David Risney
@David_Risney :
David Risney
@David_Risney :As the title suggests, spoilers for The Interview follow.
Towards the end of the movie, after Dave Skylark is shot, he miraculously has a bullet proof vest, blows up Kim Jong-un, finds a random tunnel and is picked up by Seal Team Six. These are the same details of the unbelievable scenario that Dave Skylark describes to Agent Lacey at the beginning of the movie.
This isn't a coincidence. Everything after Dave is shot is his fantasizing about how things should have gone as he dies in the interview chair. Unsurprisingly his fantasy closely matches his original ridiculous thoughts about how he would assassinate and escape.
This is similar to movies like Brazil in which the later fourth of the movie is the main character’s romantic fantasy as he is tortured and killed in real life. Or Total Recall where the end of the movie matches the description of the memories that the main character will have implanted at the beginning.
Its safe to assume that after Dave is killed, Aaron and Sook are captured and also killed.
Live coding in VR with the Oculus Rift, Firefox WebVR, JavaScript and Three.js
“I built a live-coding web app for the Oculus Rift where you code in JavaScript using Three.js and watch the world change around you in real-time.”
Quadrilateral Cowboy gameplay video
“Quadrilateral Cowboy is a game we’ve been watching with great interest ever since Thirty Flights Of Loving creator Brendon Chung first debuted it last year. It’s about hacking, but not via irritating minigames or jargon-your-problems-away Hollywood magic. Instead, you learn basic (albeit fictional) code and take down everything from laser grids to gun emplacements with a twitch of your fingers and a wriggle of your brain. It’s already an extremely clever game, and it’s quite empowering despite the fact that you play as someone who probably couldn’t even heft an assault rifle - let alone fire one. Basically, it’s a wonderfully novel idea - more Neuromancer than Deus Ex - but words only do it so much justice. Thus, I’ve decided to play it for your enrichment, in hopes that you will understand why Quadrilateral should be driving your radar haywire.”
“This is the chronicle of the most epic retaliation and how I pranked my roommate with targeted Facebook Ads to the point of complete paranoia and delusion.”
Funny anecdote but also a how-to on creating a Facebook ad campaign that targets a single person.
Mass mailing Internet scams intentionally use poor spelling, grammar etc to filter down to target ignorant audience .
The story of Chris Knight, living in isolation in the woods of Maine for 27 years.
'Anyone who reveals what he's learned, Chris told me, is not by his definition a true hermit. Chris had come around on the idea of himself as a hermit, and eventually embraced it. When I mentioned Thoreau, who spent two years at Walden, Chris dismissed him with a single word: “dilettante.”'
'But still, I pressed on, there must have been some grand insight revealed to him in the wild…”Get enough sleep.”'
I don’t want to brag, but I’ve been telling that people all along and I didn’t have to live alone in the woods for decades.
Fish vs Fish in Street Fighter II - Computer vision translates the location of two fish in an aquarium into SF2 moves.
A DEFCON talk “The Secret Life of SIM Cards” that covers running apps on your SIM card. Surprisingly they run a subset of Java and execute semi-independent of the Phone’s OS.
Mathematically speaking, any two ducks are already in a row. In order to get your
ducks in a row, own exactly two ducks.
Level3 counters Verizon’s recent post about Netflix traffic.
"In fact, Level 3 has asked Verizon for a long time to add interconnection capacity and to deliver the traffic its customers are requesting from our customers, but Verizon refuses."
An interesting way to use the report-uri feature of CSP to detect if a user is logged into Google, Facebook etc.
Applied game theory 101: Valve’s Steam Summer Sale involves a meta game with teams of Steam users competing for daily prizes. On Reddit the players join together to take turns winning daily. Valve gets wise and performs an existential attack, changing the rules to make it harder for players to want to coordinate.
Still, that all the players joined together to game the system gives me hope for humanity. Its a self organized solution to a tragedy of the commons problem. Only in this case the tragedy is by design and is updated to be more tragic.
A bogus SoundCloud takedown anecdote and a brief history of and issues with US copyright law.
Another reminder that the rest of the Western world has a public domain day every year in which new IP enters the public domain
From Inside Edward Snowden’s Life as a Robot:
Wizner had to jump on a phone call during a meeting with his whistleblower client. When he got off the phone, he found that Snowden had rolled the bot into civil liberties lawyer Jameel Jaffer’s office and was discussing the 702 provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. “It was kind of cool,” Wizner says.
It is neat but they’re marketing video is at times strangely terrifying. Put different music on when the Susan-bot comes up behind the unknowing Mark and this could be a horror movie trailer.
On exploiting security issues in botnet C&C software:
Hackers “are learning that it’s not so easy to write secure code,” Toro says. “Most of us in the business of securing our applications and systems know that bulletproofing software is an extremely expensive and exhaustive undertaking. Malware creators who have to look to their own defences would have to slow down the production of new attacks.”
FYI, if you want to know what it looks like when you hack a hacker, look no further than the seminal 1995 film Hackers.
First they came for our RSS feeds and I said nothing…
[Testing Cat-Human Translator] Scientist: Cat, what is your name? Cat: I AM KANG THE
DESTROYER Owner: It's not working. His name is Socks.
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