A Feast of Pixels and Hackers

Here are two more things that happened last week that I would have posted about had I not been distracted:

First there are the 16 winners of the digital art contest sponsored by The Electronic Entertainment Expo, The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, and The Graphics Arts Council of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. These pieces were displayed at E3 last weekend.

Second, are you a fan of George R. R. Martin’s: "A Song of Ice and Fire" series? Have you been dying for "A Feast of Crows" to come out? Well you can’t be that big a fan if you hadn’t heard THIS yet. Just make sure you read the footnote link.

If you aren’t a fan of the series that can only mean you haven’t read any of the books. I can't recommend it highly enough. I suggest you run out right this instant and buy the first book in the series, “A Game of Thrones” before your friends lose any more respect for you. Seriously… Go… NOW!

Why are you still here? Oh already a fan of the series and have read the first book half a dozen times. Well then go read this BusinessWeek story: Hacker Hunters while we wait for everybody else to get back from the bookstore. It’s about how the Secret Service broke up a gang of cyber-criminals. Normally law enforcement officials don’t want to reveler details of their operations but this artical gives us a rare glimpse into the world of cyber cops and robbers. I found it a pretty cool read. If you are really into that sort of thing I recommend reading The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier by Bruce Sterling. The link there is to the Literary Freeware version that Mr. Sterling put up. It is a history of the first big crackdown on hackers in 1990. I havn't actually read all of it myself. I stumbled across it last year, read a few chapters and then saved the link on my favorites bar where it is still waiting for me to get back to it.