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Category: Interesting or Cool

Fingerprints are not security

Fingerprints are not security

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Jan Krissler, known in hacker circles as Starbug, was already known for his high-profile stunt of cracking Apple TouchID sensors within 24 hours of the iPhone 5S release. In this case, he used several easily taken close-range photos of German defense minister Ursula von der Leyen, including one gleaned from a press release issued by her own office and another he took himself from three meters away, to reverse-engineer her fingerprint and pass biometric scans.

The same conference also demonstrated a “corneal keylogger”. The idea behind the attack is simple. A hacker may have access to a user’s phone camera, but not anything else. How to go from there to stealing all their passwords?

One way, demonstrated on stage, is to read what they’re typing by analyzing photographs of the reflections in their eyes. Smartphone cameras, even front-facing ones, are now high-resolution enough that such an attack is possible.

“Biometrics are not secrets… Ideally, they’re unique to each individual, but that’s not the same thing as being a secret.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/30/hacker-fakes-german-ministers-fingerprints-using-photos-of-her-hands

See-through Engine in 4K Slow-Motion

See-through Engine in 4K Slow-Motion

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Ever want to see what is really going on inside a combustion engine like your car? Warped Perception built a custom transparent acrylic head for a four-stroke engine so we can see what internal combustion looks like as it happens. He fed the engine with different types of fuel then captured the results in slow-motion.

0:58 is when the magic starts. 🙂

How to see a Museum

How to see a Museum

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Nick Gray of Museum Hacks gives hundreds of museum tours. As someone that likes to travel, museums can be a huge time suck and exhaust you. He’s come up with a system that sounds pretty awesome.

I’ll have to give it a try on my next trip…

Animated Sculptures of John Edmark

Animated Sculptures of John Edmark

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John Edmark‘s sculptures wiggle and twist before your eyes. It’s hard to believe that what you’re seeing is a real physical object—but we assure you it is, with a bit of trick photography and some heady mathematics thrown in for good measure. Blooms 2 (a year in the making) is the latest collection of wild strobe-animated sculptures that begin life as computer programs written in Python before being 3D printed and set in motion on a table, but the patterns you see are created, in a sense, by nature itself.

 

BLOOMS: Strobe Animated Sculptures Invented by John Edmark from Pier 9 on Vimeo.

Teddy Roosevelt on armchair critics

Teddy Roosevelt on armchair critics

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“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” – Teddy Roosevelt, from a speech delivered April 23rd, 1910 in Paris.

$200 dishes served on…iPads.

$200 dishes served on…iPads.

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Quince restaurant in San Francisco – you’ll find one of the most ridiculous and pretentious concepts in fine dining ever conceived- frog legs and white truffle croquettes served on an iPad.

A Dog In Search Of Gold

A video posted by rosé (@asap.rozzy) on

The croquettes plate is called A Dog In Search Of Gold, and it’s served on an iPad showing a video of dogs hunting for truffles, part of a $220 fixed-price supper that otherwise sounds quite delicious

Social Media sites are Highly Manipulable – by just as few as 3-5 accounts

Social Media sites are Highly Manipulable – by just as few as 3-5 accounts

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Research is demonstrating that changing the entire narrative on a topic is shockingly easy on social media sites. Sites that claim to be free of such manipulation via user-submitted content and using up/down vote systems such as Reddit are shockingly susceptible.

In most cases, researchers found it only took 1 bot casting 3-5 up/down votes at the right time to change the tone of an entire subreddit for/against something. Further experiments showed that it only took about $200 to get a completely false story to the front page of Reddit. There is growing evidence that this is already been happening in the Bitcoin Reddit forum.

This is likely not only going to be used by advertisers but foreign agencies to change the narratives of just about any topic. All of this comes on a budget that is just pennies compared to traditional advertising and military efforts.

Perhaps this will cause us to come full-circle back to curated media – or for a startup to start a vetting and verification service?

Either way, the old adage is as true than ever: Don’t believe it just because you read it on the internet. But now we might add: Also don’t believe it just because it gets lots of up/down votes.