2010 Jan 14, 2:54Wow: "If the report's findings are correct, it suggests that the government of China has been engaged for months in a massive campaign of industrial espionage against US companies."
internet google china security politics privacy 2010 Jan 13, 6:35Ars Technica rounds up links on the recent Google threatening to stop censoring itself in China including quotes from Secretary of State Clinton, and the EFF and info on the hacks.
google china arstechnica news politics security censorship 2010 Jan 5, 1:47
The New Super Mario Bros. Wii is a great game. Its the fun of old school Mario with the addition of great graphics and the kind of multiplayer I've wanted for Mario since playing the original as a
child: its got up to four player simultaneous cooperative multiplayer. I recommend it to anyone who has enjoyed Mario in the past. Watch this amazing video of level 1-3 you can unlock in the game.
As noted elsewhere, multiple players attempting to navigate platforms, grab power ups, and throw turtle shells creates new
challenges but along with that there's new ways to be incredibly cheap.
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Jumping Higher
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A second player means a head one can jump on to reach higher locations. Jump on your friend's head at the apex of their jump while holding down the jump button yourself for maximum jumping. In
the game you can also grab other players and hold them over your head. This is useful for reaching the top of the flagpole at the end of levels. On that same line, if the player you grab has a
flying cap you can now use them to fly in the same manner you would use a flying block which makes it easy to get two players to the top of the finish flagpole if only one of you has a flying
cap.
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Power-Ups
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Normal power-up blocks now spawn enough power-ups for everyone. A mushroom is spawned for each small player and full power-ups for the rest, except in the case everyone is small: then one of the
power-ups is a full power-up. If there's two players and you're both small, the full power-up always jumps out of the block to the right. Some hidden power-up blocks only give out one power-up
and in that case its a mushroom or not based on the player who hits the block - so be sure that a big player hits that if you have one.
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Death & Bubbles
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When a player dies but at least one other player lives the dead player comes back in a limbo bubble from which they must be released before they may play again. Because of this, in a tough spot
you can send one player in and leave a second behind. If the first dies you don't lose your place in the level and the first comes back in a bubble ready to try again. For instance, if you're
trying to get the last star coin in 2-1 which sits just above the abyss, one player can just jump to their death for it and as long as another player lives you've collected the coin. However you
need not sacrifice your life to do this: you can press down and 'a' to force yourself into a bubble saving yourself from death. This is true in general as long as you have enough time to see your
death coming. This is also useful if one player runs ahead to the right. The screen will expand a bit but then it will just move to the right following the player in the lead. Players left behind
walls or now forced into lava pits will die unless they use the bubble.
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Misc.
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- If all players hit the ground at the same time from a ground pound it acts like hitting a pow block, killing the enemies on the screen.
- If you hold a player who has a projectile power over your head they can still use their power.
- Bubbles can be popped by hitting them with your fire or ice projectiles as well as thrown shells or blocks.
- All players get the extra lives from anyone collecting 100 coins or finishing a level with more than 7 enemies on the screen.
multiplayer mario wii 2009 Dec 21, 3:40"“I uploaded (Panic Attack!) on a Thursday and on Monday my inbox was totally full of e-mails from Hollywood studios,” he told the BBC’s Latin American service BBC Mundo. “It was amazing, we were all
shocked.”" And I can see why -- its a good video.
video scifi robot youtube hollywood 2009 Dec 17, 10:59Your grandfather attempts to first explain and then use Twitter...
humor video david-letterman twitter web youtube 2009 Dec 14, 2:25Recommendations on writing HTML for email clients... Ugh.
via:mattb html email css web reference technical 2009 Dec 7, 3:25Cool, I've been waiting for this: "Twitter creator Jack Dorsey’s Square application, which is like a smartphone PayPal for credit cards, attracted lots of warranted attention for its potential to
enable peer-to-peer and merchant credit card transactions in the real world far beyond what’s capable today in most countries." Oh, never mind... "As a customer, all you need to buy from a Square
merchant is a credit, debit or pre-paid card"
credit-card money via:louis cellphone square 2009 Dec 4, 5:05"Astronaut Michael Barratt (Expedition 20 Flight Engineer) walks you through the International Space Station in this 20-minute long HD video, which covers the entire 167 feet of the space station's
pressurized modules."
space video space-station 2009 Dec 2, 2:52Webkit just implemented this iframe element sandbox attribute.
security html html5 webkit browser web technical 2009 Nov 25, 7:09Relative URI resolution differences in browsers vs programming language libraries.
via:ericlaw url uri rfc web browser programming dotnet java technical 2009 Nov 17, 6:52"What if there was a backwards compatible way to transfer all of the resources that are used on every single page in your site — CSS, JS, images, anything else — in a single HTTP request at the start
of the first visit to the page? This is what Resource Package support in browsers will let you do." Another resource packaging implementation but this suggests they'll actually implement this in
FireFox. One issue with all of these is you can't use the resources from the package in any context that didn't ask to use the package for fear of security issues which means you can't stick the
packaged resources in your HTTP cache. The package itself could go in the cache which would mean multiple packages per page or all your page's resources in one package. Of course the same security
issues are a concern for all of the packaging proposals if a site has any way to inject into the source the request for the package. It'd be a similar vector to the UTF7 XSS issues but much worse
attack.
security web browser http zip firefox resource technical via:kris.kowal 2009 Nov 12, 3:24That is one deep mattress.
humor photo flickr mattress philosophy 2009 Oct 19, 4:32"This was our Zombie Wedding cake made by Mike's Amazing Cakes in Seattle! They're awesome! They made the Bride and Groom on top look like us down to the tux and dress, and the zombies matched our
wedding party too!"
photo cake wedding zombie 2009 Oct 7, 8:10Quirksmode does a chart comparing the differences in various versions of WebKit: "There’s iPhone WebKit, Android WebKit, S60 WebKit (at least two versions each), Bolt, Iris, Ozone, and Palm Pre, and
I don’t doubt that I’ve overlooked a few minor WebKits along the way. All 10 mobile WebKits I’ve identified so far are subtly or wildly different."
compatibility web development browser webkit apple google android iphone safari technical via:mattb 2009 Sep 1, 4:59"...toy and apparel designers Kid Robot (with the help of creative ideas studio We Are Plus) have organized a mobile phone-based scavenger hunt in Manhattan centered around scanning QR codes."
qrcode phone scavenger-hunt toy advertising 2009 Aug 28, 9:12
sequelguy posted a photo:
Saw this at the Fremont Market. The tag read along the lines of Veterinary related tool -- three guesses.
seattle wa tool veterinary 2009 Aug 25, 7:10Research paper modelling zombie infection. "The key difference between the models presented here and other models of infectious disease is that the dead can come back to life." Also, love the
references section with "Snyder, Zack (director), 2004 Dawn of the Dead" next to things like "Bainov, D.D. & Simeonov, P.S. Impulsive Differential Equations: Asymptotic Properties of the
Solutions. World Scientific, Singapore (1995)."
humor zombie research via:schneier math science health apocalypse system:filetype:pdf system:media:document 2009 Aug 21, 3:13"At Black Hat USA 2009 and Defcon 17 Nathan Hamiel and Shawn Moyer introduced an attack called Dynamic Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF). This white paper discusses the attack and discusses several
Dynamic CSRF attack vectors." Seems to require sites trying to secure CSRF scenarios using session IDs in their URLs.
security csrf research browser web technical 2009 Aug 17, 8:39Laughed for this comment on the zombie photo used in the Wired article: 'Funny, the Wired article attribution ... says, "Fake Zombies attacking an innocent driver." I don't know who decided on that
caption, but it made me immediately want to ask 1. How do you know they're FAKE zombies? 2. How do you know the driver is INNOCENT?'
humor zombie photo flickr wired