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.
Japanese Death Poems
The haiku
The haiku describes a single state or event.
The time of the haiku is the present.
The haiku refers to images connected to one of the four seasons,Spring snow
On the ground
around the capital,
spring snow melts easily.An entrance, an exit
Empty-handed I entered the world
Barefoot I leave it
My coming, my going
Two simple happenings
That got entangledPoppies
I write, erase, rewrite,
erase again, and then
a poppy blooms.Coolness will rise
When you have vanquished your selfhood, coolness will rise even from the fire.
The way of things
It is when one forces principles on the world that one interferes with its natural workings.
Traces
If I leave
no trace behind
in this fleeting world
what then could you
reproach?Truth
The truth is never taken
from another
One carries it always
by oneself
Katsu!Autumn breezes blow
One day you are born
you die the next –
today,
at twilight,
autumn breezes blow.