It all started with a sexy selfie. Texted to the wrong number. Oops. Not my finest moment—but I have nothing to be ashamed of. She thought I was no better, and I quote, than the knuckle-dragging douche-bags she was never dating again. It was a stupid dare from a girl I’d met online, but since she’d given me a fake number, I didn’t feel bad that my interests were suddenly focused elsewhere—on the fiery and sharp-tongued, Peyton that I found myself sparring with over text for the rest of the evening. The following day, my case of mistaken identity came back to bite me in the banana. When I strolled into the office, I was introduced to Peyton as the new client I needed to win over. The Peyton , in case you're not tracking. And let’s just say she had my full attention. Brains? Check. Beauty? Oh yeah. And the best part? She hated me on sight. Dear God, do I love a challenge. Let the games begin.

Everything that makes Will Self's fiction so arresting and original is in evidence here in this collection of his best articles, book reviews and interviews from the Observer, the Guardian, the Independent, the Evening Standard and many more. Whether describing penis operations, narcotics or merely pondering the nature of slacking, these pieces are as witty and acerbic as one would expect from one of our foremost contemporary satirists.

They fill up the mailbox...and then, they fill up the recycling bin. But now Duy and Tramy Nguyen have come up with a way to make snail-mail spam appetizing--and even exotic: turn it into fantastic origami art. Their beautiful projects are specifically tailored to the dimensions of those flyers, ads, and other unsolicited offers you’d normally throw away. Even beginners will be able to transform junk mail into extraordinary creations. The Nguyens start with an introduction explaining how to interpret the symbols and lines in their instructions and to make basic origami folds. Paper crafters can then put their skills to the test with 18 designs, including a bow, heart on a stand, and a cool Halloween skull.

Humour.

“[The] book makes you care what happens to its main protagonist, the U.S. Postal Service itself. And, as such, it leaves you at the end in suspense.” —USA Today Founded by Benjamin Franklin, the United States Postal Service was the information network that bound far-flung Americans together, and yet, it is slowly vanishing. Critics say it is slow and archaic. Mail volume is down. The workforce is shrinking. Post offices are closing. In Neither Snow Nor Rain, journalist Devin Leonard tackles the fascinating, centuries-long history of the USPS, from the first letter carriers through Franklin’s days, when postmasters worked out of their homes and post roads cut new paths through the wilderness. Under Andrew Jackson, the post office was molded into a vast patronage machine, and by the 1870s, over seventy percent of federal employees were postal workers. As the country boomed, USPS aggressively developed new technology, from mobile post offices on railroads and airmail service to mechanical sorting machines and optical character readers. Neither Snow Nor Rain is a rich, multifaceted history, full of remarkable characters, from the stamp-collecting FDR, to the revolutionaries who challenged USPS’s monopoly on mail, to the renegade union members who brought the system—and the country—to a halt in the 1970s. “Delectably readable . . . Leonard’s account offers surprises on almost every other page . . . [and] delivers both the triumphs and travails with clarity, wit and heart.” —Chicago Tribune

Crypto'92 took place on August 16-20, 1992. It was the twelfth in the series of annual cryptology conferences held on the beautiful campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Once again, it was sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research, in cooperation with the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Security and Privacy. The conference ran smoothly, due to the diligent efforts of the g- eral chair, Spyros Magliveras of the University of Nebraska. One of the measures of the success of this series of conferences is represented by the ever increasing number of papers submitted. This year, there were 135 submissions to the c- ference, which represents a new record. Following the practice of recent program comm- tees, the papers received anonymous review. The program committee accepted 38 papers for presentation. In addition, there were two invited presentations, one by Miles Smid on the Digital Signature Standard, and one by Mike Fellows on presenting the concepts of cryptology to elementary-age students. These proceedings contains these 40 papers plus 3 papers that were presented at the Rump Session. I would like to thank all of the authors of the submitted papers and all of the speakers who presented papers. I would like to express my sincere appreciation to the work of the program committee: Ivan Damgard (Aarhus University, Denmark), Odd Goldreich (Technion, Israel), Burt Kaliski (RSA Data Security, USA), Joe Kilian (NEC, USA).

What spam is, how it works, and how it has shaped online communities and the Internet itself. The vast majority of all email sent every day is spam, a variety of idiosyncratically spelled requests to provide account information, invitations to spend money on dubious products, and pleas to send cash overseas. Most of it is caught by filters before ever reaching an in-box. Where does it come from? As Finn Brunton explains in Spam, it is produced and shaped by many different populations around the world: programmers, con artists, bots and their botmasters, pharmaceutical merchants, marketers, identity thieves, crooked bankers and their victims, cops, lawyers, network security professionals, vigilantes, and hackers. Every time we go online, we participate in the system of spam, with choices, refusals, and purchases the consequences of which we may not understand. This is a book about what spam is, how it works, and what it means. Brunton provides a cultural history that stretches from pranks on early computer networks to the construction of a global criminal infrastructure. The history of spam, Brunton shows us, is a shadow history of the Internet itself, with spam emerging as the mirror image of the online communities it targets. Brunton traces spam through three epochs: the 1970s to 1995, and the early, noncommercial computer networks that became the Internet; 1995 to 2003, with the dot-com boom, the rise of spam's entrepreneurs, and the first efforts at regulating spam; and 2003 to the present, with the war of algorithms—spam versus anti-spam. Spam shows us how technologies, from email to search engines, are transformed by unintended consequences and adaptations, and how online communities develop and invent governance for themselves.