In biology class, the (unnamed) professor points her walking stick (she’s blind) at a volumetric projector. The tip flashes for a second, and a volumetric display comes to life. It illustrates for the class what one of the bugs looks like. The projection device is a cylinder with a large lens atop a rolling base. A large black plug connects it to the wall.

The display of the arachnid appears floating in midair, a highly saturated screen-green wireframe that spins. It has very slight projection rays at the cylinder and a "waver" of a scan line that slowly rises up the display. When it initially illuminates, the channels are offset and only unify after a second.

The top and bottom of the projection are ringed with tick lines, and several tick lines runs vertically along the height of the bug for scale. A large, lavender label at the bottom identifies this as an ARACHNID WARRIOR CLASS. There is another lavendar key too small for us to read.The arachnid in the display is still, though the display slowly rotates around its y-axis clockwise from above. The instructor uses this as a backdrop for discussing arachnid evolution and "virtues."

After the display continues for 14 seconds, it shuts down automatically.

Interaction

It’s nice that it can be activated with her walking stick, an item we can presume isn’t common, since she’s the only apparently blind character in the movie. It’s essentially gestural, though what a blind user needs with a flash for feedback is questionable. Maybe that signal is somehow for the students? What happens for sighted teachers? Do they need a walking stick? Or would a hand do? What’s the point of the flash then?

That it ends automatically seems pointlessly limited. Why wouldn’t it continue to spin until it’s dismissed? Maybe the way she activated it indicated it should only play for a short while, but it didn’t seem like that precise a gesture.

Of course it’s only one example of interaction, but there are so many other questions to answer. Are there different models that can be displayed? How would she select a different one? How would she zoom in and out? Can it display aimations? How would she control playback? There are quite a lot of unaddressed details for an imaginative designer to ponder.

Display

The display itself is more questionable.

Scale is tough to tell on it. How big is that thing? Students would have seen video of it for years, so maybe it’s not such an issue. But a human for scale in the display would have been more immediately recognizable. Or better yet, no scale: Show the thing at 1:1 in the space so its scale is immediately apparent to all the students. And more appropriately, terrifying.

And why the green wireframe? The bugs don’t look like that. If it was showing some important detail, like carapice density, maybe, but this looks pretty even. How about some realistic color instead? Do they think it would scare kids? (More than the “gee-whiz!” girl already is?)

And lastly there’s the title. Yes, having it rotate accomodates viewers in 360 degrees, but it only reads right for half the time. Copy it, flip it 180º on the y-axis, and stack it, and you’ve got the most important textual information readable at most any time from the display.

Better of course is more personal interaction, individual displays or augmented reality where a student can turn it to examine the arachnid themselves, control the zoom, or follow up on more information. (Wnat to know more?) But the school budget in the world of Starship Troopers was undoubtedly stripped to increase military budget (what a crappy world that would be amirite?), and this single mass display might be more cost effective.

A gorgeous but very persistent siamese cat who seemingly wants to be the center of attention, pulls out all the stops in an attempt to distract Tony Martinez from his guitar shredding solo. Try as the cat might however, the methods just don’t seem to work. They do however, make for a very amusing video.

via reddit

At a time when virtually everyone's afraid of losing their jobs to robots, one prominent Japanese company is charting a counter-intuitive and radically different course to the future — one in which skilled human workers are poised to make a comeback.

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Heartbleed is a catastrophic bug in OpenSSL:

"The Heartbleed bug allows anyone on the Internet to read the memory of the systems protected by the vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL software. This compromises the secret keys used to identify the service providers and to encrypt the traffic, the names and passwords of the users and the actual content. This allows attackers to eavesdrop communications, steal data directly from the services and users and to impersonate services and users.

Basically, an attacker can grab 64K of memory from a server. The attack leaves no trace, and can be done multiple times to grab a different random 64K of memory. This means that anything in memory -- SSL private keys, user keys, anything -- is vulnerable. And you have to assume that it is all compromised. All of it.

"Catastrophic" is the right word. On the scale of 1 to 10, this is an 11.

Half a million sites are vulnerable, including my own. Test your vulnerability here.

The bug has been patched. After you patch your systems, you have to get a new public/private key pair, update your SSL certificate, and then change every password that could potentially be affected.

At this point, the probability is close to one that every target has had its private keys extracted by multiple intelligence agencies. The real question is whether or not someone deliberately inserted this bug into OpenSSL, and has had two years of unfettered access to everything. My guess is accident, but I have no proof.

This article is worth reading. Hacker News thread is filled with commentary. XKCD cartoon.

EDITED TO ADD (4/9): Has anyone looked at all the low-margin non-upgradable embedded systems that use OpenSSL? An upgrade path that involves the trash, a visit to Best Buy, and a credit card isn't going to be fun for anyone.

EDITED TO ADD (4/10): I'm hearing that the CAs are completely clogged, trying to reissue so many new certificates. And I'm not sure we have anything close to the infrastructure necessary to revoke half a million certificates.

Possible evidence that Heartbleed was exploited last year.

EDITED TO ADD (4/10): I wonder if there is going to be some backlash from the mainstream press and the public. If nothing really bad happens -- if this turns out to be something like the Y2K bug -- then we are going to face criticisms of crying wolf.

EDITED TO ADD (4/11): Brian Krebs and Ed Felten on how to protect yourself from Heartbleed.

teal-deer:

sunreon:

bottledspider:

sim0nbaz:

foxsan:

shuttersmiley:

sourcedumal:

jackthebard:

Just remember. There is no such thing as a fake geek girl.
There are only fake geek boys.
Science fiction was invented by a woman.

Specifically a teenage girl. You know, someone who would be a part of the demographic that some of these boys are violently rejecting.

Isaac Asimov.

yo mary shelley wrote frankenstein in 1818 and isaac asimov was born in 1920 so you kinda get my point

#in love wit hthis post#except i think there’s a woman who came before shelley who inspired her???#i remember seeing a post like this but with that addendum and haven’t been able to find it again#i hope i can tho since she seems fascinating

YEAH SO STRAP IN MOTHERFUCKERS I’M ABOUT TO TELL YOU ABOUT MARGARET “MAD MADGE” CAVENDISH

• she wrote the first science-fiction novel, a century and a half before Frankenstein. It has bear-men and spider-men and ZOMBIE ARMIES and FISH-MEN WITH BOMBS.
• she was the first woman to publish her autobiography
• she was all into science and hung out with the Royal Society and was bros with Hobbes and Descartes
• she was super-shy but at the same time wanted to be super-famous (“though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second; yet, I will endeavour to be, Margaret the First: and, though I have neither Power, Time nor Occasion, to be a great Conqueror, like Alexander, or Cesar; yet, rather than not be Mistress of a World, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made One of my own”) and she wore CRAZY OUTFITS and Samuel Pepys was all like “I SAW THE DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE TODAY YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE THE CRAZY SHIT SHE WAS WEARING SHE’S REALLY HOT THO”
• she wrote a TON of stuff, poetry and drama and natural philosophy and a lot of it wasn’t that good because she wasn’t educated and some people thought she was a nutcase for being a WOMAN who WROTE THINGS but she just COULD NOT STOP WRITING
• this passage: “but of the second rank are for the most part those we call Insects, whose production proceds from such causes as have no conformity or likeness with their produced Effects; as for example, Maggots bred out of Cheese, and several others generated out of Earth, Water, and the like. But said the Empress, there is some likeness between Maggots and Cheese; for Cheese has no blood, nor Maggots neither; besides, they have almost the same taste which Cheese has. This proves nothing, answered they; for Maggots have a visible, local, progressive motion, which Cheese hath not. The Empress replied, That when all the Cheese was turned into Maggots, it might be said to have local, progressive motion. They answered, That when the Cheese by its own figurative motions was changed into Maggots, it was no more Cheese”
• I know I’m forgetting more awesome stuff about her but tl;dr SHE WAS AWESOME

This post got better.

D&D inspiration 

*e* Also jesus christ dear dude who said Issac Asimov: Asimov wasn’t even the first MALE science fiction writer, you ever fucking heard of HG Wells and Jules Verne? Edgar Allan Poe? And these two ladies predated them all and inspired them all. Chriiiist. If you’re going to attempt to mansplain at least fucking know your genre. Fucking fake geek boys, get off my motherfucking lawn. 

(chuckle) Madge was a trip. I can just see her off in a corner of Heaven somewhere with Hypatia and all the FRS science bros, blowing things up.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sesame Go is a new video subscription service from the non-profit educational organization Sesame Workshop. The service provides a child-safe and ad-free alternative to other video streaming options, and is accessible from a computer, smartphone, or tablet. Sesame Street, Pinky Dinky Doo, and Sesame Street Classics episodes are currently available for streaming via Sesame Go.

via Sesame Street

As you’ve probably heard, the Heartbleed bug exposes websites that use a popular encryption technology to malicious attacks, and some of your passwords—and personal data—may well have been compromised. The vulnerable software, OpenSSL, is used to encrypt something like two-thirds of all sites on the web.

Who’s affected?

GitHub user Mustafa Al-Bassam performed a mass scan for vulnerable sites at 16:00 UTC (noon US eastern time) on April 8th. It features over 10,000 websites, and he found that 627 of them were vulnerable to the bug. Yahoo sites (including email and Tumblr) were vulnerable, as was the popular dating site OkCupid.

What you can do now

We recommend searching the list linked above for your email provider, bank, and so on. Keep in mind that many of the sites that were vulnerable yesterday have since fixed their security problem. Check your inbox—if a site you use has been made safe again, it may have emailed you to let you know.

If you find yourself about to log in to a page that isn’t on the GitHub list, you can use this open-source Heartbleed test to be sure it’s safe. That test attempts to interact with the site and extract a small amount of memory from it, mimicking the actions of a hacker stealing data, and alerts you if the site is vulnerable. If you use Google Chrome as your browser, you can get an extension that runs the test on command.

If you find that a site is still vulnerable, don’t enter any passwords or data that it doesn’t already have.

Why you need to hold off on changing your password

It’s tempting to freak out and change all your passwords immediately, but there’s no point in doing so before the sites you use are fixed—or else someone could just steal your new password. If one of the sites you use is vulnerable, make sure all other sites you use have unique passwords. (Many hackers will try to get into your other accounts using the one password they’ve found, because they know how lazy we are about coming up with new passwords.) At this point, it’s more prudent to wait for good news first. Once you’ve gotten the okay, take this opportunity to make your passwords extra secure. Or just give up and make them all Password1234.

Some helpful advice from The Onion Router

Tor(previously an acronym for The Onion Router), a free software program that makes your web browsing anonymous, has a further recommendation for those that value their privacy: Stay away from the internet for the next few days, suggests a post on Tor’s blog, “while things settle.”

Fly me to the moon

credit: Jordan

I'm not waiting for various businesses to contact me, I'm contacting them asking if they're vulnerable and if so what's the plan.

Changing your password is not a fix. Every site that is using a version of OpenSSL that has the bug has to be updated or patched. Obviously, the sooner the better.

Technical details here including the C code for the bug and the fix.

So far I've only heard from only a couple of very seriously technical sites, pubnub.com and oauth.io. It's not clear if credit card companies, online stores like Amazon, banks and brokerage firms, are vulnerable, and if so how quickly they're installing the patched software. We're in that awful period where the vulnerability has been fully documented publicly. No one knows if any hackers were aware of the problem before it was discovered, but there is no doubt the bad guys know about it now.

This is one of the reasons why the Internet of Things hype is so scary. Right now, in 2014, our entire financial system is accessible through a compromised system. That's bad enough. But what happens when our bodies are wired to the net. And our cars, homes, everything. It's great to think about when everything is working and everyone plays nice. But if you know anything about software and networks you know that's a naive dream.