never been personally affected by hacking before 1999, the Melissa virus [wiki] probably changed that. That’s when New Jersey programmer David Smith [wiki] unleashed the first self-replicating worm to attack the Internet since Robert Morris’ 1988 worm. Traveling via Microsoft Outlook email software, Melissa brought computer networks at some 300 corporations to their knees. It’s estimated Smith caused nearly $500 million in damages, but he was sentenced to five years in prison for $80 million in damages. Why? Because that was the maximum allowed under federal law. "The Melissa case," wrote author Richard Power, "had reached the outer limits of what was even conceived of in the federal sentencing guidelines."

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak:
From Phreaking to Freaking Rich

Yup, the two guys that founded Apple Computer in 1976 did a little hacking themselves. After John "Cap’n Crunch" Draper developed the blue box [see main article], Wozniak and Jobs decided to get in on the phone phreaking action. Wozniak, the technical whiz, built the boxes, while Jobs, the marketing genius, sold them for $150 a pop. They split the profits and, along the way, realized they made a pretty good team.

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The article above was written by John Brandon for the May-June 2006 issue of mental_floss magazine and is featured in Neatorama in partnership with the magazine. Be sure to check out mental_floss’ cool website and blog:

Behold, the rarest piece of Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strip ever: the only one ever unreprinted, not even in the Complete Collection of Calvin and Hobbes.

Link

For his graduation project, Siggi Eggertsson, a student at the Iceland Academy of the Arts, created this quilt based on his childhood memories (and his love for basketball!). The quilt is 2 by 2.5 meters and was made from 10,000 pieces of cloths.

Link – via 30gms

This living raft is made of thousands if not millions of fire ants – it is about one foot across in size. Kyle Pias, a BugGuide user who took this photo, wrote:

This raft was seen floating in a flooded portion of the Kissimmee Prarie. Im prettty sure the genus is Solenopsis, but Im not sure which species, and I doubt that its identifiable from this picture. It was taken from about 5 feet above the subject from a swamp buggy, and there was about 3 feet of water on the ground, so there was no getting a closer shot.

Can you imagine what would happen if something walked into one of these rafts? I cant even think about what to do if that happened, I doubt even dunking underwater would accomplish anything…

Eesh, scary little buggers

Link – via digg

More than four decades after Star Trek was cancelled after its third season, James Cawley and fans resurrect the series – by acting as Kirk, Spock, and McCoy and financing the cost of production themselves.

Q. What is the premise of the new show?
A. The new show will be the continuing voyages of Captain Kirk and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise, NCC-1701 as seen in the 1966-69 television series, Star Trek. The series was cancelled after its third season. We are restarting the series as if it were in its fourth year.

Link

What’s more awesome than rock stacking? Rock stacking in reverse! Danny Brown and Aaron Knapp produced this short video that played in reverse and showed the magical "reverse destruction" of balanced rock sculptures.

The coolest video you’ll see today: Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]- Thanks Tim!

Previously on Neatorama: Jim Needham’s Balancing Rocks, See also: Team Sandtastic’s Professional Rock Stacking & Balancing

Created by Antoine+Manuel, see more of their work: Link

Related: Animals on the London Underground.

Geography teacher Eric Hamlin, was placed on leave by the principal Carmody Middle School in Colorado for refusing to take down several flags from other countries in his classroom:

Eric Hamlin said the flags were part of a world geography lesson plan at Carmody Middle School and refused to take them down. The school’s principal escorted Hamlin out of class Wednesday morning after he refused to remove the flags of China and Mexico.

The school district placed him on administrative leave for insubordination, citing a Colorado law that makes it illegal to display foreign flags permanently in schools.

Link – via Think Progress

Located just north of the equator is Nukuoro Atoll, one of 607 islands that make up the Federated States of Micronesia, a UN Trust Territory under US administration.

About 900 people live on Nukuoro, whose lagoon is 6 kilometers (about 3.7 miles) in diameter. Fishing, animal husbandry, and agriculture (taro and copra) are the main occupations. Nukuoro is remote. It has no airstrip, and a passenger boat calls irregularly only once a month. The tiny population speaks its own unique language.

Link

Ishkur has a nice collection of irreverent posters, like this one above: Link

Related: Demotivation posters

From the website:

Once imprisoned and now blacklisted by the government, the Moustache Brothers’ comedy troupe continues to push the country’s political envelope.

Working in the gravel yard was never supposed to be a part of life for Burma’s notorious Moustache Brothers comedy troupe. But on January 7, 1996, two of its members—U Par Par Lay and Lu Zaw—were arrested in Mandalay, a day after delivering a series of politically sensitive jokes during an Independence Day performance at Aung San Suu Kyi’s house in Rangoon.

They were initially sentenced to seven years in prison, with the first stop being the distant Kyein Kran Ka Hard Labor Camp in northern Burma’s Kachin State. Cut off from their family back home, the two cousins began their five-and-a-half arduous years in Burma’s penal system before being released in July 2001.

Imagine that – going to prison for a comedy routine! Link – via Bunty

From the website:

Ever wonder why golf is growing in popularity and why people who don’t even play go to tournaments or watch it on TV?

Here’s why – in pictures, no less!: Link

Einstein said that God does not play dice with the universe – but if he does, then he’d probably use the tiny die made by Iriso Seimetsu Co. of Japan:

Billed as the smallest dice in the world, each one measures 0.3 x 0.3 x 0.3 mm (for perspective, see the photo above showing one of the die next to a 0.5-mm diameter mechanical pencil lead). The tiny dice are painstakingly crafted one by one from BsBm (brass) in a 9 hour long fabrication process that relies on the latest in micromachining technology. Each one weighs 0.00016 grams and the pips measure 0.05 mm in diameter.

Link

The introduction goes:

"Year 2006. As the bubble era ended, the Japanese advertising industry entered an endless period of war, constant competition and strife for survival. The goal of each company, as absolute as it is focused – to defeat enemies and capture the business of clients. we call this "The Creative Bushido"

A fantastic Flash movie (in Japanese, with English subtitles) on how an ad agency would be like in feudal Japan (complete with ninjas!) Very well done, by Yumiko Advertising, Inc. Link [Flash] via Ursi’s Blog

With bone crunching goodness: Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via Fazed.

What to do with that old wine bottle? Georg Riedel found the perfect answer: reuse it as an egg holder!

Link

Related: How to work out a price of a wine bottle by measuring its dimple depth.