Category Archives: Uncategorized
Welcome!
Welcome to is301.com! As you may have read in the syllabus, this is the companion site to the IS 301 class offered at Nevada State College. On this site I will make posts that supplement the topics we talk about in class and provide additional topics of interest.
That being said, the posts don’t necessarily mirror the topics we cover, although on occasion they might; rather they are meant to introduce additional topics of relevance to technology. They may cover robotics, social media, marketing, input methods, standards, lasers, military, virtual reality, the Retroencabulator, random links, or anything else that strikes me as relevant or even mildly interesting. The posts may be simply news, informing you of a new development, or they may be reviews, opinion, videos, examples, or a mix of all that and more. They will be peppered with links that provide additional information, as well as images, videos, and other media that add to the (hopefully) informative nature of the post.
Participation by students is required on this blog in the form of comments. Specifically, two comments per week, two points each, for a maximum of four points possible per week. That may not sound like much, but it adds up to sixty points total so I implore everyone not to take it lightly.
You will need to register with WordPress, the blogging platform I use for this site, in order to make comments on this site, although you can also log in using several social media accounts. I’m not sure why you would want to do that, but you can. Instructions for signing up and for making comments can be found at the top of each page under the “How To Sign Up” link, circled in the image below.
I’m also considering letting students make their own posts either as part of the class, or as an extra credit opportunity, although I haven’t yet decided.
I encourage everyone to take a look around, see the types of posts that get made, and register for your account. You can use this post as a testbed for making comments to check your registration and make sure it works, make sure you’re able to comment; random comments on this post are welcome! I’m not requiring commenting until the first full week beginning Jan 26.
If you have any questions, if something goes wrong with signing up, if any clarification is needed or I’ve left something out, you can leave a comment on this post or you can contact me via Canvas. I’m looking forward to seeing you all in class, and on the site!
A recap of the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show
So another CES has come and gone, and it was surprisingly similar to last year’s CES. It has also resulted in what is easily the longest post I’ve ever written for this blog by far. The most important thing I learned from my adventure this year had nothing to do with CES, but rather that my beloved Canon Digital Rebel DSLR camera has finally given up the ghost. It behaved normally, but the pictures were terrible and now I think it is time to put it out to pasture. I’ve had it since 2001, which in technology time is, what, 1300 years? It even uses the obsolete compact flash storage, so it had a very good run.
My poor Canon
With that said, there was a ton of stuff to see, as usual. More than you could hope to see in one day, I was there for two and wasn’t able to see all I had planned, and there is far more stuff than you’ll ever see actually out in the consumer market in the future. There was the personal fitness section, the smartwatch section, the pure electronics section where I spent a lot of time and companies were showcasing their circuits, transistors, memory tech, etc., the audio dealers, the automotive section, the gaming section, countless others, and of course the main show floor. There were also lines everywhere. Lines to try the Oculus Rift. Lines to try the Sennheiser headphones (which are the best headphones on earth). Lines to try the various home theater setups, lines to try drones, lines everywhere. I don’t wait in lines at CES, so I had to observe from afar. In this post I’ll try to cover some of what you’d expect, as well as some of the more unusual things I saw while I wandered for hours around the various expos.
Victory!
Those of you who were following this blog in the fall 2014 semester may remember that when I uploaded an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force to YouTube over the Thanksgiving break, I was immediately notified by YouTube and Cartoon Network that the video had been taken down, that I had committed a copyright violation, was threatened with a lawsuit six different times, had to attend ‘copyright school,’ and had severe restrictions placed on the account, restrictions that would all but negate its utility as a pedagogical tool. If you’d like to be brought up to speed, you can read my original post complete with fully-documented screenshots about the ordeal at this link. It’s scary stuff, worth a read.
I was given only 200 characters in which to submit my rebuttal, which I did to both YouTube *and* Cartoon Network (the owners of Aqua Teen Hunger Force), explaining the upload was covered by fair use doctrine, that it was for educational as well as entertainment value, and that it presented topics we discuss in class in a novel way that I felt would engage students. I indicated the video did not need to be reinstated, but the restrictions should be lifted as they were unreasonably punitive.
A few weeks went by, I didn’t hear anything, so I resubmitted my appeal and indicated I would escalate (meaning consider legal action) if I didn’t get a response.
Well guess what! I just received an email from YouTube that states the following:
New YouTube Copyright Counter Notification
Fri 1/9/2015 6:06 PMTo:
Darren Denenberg;Hello,In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we’ve completed processing your counter-notification regarding these video(s):
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOARq9kIwPM
This content has been restored unless you have deleted the video(s). Your account will not be penalized.
Regards,
The YouTube Legal Support Team
Not bad! A victory for the little guy, and vindication of my intent and purpose for uploading the video in the first place. Now, to upload Star Wars in its entirety.
I kid, I kid. (Or do I?)
is301.com’s Year in Review
One of the plugins I use to manage various aspects of my site is called ‘JetPack,’ and it provides a host of services from the multiple login options for commenting to site statistics to sharing options to spam control and countless others.
I just received an email from them that links to this site’s year in review, and it shows some basic stats such as who was the top commenter and what posts were the most popular. Some interesting tidbits that stand out: The second most popular referrer to the page (where people came to the page from) was Facebook, which is a surprise, and outside of the United States, the countries that visited the site most were Georgia and Russia! I’m sure it was for completely legitimate reasons.
Hmm…
The most interesting thing is that each firework exploding on the page represents a post that was made, and the code that does it is available on GitHub, a programming repository. It’s not a terribly dynamic or earth-shattering report, but if you’re interested you can find it at this link.
Happy holidays everyone, bask in some spectacular light shows!
Happy holidays to everyone, I will see you all early next year! In the meantime, here are some incredible holiday light shows that have been making the rounds. I’m saving what is clearly the best for last.
The first one which has everyone going crazy is the Star Wars-themed light show a music teacher in Newark, California set up on his house. Using 100,000 Christmas lights and some cool siren-looking things on his roof, he synced the whole thing to various tunes from Star Wars. If you’re interested, this is usually done using specialized hardware known as a controller that your lights plug in to, then you plug the controller into your PC and run specialized software that tells the controller what to do with the lights. That’s a lot of control! Some companies like Light-O-Rama sell the whole thing as a kit.
Anyway, back to the Star Wars thing. It’s good, but there’s a guitar and a keyboard, and a bunch of identical small light-tree-things in the yard, I don’t know…it seems to me that there should have been some Star Wars content in the light show itself. The music and the visuals just don’t come together for me, but everyone else seems to love it, so if you haven’t seen it, here you go:
Colorado man gets first-ever pair of mind-controlled prosthetic arms
This story has a personal angle for me, but I’ll get to that in a minute. Last week, a story made the rounds that for the first time ever, a double-amputee was fitted with mind-controlled prosthetic arms, and remember, that’s the only way to control prosthetic arms, and was able to control both of them simultaneously with his mind.
This is the first time ever that someone has controlled *two* artificial limbs with their mind, so it’s a big milestone. One other thing to keep in mind is that, according to this story at NBC News, significantly more money is spent by the VA on prosthetic legs as opposed to prosthetic arms, and prosthetic arms have more difficulty when it comes to engineering functionality into them. As the article states, walking is straightforward, but arms need to be able to reach, grab, feel, interact, control, etc. and that is proving troublesome. Even so, we have seen absolutely incredible advances in artificial arms and hands.
Now for the personal part: This was all achieved at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab outside of Baltimore, and I have two very good friends who work there so I am very proud at a personal level for this breakthrough. It’s remarkable and a major step forward.
Here’s a video from the APL, and it is really incredible how smoothly it seems to go there at the end when he is actually using the arms. Amazing stuff.
Minecraft creator outbids Beyonce and Jay-Z for $70 million home
Well here’s a success story. Markus “Notch” Persson, creator of the insanely successful world-building game Minecraft, had a huge pile of cash burning a hole in his pocket after selling his company to Microsoft for $2 billion.
So what does he do? What we would all do! He outbid power couple Beyonce and Jay-Z to buy a Beverly Hills property for $70 million, making it one of the priciest homes in the country and a standout even for Beverly Hills.
That link has a slideshow of images from inside the home, and shows the power of the gaming industry. He instantly became wealthier by far than any celebrity once his company was bought. Stay in (programming) school kids.
Here’s another pic of his new house as a teaser.
Watch an interview with a well-known hacker
The most well-known hacking group is Anonymous, known for their Guy Fawkes masks and high-profile attacks against targets such as Sony, the Church of Scientology, Westboro Baptist Church (a hack that was, impressively, carried out during a live interview), an ironic very high-profile attack against security firm HBGary, even Gene Simmons’ website, and there are many others. I was impressed, in a way, when a member of Anonymous was arrested at UNLV, and turned out to be a journalism student.
However there was another group, an offshoot and sometimes-rival, known as LulzSec that carried out some hacks of its own, apparently just for the, well, the lulz. Their targets included PBS, Fox, Arizona State Police, the U.S. Senate, and, of course, everyone’s favorite target, Sony. There were many other targets.
LulzSec disbanded, however, after many of them were arrested after their leader, ‘Sabu,’ real name Hector Xavier Monsegur, turned government informant, and he has helped them in other endeavors as well. This was part of a plea deal that he said he agreed to due to his kids.
Now, he has been interviewed on CBS This Morning, and I have embedded a clip below. I couldn’t find the full interview, but if I do I’ll update this post. Even with the four minute clip, it’s still very interesting and gives some insight into the hacker mentality and law enforcement’s attempts to thwart them.
Secure, and I mean *really* secure, your email. Just not right now.
Worried about becoming the next Sony? Afraid all those terrible things you said about your friends, family, coworkers and teachers will be released for the whole world to read? Then perhaps you need to think about taking the next step and taking complete control over your email, even if you have a web-based service like Gmail or Yahoo Mail or whatever.
I very recently was made aware of an email client called MailPile, which gives the appearance of a web-based email client, it even runs in a web browser, but it’s actually housed on your own machine. It’s even designed to run from a USB drive if need be.
You can connect the client to any web-based or client-based (Outlook) email service, and it will download all the mail to your local device, and it encrypts them so even if someone gets your PC or USB key they won’t be able to read them. On top of that, you have to have the password for the account itself, as well as a passphrase (if you remember our class discussion) for the MailPile program as well.
New, dangerous ransomware appears in the wild
In class we talked briefly about ‘Ransomware,’ software that compresses / encrypts / locks up your files, then demands payment for the password or key or whatever to get your files back. We also discussed that the amounts of money demanded are never too much to prevent someone from actually paying – if they asked for a million dollars no one would pay it, and the encryption was normally breakable if you knew what you were doing.
Now, in an event that involves many of the topics we discussed in our last class, a scary new ransomware attack is changing all that. Known as OphionLocker (this article shows it may not be as sophisticated as everyone is saying, possibly breakable through a C++ IDE ), it uses what is known as elliptic curve cryptography, a practically unbreakable form of encoding, to hold files hostage, and it is delivered through malicious ads displayed on web pages.
