House of Cards

House of Cards

Image by Caro's Lines



See notes for meaning of cards. Photo taken for this week's TWTME's Scavenger Hunt

I thought it would be interesting to create a tarot reading based on the structure of a house. Most of these (Osho Zen Tarot) are not cards I know well but I rather like the way they came out here.

I also included one card from the Oracle of The Dreamtime - the round card - to make a window.

Star Trek Business Cards

Image by The Rocketeer
I bought a set of business cards for the characters of Star Trek (The Original Series) in the 1980's at a Sci-Fi Convention. UnfortunatelyI don't know who the original manufacturer is or how to get more. I found them today whilst digging for some old photos. Best viewed in the Large Version.

Credit Cards ...item 2.. Big hack attack on Israel inevitable, say experts (01/09/2012 12:04) ...

Image by marsmet543
Israel and Palestinian hackers have been engaged in a cyber cold war for more than a decade. Israeli teenagers blocked websites belonging to the Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah, provoking Palestinians and other Arabs to declare an e-Jihad.

Those attacks consisted mainly of denial of service attacks and defacing websites, although embarrassingly for Israel these included over the years high-profile sites like those of the Knesset and Foreign Ministry.

During Operation Cast lead in 2009, Hamas was probably responsible for an attack on Israel’s Amos 3 spy satellite. More recently, Israeli hackers took over an official Hamas website and uploaded Israel’s national anthem onto it.
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.......***** All images are copyrighted by their respective authors ......
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.....item 1).... CNET ... News ... Cutting Edge ... Snapkeys' quest to assassinate QWERTY
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img code photo ... Israel's Snapkeys

i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2012/01/12/snapkeys_610x351.PNG

Memorize this input method and your keyboard could disappear forever.
(Credit: Screenshot by Eric Mack/CNET)

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by Eric Mack January 12, 2012 6:47 PM PST

news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57358223-76/snapkeys-quest-to-...

LAS VEGAS--Israel's Snapkeys doesn't want to just be an alternative to the traditional QWERTY keyboard. It wants to kill it off for good.

The company's Ryan Ghassabian taps out sentences on his tablet with all the speed and precision of a phonetic hitman as he demos Snapkeys for me at a small booth in the far back side of the Las Vegas Convention Center here at CES.

Snapkeys is an invisible keyboard that uses 2i technology and predictive typing to eliminate the need to actually look where you're typing on touch-screen devices. For most of you, that sentence will be total nonsense, like it was to me when I first heard about Snapkeys, so here's how it actually works.

The idea is to take all the characters on a normal keyboard and reduce them to only four "buttons"--those that stand on one point (F, I, T, etc.); those that stand on two (M, N, X...); those that stand on a wide base (Z, U, L...); and characters with a closed circle (@, P, O...). Snapkeys introduces four new icons for each of these new typing areas, effectively reducing the full QWERTY board down to only this:
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img code photo .... cute, emoticon-esque figures

i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2012/01/12/snap.PNG

These cute, emoticon-esque figures are hoping to kill QWERTY.
(Credit: Screenshot by Eric Mack/CNET)

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Notice that there are two extra narrow spaces on the sides--the one on the right is primarily the new spacebar, and the left is backspace. Type the area that matches the shape of the letter you want and Snapkeys uses predictive typing to figure out exactly which character you're after. The company swears it gets it right 99 percent of the time.

Once you've got a handle on this much reduced interface, you can make the entire keyboard invisible.
According to the Ghassabian, this is what Snapkeys is all about--reclaiming the screen space currently given over to a keyboard. Imagine typing a comment about a show you're watching on your iPad to a friend without have to squish or cover the video with a typepad.

"We believe that in three years' time we will be the standard for text input for all touch-screen devices," Ghassabian says.

But Snapkeys isn't interested in stopping at the touch screen. Ghassabian says they're looking at ways of embedding Snapkeys in a car's steering wheel, for example--too soon to say if that would worsen or improve our distracted driving epidemic, but a cool notion nonetheless.

Snapkeys isn't out just yet, and Ghassabian says it won't be available as an app. The company is currently negotiating with wireless carriers around the world to include it as an input method on some upcoming phones and devices.
Originally posted at CES 2012: Software and Apps

About Eric Mack

Crave freelancer Eric Mack is a writer and radio producer based high in the Rocky Mountains in a "one bar" service area (for both drinks and 3G). He's published e-books on Android and Alaska, and is a contributing editor for Crowdsourcing.org and A New Domain. He also contributes to NPR, Gizmag, and Edmunds Inside Line. Eric is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CBS Interactive. E-mail Eric.
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.....item 2).... THE JERUSALEM POST ... www.jpost.com ... Big hack attack on Israel inevitable, say experts

By DAVID ROSENBERG / THE MEDIA LINE ...
01/09/2012 12:04 ... Cyber warriors are gaining the knowledge to do more than virtual vandalism; the worst is yet to come say experts.
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img code photo ....

www.jpost.com/HttpHandlers/ShowImage.ashx?ID=181432

By Thinkstock / Imagebank

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www.jpost.com/NationalNews/Article.aspx?id=252807

The hacker attack that exposed the credit card numbers and other personal information of thousands of Israelis last week shows every sign of being an unsophisticated break-in that exploited the weaknesses of a poorly secured website. But experts warn that for Israel, like other highly networked economies, the worst is yet to come.

Lone-wolf hackers have gradually gained the knowledge and experience once the preserve of intelligence agencies and armies. Instead of defacing websites or shutting them down by flooding them with e-mails, growing numbers of hackers have the ability to disrupt electricity, water, medical and other critical services, they say.

RELATED:
Ayalon: Cyberspace attacks should be treated as terrorism
Tiberias man arrested for using hacked cards

“To shut down a major network, even for a government, is considered to be difficult, and demands excellent experience and knowledge, but there are a few tens of thousands of people around the world who could do it,” Ron Porat, who co-founded Hacktics, an Israeli maker of anti-hacking technology, told The Media Line. “Some of them have the motivation also.”

A group of Saudi hackers dubbed Group-XP led by someone who goes by the web name OxOmar claimed last week to have obtained the personal information some 400,000 Israelis through credit card data. The Bank of Israel said the numbers were in fact much smaller, probably about 15,000 names, and that the credit card issuers had blocked the exposed accounts.

Nevertheless, the attack drew a sharp response from Israel as well as its arch-nemesis, the Palestinian militant movement Hamas. Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon termed the cyber-attack “a breach of sovereignty comparable to a terrorist operation” and hinted at unspecified “retaliatory action.”

Hamas, which is not believed to have had anything to do with this attack, termed it “a new form of resistance.” Spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri was quoted by Reuters urging others to ignore Ayalon’s threat and “use all means available in the virtual space to confront Israeli crimes.”

Much attention has been focused on governments engaging in cyber-warfare, such as the Stuxnet worm that allegedly wreaked havoc on Iran’s nuclear program or when a Chinese state-controlled telecommunications company hijacked a big chunk of the world’s Internet traffic, including data from the US military, for 18 minutes in April 2010.

But hackers like OxOmar are a growing threat as well.

Israel and Palestinian hackers have been engaged in a cyber cold war for more than a decade. Israeli teenagers blocked websites belonging to the Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah, provoking Palestinians and other Arabs to declare an e-Jihad. Those attacks consisted mainly of denial of service attacks and defacing websites, although embarrassingly for Israel these included over the years high-profile sites like those of the Knesset and Foreign Ministry. During Operation Cast lead in 2009, Hamas was probably responsible for an attack on Israel’s Amos 3 spy satellite. More recently, Israeli hackers took over an official Hamas website and uploaded Israel’s national anthem onto it.

Other cyber wars have erupted across the Middle East. Anonymous, a loose collection of so-called “hacktivists,” launched denial of service attacks against government websites in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere during the Arab Spring uprisings. In November, Anonymous turned its sites on the Muslim Brotherhood. “The Muslim Brotherhood has become a threat to the revolution Egyptians had fought for, some with their lives,” it declared in a video.

While Israeli credit card companies were handling the Saudi break-in, Turkish hackers were threatening to unleash a wave of attacks against French websites after lawmakers in Paris approved legislation that would ban the denial of the Armenian genocide.

They have already assaulted French websites, including that of Valerie Boyer, the French politician who introduced the law that could punish genocide deniers with jail time.

But that is small change compared to what hacker are potential capable of doing, say experts. Indeed, hackers now take the trouble to exploit human weaknesses to enter networks, for instance, applying for a job and using the interview to gain access to a company’s headquarters and physical access to a computer.

“These kind of things were once done by the CIA, but now they are being done by hackers. It’s becoming very, very hard to defend any organization including the army and intelligence units,” said Porat. “In the past most hackers used a single vector or two to hack into system. They use multi-vector attacks now.”

Danny Dolev, a leading computer scientist and engineer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said that Israel was as well protected as any heavily networked economy even if it remains vulnerable. Policy makers and defense officials have over the past year come to recognize the extent of the threat.


In August, he noted, the government created a National Cyber Directorate to coordinate activities of the agencies that deal with the issue and to secure infrastructure against cyber attacks. The exposure of credit card details will awaken the public’s attention, which is as critical as technology defenses.

“I’m glad in a certain way it happened because it will awaken awareness,” Dolev told The Media Line. “Awareness means being careful when you plug in a disk on key, being careful when you change a password and being careful when you put your information on a social network.”

Dolev expressed doubt that a lone hacker is capable of bringing down an entire economy, but he said they are capable of doing serious damage. “Let’s assume a single hacker enters the blood database and changes few of the blood types of the database,” he said. “This would be horrendous. It would not bring down a country but it could do a lot of harm. There is damage that would be significant.”
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how to make art

Image by istolethetv
www.eabfair.com/

How To Make Katie Smile : )

Image by Lewesrat
This is the back side of this card. I scanned it so it would show up better, because I think it's really funny. It's nice to have friends with a great sense of humor. :-)

You might need to view it large. Trust me - it's worth the effort. :D