Giorgio De Chirico Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works | The Art Story. "To become truly immortal a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken it will enter the regions of childhood vision and dream. " Synopsis Giorgio de Chirico was a pioneer in the revival of Classicism that flourished into a Europe-wide phenomenon in the 1920s. His own interest was likely encouraged by his childhood experiences of being raised in Greece by Italian parents. And, while living in Paris in the 1910s, his homesickness may have led to the mysterious, classically-inspired pictures of empty town squares for which he is best known.
It was work in this style that encouraged him to form the short-lived movement, along with the painter Carlo Carrà. His work in this mode attracted considerable notice, particularly in France, where the Surrealists championed him as a precursor. Key Ideas De Chirico is most famous for the eerie mood and strange artificiality of the cityscapes he painted in the 1910s. Biography. Drones: an eye in the sky | Art and design. When photographer Tomas van Houtryve shows people his picture of a yoga class mid-pose in a San Francisco public park, half see people practising yoga, the other half see people praying. It is this reaction to what drones capture that worries him. "Imagine if all we knew about the way people in Pakistan lead their lives were derived from images of the tops of their heads, taken from 15,000ft (4,500 metres) in the air.
It's bound to be full of uncertainty. Is this the best way to fight a war? " The fact that there were few published photographs of US drone activity had been bothering Van Houtryve. "When I first started looking, they were expensive and difficult to get hold of but they started popping up on Amazon for a more reasonable price," he says. Completing the project was an unnerving experience. The project is called Blue Sky Days, inspired by the testimony of 13-year-old Zubair Rehman at a briefing at Capitol Hill last year.
Child watch: The apps that let parents 'spy' on their kids. Think your kid's being bullied? Or sending sexts? Or dealing drugs? There's an app for that. In the United States, nearly 80% of teenagers own mobile phones. About half of those are smartphones - with access to the internet, games, cameras and social media. That worries many parents. TeenSafe can work as a personal CIA spy for parents. The company urges parents to tell their children they are being monitored, but the app can work covertly and show what kids are posting on social media as well as deleted texts and messages sent via popular apps such as Kik, WhatsApp and Snapchat. "It's absolutely legal for a parent to do this discreetly," says TeenSafe's chief executive Rawdon Messenger. "The real question is, 'Is it justified? ' Boundary alerts Mr Messenger says he believes about half the families who use TeenSafe use it to spy on their kids.
TeenSafe operates in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and is hoping to expand to the UK soon. Stalker apps? 'Blind trust' Extremist Ideas. Tags: counterterrorism | education | law The Counterterrorism and Security Bill 2014-15 has all but completed its swift passage into law. Sponsored by Theresa May and Lord Bates of the Home Office, it promises to expand the state’s paranoid reach in predictable ways: new powers to seize passports and bar UK citizens from returning home; a requirement that internet service providers collect data on users; a provision that airlines and rail and shipping companies may have to seek permission from the Home Office to carry certain groups of people.
More novel is the bill’s requirement that schools and universities conduct surveillance on their students. Section 25.1 states that education institutions are among the ‘specified authorities’ – along with councils, prisons, hospitals and police chiefs – that must ‘have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’. The Home Office has published guidance notes on how this duty is to be fulfilled.
Power, Privacy, and the Internet | NYRgallery. On October 30–31, 2013, The New York Review of Books held a conference, “Power, Privacy, and the Internet,” at Scandinavia House in New York City, with generous support from The Fritt Ord Foundation of Oslo, PEN America, Sarah and Landon Rowland, The Europaeum of Oxford, The Lead Bank of Kansas City, and the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. Simon Head, director of programs for The New York Review of Books Foundation, addressed the theme of the conference: The Internet is a transformative technology of our times and it is changing our lives as perhaps nothing else has done since the coming of the telephone, the telegraph, and the mass production automobile a century and more ago.
We are pleased to present the following recordings from the event. Listeners can also stream or download the audio from the Review’s account on Soundcloud. Panel I: Governments, Corporations and Hackers: The Internet and Threats to the Privacy and Dignity of the Citizen. Privacy Fears Grow as Cities Increase Surveillance. Jim Wilson/The New York Times Federal grants of $7 million, initially intended to help thwart terror attacks at the port in Oakland, Calif., are instead going to a police initiative that will collect and analyze reams of surveillance data.
The new system, scheduled to begin next summer, is the latest example of how cities are compiling and processing large amounts of information, known as big data, for routine law enforcement. And the system underscores how technology has enabled the tracking of people in many aspects of life. The police can monitor a fire hose of social media posts to look for evidence of criminal activities; transportation agencies can track commuters’ toll payments when drivers use an electronic pass; and the National Security Agency, as news reports this summer revealed, scooped up telephone records of millions of cellphone customers in the United States. For law enforcement, data mining is a big step toward more complete intelligence gathering. `Security' Coca-Cola Security Camera Ad Encourages Viewers To 'Look At The World A Little Differently' Security cameras capture more than just burglaries, brawls and automobile accidents.
They also capture sweet, everyday moments of people just being, well, people. It's those feel good moments Coca-Cola highlights in a new video advertisement that urges viewers to "look at the world a little differently. " Set to the song "Give A Little Bit," the clip features security camera footage from around the world showing people kissing, dancing, helping the homeless, saving others and, yes, sharing a Coke. A representative from Coca-Cola Latin America explained the spot is meant to elicit those warm, fuzzy feelings.
“We want to remind people that acts of kindness and bravery are taking place around them all the time,” Guido Rosales told Media Bistro's Agency Spy. And though some viral ads get a bit corny, CBS' William Goodman admits the clip was a "total feel-good video that actually had this blogger smiling. " What do you think of the clip? MI5's Andrew Parker lives in a different world to the rest of us | Clive Stafford Smith. It has often been said that MI5 operates in a shady, parallel world. Unfortunately, the recent public comments of Sir Andrew Parker, the new head of MI5, makes it all too clear that he does not live in the same world as the rest of us. Thirty years in MI5 have apparently left him a little short on perspective. If one is to believe Parker (as interpreted by the Daily Mail), the Guardian's recent revelations about the security services have "handed a gift to terrorists". Parker claims his is "a highly accountable service".
MI5 is "overseen independently by parliament through the ISC [intelligence and security committee], inspected by two independent commissioners (usually senior judges), held to account on any complaints from the public by a senior and independent tribunal of judges and lawyers … Rightly, these arrangements are tough and testing," he concludes. However, the Guardian has cast light on some worryingly broad snooping by his service. Perhaps all is well in Parker's happy land.
Surveillance secrecy: the legacy of GCHQ's years under cover | Analysis | UK news. GCHQ's headquarters on the outskirts of Cheltenham. Photograph: Barry Batchelor/PA The extent to which GCHQ has tried to guard its secrets for decades was wonderfully illustrated nearly 30 years ago when a former codebreaker wrote about his work during the second world war.
Sir Peter Marychurch, then director of the government's eavesdropping centre, chastised Gordon Welchman, one of the brilliant group of intelligence officers at Bletchley Park, GCHQ's wartime predecessor, for referring to codebreaking successes. Marychurch's intervention provoked a scathing attack from Sir Stuart Milner-Barry, one of Welchman's colleagues. "To suppose that the battles which we had to wage before the birth of the first electronic computer (which must seem to present-day cryptanalysts rather like fighting with bows and arrows) could be relevant to security now is just not credible," he said. GCHQ's cover was first blown in 1976 by an article, The Eavesdroppers, published by the London magazine, Time Out. Why Is the UK Border Agency Racially Profiling People On the Tube? UK Border Agency officers at Kensal Green station.
(Photo via) If you were anywhere near Kensal Green tube station earlier this week, you might have noticed an unusual proliferation of burly cop types doing all the things burly cops usually do. For example, intimidating civilians, grabbing anybody with brown skin and prodding them with their notepads, forbidding people from taking photos of them, talking down to everyone they encountered – you know, all the standard stuff. Even if you missed that party you might be interested to know that these four guys weren't cops at all, they were officials from the much-maligned UK Border Agency, now operating under the Theresa May-approved auspices of the Home Office. It turns out they were there trying to catch illegal immigrants – or, as the widely mocked, disparaged and despised Home Office Twitter account has sought to rebrand them, "#immigrationoffenders".
"My claimant doesn't have an English accent," Naftalin says. The best type of control is the type we enjoy. Differing Views on Privacy Shape Europe’s Response to U.S. Surveillance Program. It is too early to say what impact the disclosure of widespread Internet spying in the United States government’s Prism program will have on the European public. Not everyone here is as attuned to privacy issues as Mr. Storbeck. But official European reaction, at least, has been loud and angry. The response in Europe is partly based on a political reaction to what is perceived as American superpower arrogance and the secrecy surrounding Prism and its supposed safeguards.
The European response is not uniform, but it is based on tradition, differing philosophies of the law and history, especially in countries that lived under dictatorships, whether fascist or Communist, and where governments remain mistrusted. J. Germany is the country most aggressive in protecting individual privacy. But the Sept. 11 attacks and other acts of terrorism have had an impact in Germany, too. In Britain, where the common law is based on property rights, privacy is “an existential concept,” Mr. So Are We Living in 1984? Since last week’s revelations of the scope of the United States’ domestic surveillance operations, George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” which was published sixty-four years ago this past Saturday, has enjoyed a massive spike in sales.
The book has been invoked by voices as disparate as Nicholas Kristof and Glenn Beck. Even Edward Snowden, the twenty-nine-year-old former intelligence contractor turned leaker, sounded, in the Guardian interview in which he came forward, like he’d been guided by Orwell’s pen. But what will all the new readers and rereaders of Orwell’s classic find when their copy arrives? Is Obama Big Brother, at once omnipresent and opaque? And are we doomed to either submit to the safety of unthinking orthodoxy or endure re-education and face what horrors lie within the dreaded Room 101?
Are we living in “Nineteen Eighty-Four”? “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is not simply a cold counterfactual. “And after that, you don’t feel the same toward the other person any longer.” Wearable Video Cameras, for Police Officers. Eye Am a Camera: Surveillance and Sousveillance in the Glassage. The following is a guest post by Professor Steve Mann. Read Mann’s complete bio at the end of this article for more information.
Digital eye glasses like Google’s Project Glass, and my earlier Digital Eye Glass, will transform society because they introduce a two-sided surveillance and sousveillance. Not only will authorities and shops be watching us and recording our comings and goings (surveillance as we know it today), but we will also be watching and recording them (sousveillance) through small wearable computers like Digital Eye Glass. This affects secrecy, not just privacy. As one of the early inventors and developers of wearable computing and reality augmenting and mediating, I was asked by TIME Tech to write about the history and future predictions of these technologies.
Through the Glass Society has entered the era of augmented and augmediated reality. Steve Mann Cell phone view, augmediated reality on iPhone Steve Mann : Antonia Zugaldia / Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons.