This is awesome… The three MIT students who exposed flaws in the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) fare-collection system — and were sued by the MBTA right before the DEFCON 2008 security conference to prevent them going public with those flaws — have settled the lawsuit and are now in talks with the Boston subway on how to improve the transit card systems’ securityмебели.

I photographed them back in August around MIT. Here, they’re in front of a blackboard depicting the key vulnerability in how the CharlieTicket fare card stores the dollar value of the card.

Workers rappel down the site of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Stata Center on 9/23/08 to apply devices for reducing the buildup of snow and ice to the flat tops of the windows that jut out from Frank Gehry’s design.

More photos of the MIT Stata Center are at my MIT Stata Center photo gallery.

The point of I.M. Pei’s Ralph Landau Building (Building 66) framed by the concrete arch of the MIT Media lab.

From MIT photos with graphic impact gallery. (Also see the general gallery of MIT photos.)

I put together a gallery of MIT photos with graphic impact over at my archive. It supplements the general gallery of MIT photos that’s grown to 250+ images over time.

The Drumm Geminy shield is a high-security secondary locking device designed to protect against all kinds of entry as well as vandalism. Distributed in the US by Han Fey Lock Technologies, the pin-in-pin design of this lock uses sophisticated anti-pick pins that have so far withstood the best efforts of the locksport community to pick them.

Rather than interfacing directly with the bolt, the Drumm Geminy prevents the attacker from getting access to a normal lock cylinder mounted in the door. (In this case, an Abloy Protec.)

The Geminy Shield is unlocked by means of a pan-shaped key which contains a set of stepped projections that depress the inner and outer pins to different depths.

Last week I was up at the Maine Media Workshops taking a class in photographic lighting with ultra-big-name portraitist Gregory Heisler. Here’s some photos from the workshop…

(Above: Bill poses on top of some oil tanks in the basement of a now-defunct school building, lit by a variety of lights that Heisler picked up at Home Depot.)

Gregory Heisler demonstrates lighting fellow workshop participant Fred with a $20 Home Depot fluorescent light fixture.

In one of the “split into groups and go shoot” sessions in the workshop, we spent the afternoon shooting portraits of each other (no models!) in an ancient and now-defunct school building. Each group of three or four would divide up into a shooter, a subject, and one or two assistants. Here, fellow workshop attendee Dani decided he wanted to do a portrait of Dave (pictured) leaning over the sink — with the sinks around him full of variously colored lights. This is a shot I grabbed while we were tweaking things around. (For the photo nerds, it was taken with a Canon 85mm f/1.2 lens on a 5D body.)

The light on Dave’s face was Bill’s idea — he hid in one of the bathroom stalls and threw a beam of light from a big lantern flashlight into the sink mirror to get the glow on Dave’s face.

Another portrait I did at the workshop — Ned riding a bomb, strapped down to the roof of an old sedan. We found this car (marked “Jazz Not War” on the other side) in the yard of Firefly Restoration in Hope, Maine — a company dedicated to restoring old firetrucks. Ned’s illuminated by a gigantic movie-light-style Fresnel lens in front of a battery-powered studio flash unit. I threw so much orange gel over the front of the light that the rest of the world looked really blue in comparison, and then cranked up the power so that the rest of the world was really dark in comparison too.

Also, raduga.