crime
Traced in the summer skies
Yes, it was the hour when, a long time ago, I was perfectly content. What awaited me back then was always a night of easy, dreamless sleep. And yet something had changed, since it was back to my cell that I went to wait for the next day…as if familiar paths traced in summer skies could lead as easily to prison as to the sleep of the innocent.
Putting the streets to use
Tad Friend writes, if you build “nine hundred miles of sinuous highway and twenty-one thousand miles of tangled surface streets” in one city alone, then you’re going to find at least a few people who want to put those streets to use. This suggests that every city blooms with the kinds of crime most appropriate to its form.
Every heist is a counterdesign
Heists obsess people because of what they reveal about architecture’s peculiar power: the design of new ways of moving through the world. Every heist is thus just a counterdesign—a response to the original architect.
To commune with the space
...having realized long ago that the best way to commune with an architectural space was by breaking into it.
Bandits
A FilmA Burglar's Guide to the City
A Book by Geoff ManaughAuthorisation vs. Consent
An Article by Terence EdenI recently read this interesting, and distressing, story of a man who was drugged and robbed. A form of crime which has been going on for centuries. But the 21st Century twist is that the thieves forced him to transfer large sums of money via his phone's banking apps.
While under the influence, the victim used his usernames, passwords, PINs, and biometrics to send money to the criminal's accounts.
Is there a "technological" way to stop this? His banks initially refused to refund the stolen money. Only once the press stepped in did they relent. One bank, Revolut, said:
This was an unusual case where the payments were authorised by the customer but, as is now clear, without his consent.
Picking locks with audio technology
An ArticleThe series of audible, metallic clicks made as a key penetrates a lock can now be deciphered by signal processing software to reveal the precise shape of the sequence of ridges on the key's shaft. Knowing this, a working copy of it can then be 3D printed.
A lightbulb is not an idea
With conventional placeholders, such as words, we can describe patterns for a large number of situations. On the other hand it is easy to fool yourself (and others) with words, since you can avoid to be specific. Any business meeting can confirm this.
When you draw something you are forced to be specific — and honest.
Our illustration of an “idea” from above is unconventional in the sense that it conveys specific original thoughts of what an idea is. It adds value to the words.
And that is the catch: The drawing must be unconventional to support the conventional words. We have to make sure not to use “words in disguise”. Take a common illustration for “idea” for example, which haunts flip charts all over the world: the lightbulb.
The lightbulb image works on a purely symbolic level, it only replaces the word “idea”. This image of a household item contains no original thought about what an idea is. While symbols like these work well as international replacements for words or icons to indicate a light switch for instance, they convey no nutritional value as illustrations — they are empty.