Lepht Anonym and the 'Grinders'. crazy stuff -- low-end DIY cybernetic augmentation. 'The implants sit in various places under my skin: middle fingertips of my left hand, back of the right hand, right forearm — tiny magnets, five or six millimeters across, coated in gold and then in silicon to isolate the delicate metal from the destructive environment of your body. They’re something of an investment at about thirty euros apiece, and hard to get hold of, but worth pursuing. When implanted, they become technological sensory organs. There’s an entire world of electromagnetic radiation out there, invisible to most. Our cities are saturated with it. A radio, for instance, gives off a field that’s bigger than the device itself. So do power supplies and wires in the walls. The implants pick up on the fields, and because they’re magnets, they fizz with gentle electricity, telling you this hard drive is currently active, that one is turned off, there’s the main line in the wall. Holding a mobile phone, you can feel the signals it sends and receives. You know it’s ringing before it starts to play any sounds, and when you answer it, you stick the touchscreen stylus to the back of your hand to hold it, then to your finger to type.'

"Everything has an embedded processor and computer in it," he said. "Every time you hide behind [security by] obscurity, it is going to fail."

Brad Smith, a researcher and Black Hat conference staffer who also is a registered nurse, said the medical field largely looks the other way when it comes to securing patient devices.

"I lecture at all the medical conferences," he said during the press conference. "They just hide it. Pay attention to what [Radcliffe] is saying. His life is in this pump." (via Risks Digest)

holy shit. This is absolutely amazing, a first-person account of auto-appendectomy (via infovore)

Reddit thread from answers from a "doctor" at a dodgy online prescription-drugs store, supposedly not a spamvertized one though

'Ohm notes, this illustrates a central reality of data collection: "data can either be useful or perfectly anonymous but never both."'