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Would you notice this?
There are countless news stories about credit card numbers being stolen by hackers, and people having thousands of dollars of fraudulent charges levied against their accounts. Target is paying out $10 million to compensate for a data breach in their system, however everyone from Sony to multiple financial institutions has been attacked recently.
Unbeknownst to many, there is another way that criminals are able to get hold of credit and debit card info that many of us would never notice – skimmers and keypad overlays.
A skimmer is a device that fits over the card slot on an ATM or gas pump or other device, and when you slide your card into the slot, you slide it into the skimmer as well as the ATM slot itself. You’ll still get your money, but the criminals will get your information and you’ll never know it happened, at least until you get robbed. Keypad overlays are the same, except they sit over the keypad of a machine and when you enter your PIN, it’s recorded on the overlay as well as in the ATM. Again, you’ll still get your money, but you’ll also have unknowingly given your information to some unscrupulous people.
Make your own computer art
See that nifty work of art up there? That’s actually all the mouse movements I made over the course of just under 90 minutes while using my PC. It’s the result of a tiny program called IOGraph, and it doesn’t even require an install. You simply download it, double-click the .exe, click the button to start, and it uses very little resources (I couldn’t find it at all in Process Monitor, which is disconcerting) while it runs in the background graphing your mouse movements.
The lines represent mouse movements, and the circles indicate when and how long the mouse is at rest (the larger the circle, the longer the mouse was resting).
I’m calling it now, this will be movie of the year
Maybe even best movie ever. Just watch the trailer.
What 4K really means
In class last Friday, I showed you the website for Samsara, a movie that has been converted from 70mm film to 8K (it has another homepage here), which is the most practical way of achieving 8K. I haven’t yet seen it, but I have seen its prequel, Baraka, and it is magnificent. There was even a 1983 prequel to Baraka titled Koyaanisqatsi, and it was glorious as well. The trailer for Samsara is below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0xVp3N-M84
Internet Explorer’s Swan Song
It’s been a long time. A very long time. Back in the halcyon days of the Web, circa early ’90s, we had the early browsers such as Lynx (a text-based browser that predates the graphical front-end of the Web, and you can see what current websites look like as text-only at this page), along with NCSA Mosaic and Netscape Navigator.
At that time, Bill Gates felt the Internet was only a fad and didn’t put much thought into a browser. But it didn’t take long for him to realize that he might be wrong. Very wrong. When he realized it was the future, he wrote that memo that turned the entirety of Microsoft towards integrating with the potential of the Internet.
No Robots!
I wonder if the people at this year’s SXSW tech conference who were protesting against continuing advancements in artificial intelligence understand that A.I. and robots are not the same thing.
I understand their concerns; we have seen rapid advancements lately in artificial intelligence thanks to significant investments in the field, especially deep learning, by Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, and Google. Couple that with warnings from people who know what they are talking about, such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking and it sounds like things could get out of hand.
Meet your new daddy
Bring out your inner Nedry
There are spoilers about Jurassic park in this post, so beware. Having said that, remember that scene in Jurassic Park where stereotypical computer guy Dennis Nedry tried to make off with some dino eggs while locking his system down to prevent anyone finding out what he had done? And remember how Samuel L. Jackson tried to get in but couldn’t, because he didn’t say the magic word?
If you ever wanted to see what makes fighting for your life against dinosaurs by using technology so much fun, you can do so over at JurassicSystems. They give you a fast video to remind you of how it all went down in the movie, then present you with an authentic replication of the IRIX OS used in the movie.
SGI IRIX Simulation
And that’s one of the things I like about this site; it’s based on a real system. IRIX was a UNIX-based system developed by Silicon Graphics, a workstation company that made – you guessed it – workstations, which were essentially super-powerful and expensive PCs. As PC power increased, however, there was less and less demand for workstations and SGI became something different. Interestingly enough, the old SGI building in Mountain View, California, now houses the Computer History Museum.
Anyway, the site recognizes some actual IRIX commands that you can use in the simulation. You can even find some things that someone like Nedry might have on his hard drive, although it’s nothing too risque.
And speaking of Jurassic Park Hacking, you might also remember the infamous “This is a UNIX system! I know this!” scene, embedded below. Many people will tell you that’s a farcical representation of navigating a file system, but in fact it was based off of a real yet experimental interface known as File System Navigator that had been built by SGI for the IRIX OS mentioned earlier. In fact, for years it was available to download off the SGI website free of charge. So if anyone ever tells you it’s an example of Hollywood making idiotic hacking scenes (which does happen), politely have your raptors attack.
Netflix finally available in 8-bit
More like 2-bit. I didn’t know about this until reading it yesterday, but Netflix hosts a hack-day event in which its employees can develop new, possibly useful features for the streaming service. This year there were some sensible hacks, such as a dual login that would prevent someone watching a show without their partner, some maybe not so practical hacks such as the “Binge Encouragement and Enforcement Platform (BEEP)” that plays an ear-shattering noise when you look away from the screen, and a very interesting one that shows a globe with real-time viewing activity superimposed on it.
However my absolute favorite one was – I’m not making this up – Netflix being run on an original Nintendo Entertainment System.
To give a technical context before showing the results, the NES ran on an 8-bit CPU and had 2048 *bytes* of RAM and the same amount of video RAM. That could be expanded through including RAM on a cartridge, and that’s (I believe) what this does since it runs off a cartridge. Of course, you could just build an NES PC and watch Netflix on that instead.
All the new Apple stuff
So now we know. The new Apple watch and MacBook – that’s right, just MacBook – have been officially announced at an Apple event a yesterday in San Francisco.
iWatch
The High End
The iWatch is clearly aimed at people who want a fashion statement as much as it is those who want a digital assistant, made even more evident by their 12-page advertisement spread in Vogue magazine.
The watch will come in two sizes, 38 and 42mm, and will cost from $349 for the more ‘sporty’ version, while people who have more disposable income can opt for the aluminum-band $1,049 version, or you can spec out an 18 karat gold version for $17,000. Hey, I don’t fault people for being rich or spending their money however they want.
It also provides iWatch-to-iWatch communication so you can send information between them directly, will interface with the Apple App Store, offers many different watch faces which I think is pretty cool, it has a sapphire crystal over the face (which is not unbreakable, just want to clear that up) and two buttons, one of which is a dial, and the face can recognize two different pressures. It can track physical measures, play music, the features just go on and on. It can even unlock your hotel door.
Techwise, it will use MagSafe charging in which you snap the watch against a magnetic plate and the watch charges. it uses Apple’s custom S1 system-on-a-chip, in fact the iWatch is the chip’s debut.
It’s an intriguing device, and with the installed and loyal iPhone base, will the iWatch take off? I honestly don’t know, but it has a lot of neat features and I wouldn’t be surprised.
MacBook
Silver and gold, silver and gold
The MacBook was received a little less enthusiastically, mainly because of its single expansion port and price. It’s thin – very thin at 13mm max, you could slice a tomato with the edge of the thing – but has only a single USB type C port. It comes with a 16:10 Retina display, and uses Intel’s Core M (Broadwell architecture). It won’t be a powerhouse, but it should be pretty good. Feedback has been mixed on the new butterfly switches the keyboard will use, and the ‘taptic’ trackpad. We’ll have to see how it works out.
Oh, and it comes in gold, to match your $10,000 iWatch. Surprisingly enough, I like the finish.
Pre-orders start next month, so get your money ready!
A personal anecdote
See that guy with the guitar? That’s Rick Nielsen, the main guy from Cheap Trick, a band that has been around since the 70s and was at one time huge, although they still have a significant following.
This past Saturday, I was surprised to hear they were playing a free show on Fremont Street considering they recorded the theme to That ’70’s Show and once brought down Budokan, so of course I had to be there. Apparently, about 16,000 other people had to be there too. It was a tight fit even a ways back from the stage, but when the people who only stopped to gawk at the spectacle went their own way the crowd thinned ever so slightly. That gave people room to dance around in the infamous drunk dance, however I’ve been to enough concerts where that doesn’t bother me. And when you mix classic rock with NASCAR weekend, you have to expect an eclectic mix of people.
But something else did. As you can imagine, there were many, many, many people taking pictures and videos, myself included. But I also saw something I had never seen before. The couple in front of me were actually making a video of *themselves* singing along to the song the band was playing on stage. They weren’t watching the show, they were watching themselves sing to the song the band was actually playing, as though it was some kind of karaoke in which the band was actually playing the song live.
A familiar sight
I don’t know why this bugged me so much. A legendary band, at a free show, why would you video *yourself* and not watch the show? I guess I can understand a selfie, but missing seeing the band perform a song you obviously know and enjoy when you’re right there is too weird. It reminds me of when I was much younger and I’d see people show up to a concert drunk, throw up, pass out and miss the whole experience. Why show up in the first place?
I guess since this show was free the comparison isn’t entirely apt, but they spent most of the show looking around, taking pictures of themselves, facing away from the stage, making Facebook posts; why go to the show if you aren’t going to watch? At least stand in the back. Sheesh.
