An anonymous reader writes Christmas came early in Minneapolis! U.S. Internet has announced that they are now offering 10 Gbps service to all of their existing fiber customers. Their prior top tier service was 1 Gbps. The article also goes on to state that they're actively working on rolling out 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps fiber service as well."
It's been an interesting day for Kernel, the site powering Sony's digital rentals of The Interview. Not only did it briefly buckle under the pressure of people hammering its site to watch the movie, but apparently it didn't do a great job in securing copies of the film, either. Those who spent $5.99 to watch a 48-hour rental of The Interview on their browser could simply share the URL of the film with anyone else. Worse yet, anyone who had access to the link was able to save an unprotected copy locally through a super obvious loophole, something The Verge was able to confirm from different browsers and locations.
Kernel did not respond to a request for comment, but tweeted that it was "working on a fix as we speak," after the issue was pointed out.
Kernel was one of only a handful of places to get The Interview digitally, a day before its theatrical release in the US. The film became available today on YouTube Movies, Google Play, Xbox Video, as well as Sony's SeeTheInterview.com, which Kernel powers. The film's public debut was briefly canceled after Sony Pictures buckled to a hacker group that threatened violence for theatergoers and Sony employees, as well as leaking more documents. Sony did an about-face this week, rescheduling the release and adding today's video on demand release as an unexpected bonus.
Sam participated in an interview with Oprah Winfrey where he states that multiple gay NFL players reached out to him to thank him for coming out.
Michael Sam was the only openly gay player in the NFL when he reported to rookie camp in July, but he wasn't the only gay player in the league. Sam said in an interview with Oprah Winfrey that a handful of gay NFL players have thanked him for stepping forward.
In a brief teaser clip, Sam indicates that multiple players contacted him. While he doesn't provide names or numbers, he does state that they expressed their gratitude for his decision to publicly identify as gay.
Sam states that it was a small "few" who contacted him, but those who did said they wished they had his courage to come out, via The Washington Post:
"Gay men in the NFL reached out to me and showed their respect and admired my courage," Sam told Winfrey. "There's a lot of us out there. I'm not the only one. I'm just the only one who's open."
The entire interview will be aired along with a 90-minute documentary about Sam this Saturday night at 9 p.m. ET on OWN.
Sam was selected with the No. 249 overall pick in the 2014 Draft by the St. Louis Rams. Sam did not make the Rams' 53-man roster and was not added to the team's practice squad. He was signed to the Dallas Cowboys practice squad in September, before being released near the end of October.
Nearly five years ago I figured out a method to make clear ice blocks in a picnic cooler in what we now call the Directional Freezing or Cooler Method. It works from the top-down. Now a reader has figured out a moderately easy way to freeze in a cooler from the bottom-up.
In the top-down method, one simply fills an insulated cooler with water and leaves the top off. The water freezes only from the top down, and all the trapped air and impurities are pushed to the bottom, where a cloudy 25% or so will form if you let it freeze that long.
Freezing From The Bottom-Up
Commercial ice machines like the Clinebell freeze blocks of clear ice by freezing from a cold plate on the bottom, while a water pump near the surface keeps water circulating (thus preventing ice from forming on the surface).
Reader Nome Park wrote me to tell me about a method he developed that sort of combines these two methods for the home user, producing a mini-Clinebell-type block.
The cooler is insulated on all sides except for the bottom, and a small aquarium pump is used to keep water circulating at the top.
The white area on the bottom is the interior of the cooler with the foam/plastic cut off so it's no longer insulated on the bottom.
1. Cut the cooler bottom outside layers off a few inches up from the bottom. Park did this using a Dremmel tool and a knife. *Important* You only want to cut off the outer plastic and the foam insulation. Do not cut out the interior plastic otherwise it will not hold water.
2. Insulate the top lid. Park made a 2.5-inch thick piece of foam that fits snuggly inside the cooler (since the lids on these coolers tend not to be insulated. (Pump is just there for scale. It is not attached.)
3. Fill the cooler with water up to where the foam will hit it from the top.
4. Hang the (unused for your fish tank) aquarium pump from the top, so that it's just beneath the surface of the water. Put the foam piece on top and the lid on that. Park cut a little section out for the pump power cord.
5. Turn the pump on and wait for it to freeze. In Park's freezer, it takes 2 days and 2 hours to freeze (50 hours) into a block that isn't all the way frozen. If it goes too long (t 72 hours or so) the pump will freeze into the block and probably break.
6. Remove the cooler from the freezer, turn off the cord, turn the cooler upside-down, and wait for the block to slide out. (An hour is about normal). Now you're ready to cut it up.
I asked Park if he tried this without the pump just to see what happens, but he had not tried it, basing his system on the Clinebell.
So, for you ambitious sorts with large freezers, this might be a way to make larger blocks than with the small cooler at home.
Thank you much to reader Nome Park who not only took the time to perfect this method but also to send me detailed description and pictures.
Tensions have been high around law enforcement lately, to say the least. So when a YouTube commenter left a fairly specific murder threat against retired police officers in a comment thread, Google took it very seriously, despite his claims about its intent.
Under the username “Vets Hunting Cops,” 33-year-old Jeremiah M. Perez left the following comment on a YouTube video, Reuters reported:
SINCE DARREN WILSON our group has killed 6 retired sheriffs and cops … because of this event we will hunt two more in colorado this week … for every innocent citizen that cops kill WE, VETERANS WILL KILL RETIRED HELPLESS COPS.
COPS ARE THE REAL ENEMIES OF FREEDOM LOVING AMERICANS and TIME TO STRIKE BACK IN ALL OUT WAR IS NOW.
A statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado said that Google “urgently” alerted the FBI, and Perez was arrested uneventfully at his home in Colorado Springs. They determined that the threat was deliberately left to make people afraid and not to be followed through, according to the U.S. Attorney statement:
At that time they determined that he knew that law enforcement officers would see the post and his intent was for them to be fearful after reading it. He was then arrested.
But despite his intentions, Perez still faces as much as five years in federal prison if he’s convicted.
Let this be a clear message, folks: online threats are serious whether they’re meant to be or not. We talk a lot about this kind of thing, and this incident is simply a very visible example with its mention of Ferguson officer Darren Wilson and clear connection to the recent killing of two police officers in New York.
But threats like these against regular citizens happen every day online, and there’s a struggle in convincing some people that they’re not harmless “jokes.” My father was a police officer who had to retire just over ten years ago when he lost his eyesight. This comment chilled me to the bone, but it also made me think of the people out there on the Internet who have to face comments like this about themselves or loved ones on a regular basis. That’s not a world I want to live in, and it’s not something that any of us should find acceptable.
The Internet is a vast place, and due to its anonymity, you have no way of knowing if the person hurling threats your way is serious or not. But that anonymity isn’t an excuse. FBI Denver Special Agent in Charge Thomas Ravenelle told Reuters, “The perceived anonymity of the Internet will not serve as a shield for espousing violence.”
And it shouldn’t, no matter at whom that violence is aimed.
“Know Before You Fly” is an informational animation by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) about drone safety for people who receive unpiloted aircraft as gifts for the holidays. The video gives operators basic ground rules like keeping the aircraft below 400 feet, away from airports, and within their line of site. The FAA also works in facts like the height of the Great Pyramid of Giza (455 feet) and the weight of the world’s largest bunny rabbit (Ralph, 55 pounds) as references for the regulations.
More information about drone safety and FAA regulation can be found at KnowBeforeYouFly.org.
Folks, we have a new hero in our midst, and it's a Cincinnati-area man named Jasen Dixon who built an illuminated, zombie-themed Nativity scene in his front yard ... complete with undead baby Jesus. Alas, his neighbors were none too pleased with his handiwork.
Prosecutors have a limited ability to use visuals while making their case in a trial, but apparently, some are starting to push it too far with the use of PowerPoint. In a report on the use of slideshows during trials, The Marshall Project points to a number of instances where prosecutors have been reprimanded or convictions have been overturned because of how PowerPoint was used. Basically, PowerPoint seems to be making it far too easy for prosecutors to make ridiculous and inappropriate slideshows — for instance, slathering the word "guilty" in big red letters over a defendant's head — thus improperly affecting the outcome of the trial.
Brian Krebs has a blogpost citing those who claim evidence of North Korea involvement in the massive Sony hack. He uses as an example the similarities between the Sony defacement and a South Korean defacement that was attributed to the North Koreans. He shows these two images side-by-side so that you can see that they are obvious similar.
However, they don't look similar at all. This is generally what all website defacements look like. Specifically, the common components among defacements in are:
black background
green, red, and white foreground
"Hacked by" message
WARNING banner
Phrack-style headers (like ::: on either side of header)
Powerful picture in center, often a skull
Message that strokes the ego, often "we are legion" style
In the bottom of this post, I include a gallery of other defacement pictures, so that you can see that this is normal hacker underground culture.
There are certainly some similarities, such as the "we have all your data" message. But that's easily explained by the fact that the South Korean hack was widely popularized in the media, so it's easy to see how they would take this as inspiration. Or, it's just simply that if the goal of your hack is to steal data and extort the victim, this is pretty much always going to be how your phrase it.
At the same time, there are many dissimilar items. One does multiple colors in the same word, the other doesn't. One capitalizes every word, one doesn't. One appears to have copied and pasted from a word processor with broken unicode characters, the other didn't. Stylistically, these point to very different groups.
This is an example of something called confirmation bias, a well known logical fallacy. Once you've decide on the conclusion ("North Korea hackers"), your perception of the evidence changes. Everything you see starts to confirm your conclusion. This is especially true when you are ignorant of the larger perspective. To those of us with perspective, we don't see the evidence that you believe in.
I see the similarities with the underground as disproof of DPRK involvement. North Korean hackers are trained as professional, nation state hackers. They aren't part of the vast world wide underground of hackers, were kids start as teenagers and are mentored by the system. This vast underground shares culture, tools, techniques, and processes. That's why attacks from wildly diverse cultures often appear the same. North Korean may certainly recruit foreign hackers into their teams, or contract out tasks to foreign groups, but it's unlikely their own cybersoldiers would behave in this way.
Here are a bunch of defacements. See for yourself whether the above two are particularly similar.
Sony Pictures recently attempted to enter talks with Apple over distributing its highly-anticipated film "The Interview" on iTunes, reportsThe New York Times. The report notes that Apple showed no interest in the offer, which came shortly after Sony Pictures announced that it would be canceling the wide theatrical release of the movie after being threatened by hackers.
It remained unclear, however, whether any on-demand service would take "The Interview." According to people briefed on the matter, Sony had in recent days asked the White House for help in lining up a single technology partner — Apple, which operates iTunes — but the tech company was not interested, at least not on a speedy time table. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.
Sony announced yesterday that it would be showing "The Interview" at select independent cinemas, with Sony Entertainment Chairman and CEO Michael Lynton noting that the company is "continuing our efforts to secure more platforms and more theaters so that this movie reaches the largest possible audience.”
The movie has been the subject of controversy throughout the later half of 2014, as it depicts two journalists attempting to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un under the guidance of the CIA. The hacking of Sony Pictures and the movie's cancellation prompted widespread reaction, with U.S. President Barack Obama calling the latter move a "mistake."
A computer lecturer has accused the 2013 movie about WikiLeaks "The Fifth Estate" of piracy after he discovered that his slideshows appear in the movie without his permission.
Michael Steil writes on his Page Table blog that when watching the movie, he recognised one of the phrases as something he would say. Sure enough, it was something he actually said himself during a 2007 talk in Berlin.
The scene in question takes place when the character of Julian Assange, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, gives a lecture in Berlin accompanied by other WikiLeaks employees. On a board behind Assange is a set of cards that he links with string.
It turns out that pretty much all of those cards were lifted without attribution from Steil's 2007 talk.
Here's a still image of the scene showing Cumberbatch acting next to the cardboard display:
And here's the slideshow which Steil accuses the filmmakers of using for the cards:
You can see that the central card in the movie still reads "Linux is Inevitable," which is the second slide in Steil's slideshow.
But it's not just a single slide that the filmmakers used. Steil claims that "most slides" shown on the board are "direct copies" of either his 2007 talk, or another lecture that he gave in 2008.
Windows 7 showed up in the market to "save" Microsoft after the company failed to market the feature-heavy Vista properly and the public soured on it. After all these years, I can accurately conclude that Vista was head and shoulders above Windows 7.
IDRIS AS THE MALE PROTAGONIST IN EVERY FRANCHISE BEAT FOR REAL
The chairwoman of Sony Pictures, whose hacked emails have entranced everyone from North Korea to George Clooney, has said who should take over from Daniel Craig as the ninth actor to play the character onscreen: “Idris should be the next bond.”
She means Idris Elba, the actor best known for playing Stringer Bell on HBO’s The Wire.
Asked once on an AMA chat on Reddit if he would play Bond if asked, Elba, a Londoner, said, “Yes, if it was offered to me, absolutely.” Bond is Sony’s prized film franchise—so if chairwoman Amy Pascal says it’s a good idea, Elba may be getting a call in a couple of years.
That would make it the other enormous film franchise to have a black lead actor. After waiting 30 years for sequels to the original Star Wars trilogy, the first shot fanboys saw in the recent teaser for Star Wars: The Force Awakens opened with actor John Boyega looking utterly terrified in a stormtrooper’s uniform:
The #BlackStormtrooper hashtag immediately started trending on Twitter. It is a safe bet that his will be an integral part in the film, but only time will tell if Boyega’s role will be bigger than one-time Millenium Falcon owner, Billy Dee Williams:
Elba is no stranger to getting questions on the race of characters he plays. In the Thor films, he plays Heimdall, a Norse god. Many racists were unhappy with this. Elba was unapologetic. As he was quoted in the UK press:
There has been a big debate about it: can a black man play a Nordic character? Hang about, Thor’s mythical, right? Thor has a hammer that flies to him when he clicks his fingers. That’s OK, but the colour of my skin is wrong?
I think that’s a sign of the times for the future. I think we will see multi-level casting. I think we will see that, and I think that’s good.”
Once upon a time, the idea of a James Bond film and a Star Wars movie featuring black actors in starring roles would have been considered fantasy. But it could happen sooner than most would have thought.
Imagine being forced to listen to other people discuss the following question: "Is the Gaza War Really Over?"
Now imagine those people include Def Jam founder Russell Simmons, baby-resembling GOP talking point-scribbler Frank Luntz, producer Ryan Kavanaugh, former NBC and Universal co-chair Ben Silverman, actresses Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman, at least three rabbis, and, of course Ryan Seacrest.
Thanks to emails included in the recent Sony mega-dump, you don't have to use your imagination.
The comics were created by cartoonist John Campbell, best known for the webcomic Pictures For Sad Children and a well-publicized episode following a very successful Kickstarter campaign, during which Campbell claimed to have faked depression, and then followed by claiming to have faked faking depression, while burning the comics he’d raised money to distribute. As you might expect from that description — especially if you were familiar with PFSC — the comics about Keaton get really strange, really quickly, starting with a story about his birth.
Florida has leapfrogged New York to rank as the third most populous U.S. state, the Census Bureau reported on Tuesday, reflecting demographic trends that are reshaping American politics and culture, along with state bragging rights.
With 19.9 million residents, Florida surpassed New York by a slim margin to rank behind two other warm-weather states: California, population 38.8 million, and Texas, 27 million.
New York, while still growing, dropped to fourth with 19.7 million residents, the July 2014 tally found, continuing the state's longtime slide from the top of the national rankings.
please tell me this ends with someone putting a bunch of ants in the house and adding a gingerbread truck named “Not A Creature Will Be Stirring Exterminators”
It’s quite awesome really, many of them just get eaten by Jupiter and are never seen again. The rest usually get catapulted back into space by Jupiter’s immense gravity. It’s quite amazing just how many things are keeping Earth alive and the way it is.
I wound up working 50 hours, earning almost $600 in fares. And I actually made a lot more than that. Lyft paid me $1,500 (which I'll be donating to DC Central Kitchen) under a program that guaranteed drivers would make $30 per hour if they worked 50 hours. In other words, Lyft paid me more than $2 for every dollar in revenue I generated for them.
That absurdly generous compensation, funded by millions in venture capital, is part of Lyft's strategy to expand its roster of drivers in order to better compete with Uber. Obviously, these deals can't last, and my experience left me skeptical that drivers will be able to make anywhere close to $30 per hour without them.
A man with a high-powered rifle was killed by police near Atlanta early on Monday after a tense four-hour standoff during which he fired at officers and neighbors, a police spokesman said.
Sony Pictures recently attempted to enter talks with Apple over distributing its highly-anticipated film "The Interview" on iTunes, reports The New York Times. The report notes that Apple showed no interest in the offer, which came shortly after Sony Pictures announced that it would be canceling the wide theatrical release of the movie after being threatened by hackers. 
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