An evil phishing worm masquerading as "Google Docs" took the Internet by storm today. It sent an e-mail claiming to be from a friend or relative who wanted to share a document with you. Clicking on the "Open in Docs" button asked you to log in to Google, then it popped up a familiar OAuth request asking for some permissions. If you clicked "Allow," the permissions granted it full control over your e-mail and access to all your contacts. The worm then e-mailed everyone in your contacts list before doing god-only-knows what else to the victim's e-mail.
The interesting thing about this worm was just how convincing it was. The e-mail was great—it used the exact same language as a Google Docs sharing e-mail and the exact same "Open" button. Clicking on the link brought up an authentic Google log-in page, served up from Google's servers. Then you were presented a real Google OAuth permissions page, also from Google's servers. The trick was that the app claiming to be "Google Docs" wasn't really Google Docs. The screen showed a third-party app with the name "Google Docs" and a profile picture that matched the Google Docs logo.
Bryan Fuller, showrunner for Starz adaptation of Neil Gaiman’sAmerican Gods, has been posting new American Gods character posters to his Twitter account. We have Ricky Whittle as Shadow Moon, Ian McShane as Mr. Wednesday, Emily Browning as Laura Moon, Yetide Badaki as Bilquis, Crispin Glover as Mr. World, Peter Stormare as Czernobog, Orlando Jones as Mr. Nancy, Pablo Schreiber as Mad Sweeney, Bruce Langley as Technical Boy, and finally Kristin Chenoweth as Easter.
Intel announced today the first Optane-branded product using its new 3D XPoint memory: the catchily named Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X. It's a 375GB SSD on a PCIe card. Initial limited availability starts today, for $1520, with broad availability in the second half of the year. In the second quarter, a 750GB PCIe model, and a 375GB model in the U.2 form factor will be released, and in the second half of the year, a 1.5TB PCIe card, and 750GB and 1.5TB U.2 stick, are planned.
3D XPoint is a new kind of persistent solid state memory devised by Intel and Micron. Details on how the memory actually works remain scarce—it's generally believed to use some kind of change in resistance to record data—but its performance characteristics and technical capabilities make it appealing for a wide range of applications.
When it was first announced in 2015, Intel claimed it would be 1,000 times faster than NAND flash, 10 times denser than DRAM, and 1,000 times better endurance than NAND, though without saying "faster at what" or "what kind of NAND" or anything like that. With the shipping product, these comparisons are now clearer, as one of Intel's slides make clear: 3D XPoint has about one thousandth the latency of NAND flash (or about ten times the latency of DRAM), and tens times the density of DRAM.
Enlarge / Early versions of the Machines from The Animatrix. (credit: The Animatrix)
Blade Runner and Mad Max are back, so why not The Matrix? The Hollywood Reporter says sources have confirmed that Warner Bros is starting work on a reboot of The Matrix, and it even has a star in mind: Michael B. Jordan, who recently broke out as the star of Creed. Zak Penn (Alphas, X-Men: The Last Stand, The Incredible Hulk) is currently writing a treatment.
The Matrix was not expected to be a blockbuster when Warners released it in March 1999. At the time, writer/director siblings the Wachowskis were best known for an indie film noir called Bound about lesbian lovers plotting the ultimate crime. But the innovative camera effects (bullet time!) and futuristic originality of The Matrix blew audiences away, rocketing it to the fourth-highest box office on Earth that year. Who could forget badass Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus, offering the blue and red pills, or Carrie Ann Moss as Trinity, using nmap when she wasn't doing gun ballet. And then there was Keanu Reeves as Neo, downloading data over his brain port and intoning gravely, "I know kung-fu."
Though the sequels never lived up to the promise of the first film, the franchise was a game changer, influencing science fiction to this day. Everything from Inception to Mr. Robot owes something to the style and themes that the Wachowskis popularized. Plus, bullet time has forever left its mark on action scenes, both technologically and stylistically. Any time you see a fight scene that moves between fast and slow motion, viewed in 360 degrees, you are looking at a special effect that the Wachowskis invented.
“Functional, healthy family relationships can’t be funny! Only dysfunctional relationships where the family members despise each other can be hilarious!”
UM
“Everything has to be edgy and dark and violent and push the line to be good!”
If you genuinely believe that, then you’re not trying hard enough.
We've sold half the tickets for BAHFest London! BUT, there's still time to come see me, Simon Singh, Helen Keen, and more turbogeeks on March 25, up at Imperial.
Many organizations have pursued Big Data as a panacea. For years, there has been an implicit strategy to capture as much data as possible and then figure out what to do with all of it later.
Big Data has swelled beyond the capacity of data-driven marketers to make sense of it all. IBM estimates that 90% of the world’s data today was created in the last two years. Many companies have built large “data lakes” to capture larger and larger data sets without clear use cases in mind.
Gartner officially declared Big Data mainstream by removing it from their Hype Cycle. Yet they predict that in 2017, “60% of big data projects will fail to go beyond piloting and experimentation, and will be abandoned.”
As Big Data matures beyond the hype, organizations are re-evaluating how they approach it. Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, CMO at Mozilla, describes an interesting strategic shift from “Big Data” to “Lean Data”:
“For growth-minded companies, collecting customer data for the sake of collecting data is more risk than the rewards can usually justify. Instead, we should be looking for ways to collect less data and go lean. Why? Because our collection tools create expensive overhead and risks that are impacting the trust of our customers in a negative way…
“For the most part, compiling bigger and more complex sets of customer data will not lead to the big profit and marketshare breakthroughs that Big Data promises. Instead, we marketers must learn to live and think lean. The twin false gods of Big Data and MarTech will continue to encourage thousands of marketers to gather all the data they can wielding an ever-expanding arsenal of tools to sift through it all, with little discussion about whether the mad scramble to vacuum up customer info is worth the trouble, expense, and risk…
“I challenge the assumption that more data is always better. Rather, I say you can have too much of a good thing. And I call that sort of scrape-first think-later behavior lazy marketing.”
Here are a few other cartoons I’ve drawn about Big Data over the years.
by Andrew Liszewski on Sploid, shared by Beth Elderkin to io9
For being an amateur Lego enthusiast, Jason Allemann, of JK Brickworks, has created some masterfully-engineered toys made from nothing but plastic bricks. However, his partner, Kristal Dubois, might have just outdone him with a flying bat sculpture featuring some amazingly articulated wings.
Since each frame has to ensure the blade is in the same position as the last it therefore needs to be in sync with the rpm of the rotar blades. Shutter speed then needs to be fast enough to freeze the blade without too much motion blur within each frame.
Here the rotor has five blades, now lets say the rpm of the rotor is 300. That means, per rotation, a blade is in a specific spot on five counts. That gives us an effective rpm of 1500. 1500rpm / 60secs = 25.
Therefore shooting at 25fps will ensure the rotor blades are shot in the same position every frame. Each frame then has to be shot at a fast enough shutter speed to freeze the blade for minimal motion blur.
Google has a long history of introducing, then forgetting about, and finally officially killing off its products. Most recently, that included Google Spaces, a service that most of us never knew existed to begin with. Let’s take a tour of some of our favorite services Google’s killed off over the years.
As tyrants take control of democracies, they typically do 7 things:
1. They exaggerate
their mandate to govern – claiming, for example, that they won an election by a
“landslide” even after losing the popular vote. They criticize any finding that they
or co-conspirators stole the election. And they repeatedly claim “massive voter fraud” in the absence of any evidence, in order to have an excuse to restrict voting
by opponents in subsequent elections.
2. They turn the public
against journalists or media outlets that criticize them, calling them
“deceitful” and “scum,” and telling the public that the press is a “public enemy.” They hold few, if any, press conferences, and prefer to communicate with the public directly through mass rallies and unfiltered
statements (or what we might now call “tweets”).
3. They repeatedly lie
to the public, even when confronted with the facts. Repeated enough, these lies cause some of the public to doubt the truth, and to believe fictions that
support the tyrants’ goals.
4. They blame economic
stresses on immigrants or racial or religious minorities, and foment public
bias or even violence against them. They threaten mass deportations, “registries” of
religious minorities, and the banning of refugees.
5. They attack the motives of anyone who
opposes them, including judges. They attribute acts of domestic violence to “enemies
within,” and use such events as excuses to beef up internal security and limit
civil liberties.
6. They appoint family
members to high positions of authority. They ppoint their own personal security
force rather than a security detail accountable to the public. And they put
generals into top civilian posts.
7.They keep their personal finances secret, and draw no distinction between personal
property and public property – profiteering from their public office.
A few hours ago, NASA announced the discovery of a potentially habitable ‘Sister Solar System’ just 39 light-years away – boasting seven Earth-sized planets orbiting a star called TRAPPIST-1. These planets appear to be made of rock, have life-friendly surface temperatures, and some could potentially host liquid water, so NASA went ahead and created a whole bunch of travel posters and fan art of the coolest new place in the Universe for us to get all misty-eyed about.
We’ve got a whole lot more to learn about the TRAPPIST-1 system – and a lot of speculation that will need to be backed up by more data – but holy crap, this is an incredible discovery. And NASA went all-out to mark the occasion, launching an entire website dedicated to our Sister Solar System, complete with travel posters, infographics, videos, and glimpses into the future of our investigations of TRAPPIST-1.
ive been writing this program to keep track of when you do day to day tasks like doing dishes/laundry. anyways my streak of “bugs in things i write manifesting as infinite loops of unexpectedly poignant user prompts” continues
