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  • Designer Makes iPad Cases from Bernie Madoff’s Clothing [PHOTOS]



    We’ve seen a number of iPad cases made from recycled materials, but this just tops the charts: iPad cases made from Bernie Madoff’s salvaged clothing.

    Madoff is an incarcerated American felon, former stockbroker, investment advisor, non-executive chairman of the NASDAQ stock market, and the admitted operator of what has been described as the largest Ponzi scheme in history.

    After Madoff’s arrest, the U.S. Marshals Service seized and auctioned thousands of items from his New York homes, including his clothing, which designer label Frederick James is now fashioning into iPad cases, via its collection called “The Bernie Madoff.”

    The cases, each being one-of-a-kind, range from $250 to $500. Founder John Vaccaro warns purchasers that the cases are strictly for fashion use and should not be trusted to keep an iPad safe in the case of a drop. Regardless, these cases are selling out as soon as they are posted to the company’s website, by word of mouth alone.

    Take a look at a sampling of the cases Vaccaro has created so far in the gallery below. Would you buy a $500 case made from Madoff’s trousers? Let us know in the comments.

    Ralph Lauren Polo Chino Blue Pants - $350

    Murphy & Nye Sailmakers Pants Orange - $500

    Murphy & Nye Sailmakers Pants Green - $500

    J. Crew Khaki Pants - $250

    Mason's Off-White Khaki Pants - $350

    Banana Republic Gavin Khaki Pants - $250

    Banana Republic Gavin Khaki Pants - $250

    More About: Bernie Madoff, fashion, ipad, iPad Cases

    For more Tech & Gadgets coverage:

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We’ve seen a number of iPad cases made from recycled materials, but this just tops the charts: iPad cases made from Bernie Madoff’s salvaged clothing. Madoff is an incarcerated American felon, former stockbroker, investment advisor, non-executiv...



We’ve seen a number of iPad cases made from recycled materials, but this just tops the charts: iPad cases made from Bernie Madoff’s salvaged clothing.

Madoff is an incarcerated American felon, former stockbroker, investment advisor, non-executive chairman of the NASDAQ stock market, and the admitted operator of what has been described as the largest Ponzi scheme in history.

After Madoff’s arrest, the U.S. Marshals Service seized and auctioned thousands of items from his New York homes, including his clothing, which designer label Frederick James is now fashioning into iPad cases, via its collection called “The Bernie Madoff.”

The cases, each being one-of-a-kind, range from $250 to $500. Founder John Vaccaro warns purchasers that the cases are strictly for fashion use and should not be trusted to keep an iPad safe in the case of a drop. Regardless, these cases are selling out as soon as they are posted to the company’s website, by word of mouth alone.

Take a look at a sampling of the cases Vaccaro has created so far in the gallery below. Would you buy a $500 case made from Madoff’s trousers? Let us know in the comments.

Ralph Lauren Polo Chino Blue Pants - $350

Murphy & Nye Sailmakers Pants Orange - $500

Murphy & Nye Sailmakers Pants Green - $500

J. Crew Khaki Pants - $250

Mason's Off-White Khaki Pants - $350

Banana Republic Gavin Khaki Pants - $250

Banana Republic Gavin Khaki Pants - $250

More About: Bernie Madoff, fashion, ipad, iPad Cases

For more Tech & Gadgets coverage:

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Derek Watkins created a visualization tracking the spatial distribution of U.S. postal offices from the 18th to the 20th century. Gathering data from the USPS Postmaster Finder, with lat/long coordinates extracted from the USGS Geographic Names Inform...

Derek Watkins created a visualization tracking the spatial distribution of U.S. postal offices from the 18th to the 20th century. Gathering data from the USPS Postmaster Finder, with lat/long coordinates extracted from the USGS Geographic Names Information System, the results were animated using Processing. [Thanks, MR!]




Rowers navigate around a sculpture in the Binnenalster, an artificial lake in Hamburg, last week. Apparently not well-received by locals, the installation will remain in place until August 12. Photo: Morris Mac Matzen / Reuters. More.

Rowers navigate around a sculpture in the Binnenalster, an artificial lake in Hamburg, last week. Apparently not well-received by locals, the installation will remain in place until August 12. Photo: Morris Mac Matzen / Reuters. More.




  • Welcome To The Panopticon
    panopticon

    And so it begins. Carnegie Mellon researchers recently combined Facebook profile pictures and PittPatt‘s facial recognition software to identify supposedly-anonymous pictures from a dating site. Now they’re planning to demo a smartphone app that identifies faces by tapping into cloud-based image databases and recognition software. What’s next?

    That’s a question I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Facial recognition via cloud computing is a major plot point in my novel Invisible Armies, which I wrote some seven years ago. When I got mugged in Mexico City a few years back, I promptly started musing about the benefits of a surveillance society. Which is on the way, make no mistake—if it isn’t here today.

    There are cameras everywhere already. I don’t just mean the nearly 5 million CCTVs monitoring Britain, or the similar system planned for New York: I mean the world’s hundreds of millions of phone cameras, all of which will soon automatically upload every picture they take to cloud repositories. Charles Stross has suggested, and I agree, that police will soon wear always-on cameras while on duty, for legal reasons. Meanwhile, Moore’s Law keeps ticking along nicely, making facial recognition software ever faster, more powerful, and more accessible; cameras get ever better, cheaper, and more innocuous; and drones start taking to our skies as well as Afghanistan’s. Add it all up, and we’ll soon spend much of our lives in sight of cameras that can and will identify us by our faces in near-real-time.

    A comment on my recent Google Plus proposal said: “When I go out in public, nobody knows my name unless I tell them. If one were to demand that this be changed, that everyone be forced to wear an ID badge with key facts at all times, one would be denounced as a totalitarian.” Well, soon enough that’s pretty much going to be the case—at least in France, where covering one’s face in public was banned earlier this year, and maybe in Australia and the UK too. There won’t be any point in disabling Facebook’s auto-tagging: a single correctly labelled picture of your face anywhere on the public Internet will be all that is required to cross-reference all other pictures of you ever.

    I don’t mean to be a paranoid conspiracy theorist. Most of this would all still happen without any government initiatives or ban-happy mobs. The death of public anonymity is a natural side effect of improving and increasingly ubiquitous technology. That’s why the ongoing brouhaha about “real names” on Google Plus, and their apparent insistence on digging to China even after realizing they’re in a hole, is actually important. Soon enough, pseudonymity and anonymity will only exist online; in the real world, barring plastic surgery, they’ll be more or less extinct.

    Which is bad news for everyone. Pseudonymity shelters whistleblowers, dissidents, and the vulnerable along with trolls. Everyone assumes that real names make conversations more polite, but I’m not so sure. Here at TechCrunch, we stooped to using Facebook Comments in part for that reason; and it worked at first; but—

    Follow @arishahdadi@arishahdadi
    Ari Shahdadi

    It's amazing how TC comments have completely devolved into the same pit they were before, except with real names attached because of FB.

    (Feel free to prove him right!)

    “There are myriad reasons why individuals may wish to use a name other than the one they were born with,” says the EFF. Over at My Name Is Me, many are cited. Danah Boyd says, “The people who most heavily rely on pseudonyms in online spaces are those who are most marginalized by systems of power.” Ivor Tossell argues, “It’s a given in our system of government that staff need to stay neutral, and never, ever criticize their elected bosses in public … They’re but one group for whom the Internet offers an anonymous outlet. For every anonymous weasel in a political forum, there’s a considerate citizen with an opinion that needs shelter to be voiced.”

    But my favorite citation is this: “Using a pseudonym has been one of the great benefits of the Internet, because it has enabled people to express themselves freely—they may be in physical danger, looking for help, or have a condition they don’t want people to know about,” according to, believe it or not, Google’s Directory of Privacy, back in February. Unidentified, pseudonymous, identified: “We believe all three modes have a home at Google.” Boy, a lot can change in six months, eh?

    Image credit: Jesus Ruiz Fuentes, Artelista.


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And so it begins. Carnegie Mellon researchers recently combined Facebook profile pictures and PittPatt‘s facial recognition software to identify supposedly-anonymous pictures from a dating site. Now they’re planning to demo a smartphone app that id...

panopticon

And so it begins. Carnegie Mellon researchers recently combined Facebook profile pictures and PittPatt‘s facial recognition software to identify supposedly-anonymous pictures from a dating site. Now they’re planning to demo a smartphone app that identifies faces by tapping into cloud-based image databases and recognition software. What’s next?

That’s a question I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Facial recognition via cloud computing is a major plot point in my novel Invisible Armies, which I wrote some seven years ago. When I got mugged in Mexico City a few years back, I promptly started musing about the benefits of a surveillance society. Which is on the way, make no mistake—if it isn’t here today.

There are cameras everywhere already. I don’t just mean the nearly 5 million CCTVs monitoring Britain, or the similar system planned for New York: I mean the world’s hundreds of millions of phone cameras, all of which will soon automatically upload every picture they take to cloud repositories. Charles Stross has suggested, and I agree, that police will soon wear always-on cameras while on duty, for legal reasons. Meanwhile, Moore’s Law keeps ticking along nicely, making facial recognition software ever faster, more powerful, and more accessible; cameras get ever better, cheaper, and more innocuous; and drones start taking to our skies as well as Afghanistan’s. Add it all up, and we’ll soon spend much of our lives in sight of cameras that can and will identify us by our faces in near-real-time.

A comment on my recent Google Plus proposal said: “When I go out in public, nobody knows my name unless I tell them. If one were to demand that this be changed, that everyone be forced to wear an ID badge with key facts at all times, one would be denounced as a totalitarian.” Well, soon enough that’s pretty much going to be the case—at least in France, where covering one’s face in public was banned earlier this year, and maybe in Australia and the UK too. There won’t be any point in disabling Facebook’s auto-tagging: a single correctly labelled picture of your face anywhere on the public Internet will be all that is required to cross-reference all other pictures of you ever.

I don’t mean to be a paranoid conspiracy theorist. Most of this would all still happen without any government initiatives or ban-happy mobs. The death of public anonymity is a natural side effect of improving and increasingly ubiquitous technology. That’s why the ongoing brouhaha about “real names” on Google Plus, and their apparent insistence on digging to China even after realizing they’re in a hole, is actually important. Soon enough, pseudonymity and anonymity will only exist online; in the real world, barring plastic surgery, they’ll be more or less extinct.

Which is bad news for everyone. Pseudonymity shelters whistleblowers, dissidents, and the vulnerable along with trolls. Everyone assumes that real names make conversations more polite, but I’m not so sure. Here at TechCrunch, we stooped to using Facebook Comments in part for that reason; and it worked at first; but—

Follow @arishahdadi@arishahdadi
Ari Shahdadi

It's amazing how TC comments have completely devolved into the same pit they were before, except with real names attached because of FB.

(Feel free to prove him right!)

“There are myriad reasons why individuals may wish to use a name other than the one they were born with,” says the EFF. Over at My Name Is Me, many are cited. Danah Boyd says, “The people who most heavily rely on pseudonyms in online spaces are those who are most marginalized by systems of power.” Ivor Tossell argues, “It’s a given in our system of government that staff need to stay neutral, and never, ever criticize their elected bosses in public … They’re but one group for whom the Internet offers an anonymous outlet. For every anonymous weasel in a political forum, there’s a considerate citizen with an opinion that needs shelter to be voiced.”

But my favorite citation is this: “Using a pseudonym has been one of the great benefits of the Internet, because it has enabled people to express themselves freely—they may be in physical danger, looking for help, or have a condition they don’t want people to know about,” according to, believe it or not, Google’s Directory of Privacy, back in February. Unidentified, pseudonymous, identified: “We believe all three modes have a home at Google.” Boy, a lot can change in six months, eh?

Image credit: Jesus Ruiz Fuentes, Artelista.


Take two minutes out of your day and watch this beautifully-made and interesting little short documentary about Shikai Tseng and his interesting photographic technique. Tseng uses a custom-built multi-pinhole box to expose objects, which have been coat...

dezeen_PhotoGraphy-by-ShiKai-Tseng_33

Take two minutes out of your day and watch this beautifully-made and interesting little short documentary about Shikai Tseng and his interesting photographic technique. Tseng uses a custom-built multi-pinhole box to expose objects, which have been coated in Liquid Light, to their environments.

The result is a beautiful and unique object, essentially a three-dimensional one-time print. It looks like he primarily exposes vases, I’m guessing since they’re nice and round and their surface takes the Liquid Light well.

Here’s the video, by Juriaan Booij. A slightly longer version can be found here.

[via Dezeen]


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What makes a person want to make an insanely complicated connect-the-dot poster? Glory! Artist Thomas Pavitt created this 6,239 dot recreation of the Mona Lisa to set a world record. A record that he ...

What makes a person want to make an insanely complicated connect-the-dot poster? Glory! Artist Thomas Pavitt created this 6,239 dot recreation of the Mona Lisa to set a world record. A record that he might be the first to hold. More »







Alternet’s Russ Baker goes beyond the individual sins of the Murdoch media empire — the phone hacking and such — and looks at the big picture: what has the Murdoch empire done to the world? He has undermined liberty: His outlets led the drumbeat...

Alternet’s Russ Baker goes beyond the individual sins of the Murdoch media empire — the phone hacking and such — and looks at the big picture: what has the Murdoch empire done to the world?

He has undermined liberty: His outlets led the drumbeat for restriction or elimination of certain fundamental rights, including those under the US Fourth Amendment, while at the same time supporting unrestrained wiretapping, the harsh treatment of suspects who may have done nothing wrong, and fueling panic justifying the build-up of the national surveillance state.

He has turned the public against the press. By the generally inferior product produced, with a few exceptions, by the majority of the news outlets he controls and the tawdry methods sponsored by many of them, he has eroded the public’s confidence in media in general, tarnishing its belief even in those outfits whose work deserves to be taken seriously. He has also used his outlets to convince the public that other, more conscientious news organizations are ideologically suspect and biased.

What Rupert Murdoch Means For You Personally

(via Making Light)






  • Humpback whale “says thanks” after being freed from nets

    [Video Link]. In this video, The Great Whale Conservancy (GWC) co-founder Michael Fishbach describes his encounter with a young humpback whale entangled in local fishing nets off the coast of Baja California, Mexico.

    Spoiler: the whale is freed, and she survives. After she is freed, she breaches again and again in a way that suggests she is thrilled to be free and alive (yes, there could be more dull explanations for her behavior, but she sure looks like one overjoyed whale to me).

    Even in the rare cases where humans are able to intervene to try and free whales trapped in fishing nets, this kind of happy ending is rare. I know people here in Southern California who have been involved in emergency rescue efforts, and the sad truth is: even with the best of efforts, they often fail. Knowing that makes this video all the more sweet.

    If you would like to donate to The Great Whale Conservancy‘s efforts, or get involved to help save more whales like this, you can contact Mr. Fishbach at fishdeya@gmail.com, or contribute here.

    (via Reddit, thanks Susannah Breslin)


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[Video Link]. In this video, The Great Whale Conservancy (GWC) co-founder Michael Fishbach describes his encounter with a young humpback whale entangled in local fishing nets off the coast of Baja California, Mexico. Spoiler: the whale is freed, and ...

[Video Link]. In this video, The Great Whale Conservancy (GWC) co-founder Michael Fishbach describes his encounter with a young humpback whale entangled in local fishing nets off the coast of Baja California, Mexico.

Spoiler: the whale is freed, and she survives. After she is freed, she breaches again and again in a way that suggests she is thrilled to be free and alive (yes, there could be more dull explanations for her behavior, but she sure looks like one overjoyed whale to me).

Even in the rare cases where humans are able to intervene to try and free whales trapped in fishing nets, this kind of happy ending is rare. I know people here in Southern California who have been involved in emergency rescue efforts, and the sad truth is: even with the best of efforts, they often fail. Knowing that makes this video all the more sweet.

If you would like to donate to The Great Whale Conservancy‘s efforts, or get involved to help save more whales like this, you can contact Mr. Fishbach at fishdeya@gmail.com, or contribute here.

(via Reddit, thanks Susannah Breslin)






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