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Links for 2014-10-14

  • Dublin’s Best-Kept Secret: Blas Cafe

    looks great, around the corner from Cineworld on King’s Inn St, D1

    (tags: dublin cafes food blas-cafe eating northside)

  • “Meta-Perceptual Helmets For The Dead Zoo”

    with Neil McKenzie, Nov 9-16 2014, in the National History Museum in Dublin: ‘These six helmets/viewing devices start off by exploring physical conditions of viewing: if we have two eyes, they why is our vision so limited? Why do we have so little perception of depth? Why don’t our two eyes offer us two different, complementary views of the world around us? Why can’t they extend from our body so we can see over or around things? Why don’t they allow us to look behind and in front at the same time, or sideways in both directions? Why can’t our two eyes simultaneously focus on two different tasks? Looking through Michael Land’s defining work Animal Eyes, we see that nature has indeed explored all of these possibilities: a Hammerhead Shark has hyper-stereo vision; a horse sees 350° around itself; a chameleon has separately rotatable eyes… The series of Meta-Perceptual Helmets do indeed explore these zoological typologies: proposing to humans the hyper-stereo vision of the hammerhead shark; or the wide peripheral vision of the horse; or the backward/forward vision of the chameleon… but they also take us into the unnatural world of mythology and literature: the Cheshire Cat Helmet is so called because of the strange lingering effect of dominating visual information such as a smile or the eyes; the Cyclops allows one large central eye to take in the world around while a second tiny hidden eye focuses on a close up task (why has the creature never evolved that can focus on denitting without constantly having to glance around?).’ (via Emma)

    (tags: perception helmets dublin ireland museums dead-zoo sharks eyes vision art)

  • Grade inflation figures from Irish universities

    The figures show that, between 2004 and 2013, an average of 71.7 per cent of students at TCD graduated with either a 1st or a 2.1. DCU and UCC had the next highest rate of such awards (64.3 per cent and 64.2 per cent respectively), followed by UCD (55.8 per cent), NUI Galway (54.7 per cent), Maynooth University (53.7 per cent) and University of Limerick (50.2 per cent).

    (tags: tcd grades grade-inflation dcu ucc ucd ireland studies academia third-level)

  • webrtcH4cKS: ~ coTURN: the open-source multi-tenant TURN/STUN server you were looking for

    Last year we interviewed Oleg Moskalenko and presented the rfc5766-turn-server project, which is a free open source and extremely popular implementation of TURN and STURN server. A few months later we even discovered Amazon is using this project to power its Mayday service. Since then, a number of features beyond the original RFC 5766 have been defined at the IETF and a new open-source project was born: the coTURN project.

    (tags: webrtc turn sturn rfc-5766 push nat stun firewalls voip servers internet)

  • Google Online Security Blog: This POODLE bites: exploiting the SSL 3.0 fallback

    Today we are publishing details of a vulnerability in the design of SSL version 3.0. This vulnerability allows the plaintext of secure connections to be calculated by a network attacker.
    ouch.

    (tags: ssl3 ssl tls security exploits google crypto)