Singular 9 hopes to launch a crowdfunding campaign for an e-ink console.
Ink Console takes inspiration from choose-your-own-adventure books and retro text-based video games. It lets you play as you read, turning reading into a dynamic and interactive adventure. And the aim is to encourage people to develop their own gamebooks too.
Grant Smith got one of the USPS delivery scam text messages. He decided to track the scammers and uncovered a Chinese-language group behind the campaign. He hacked their systems, discovered their mechanisms, and gathered victim data. He handed it to USPS, bank, and FBI investigators – as well published information about their operations online and at Defcon.
He discovered the group sold their scamming kits to set up their own operations for a $200/mo subscription. Similar scams showed up in half dozen other countries.
What’s interesting is he reported how many people fell for it. The triad sent 50,000-100,000 text messages a day. In total, US victims for just this one (albeit very large) operation entered 438,669 credit card numbers. Many people entered multiple cards.
Think Choose Your Own Adventure books were the first? Think again
Consider the Consequences! was an interactive romantic novel published in 1930 – and was made available on the internet archive. There’s even an online game version on itch.io.
Before Netflix’s Bandersnatch, the world’s first interactive movie was a Czech film called Kinoautomat.
If you want some fun, there are a few folks that read/review the books online:
Scientists have used a innovative method to map out the transition of symbols into words. Using an interesting strategy, scientists tracked the how our visual system picks up on the shapes and converts them into symbols, then into concepts.
Over two weeks, the scientists taught made-up words written in two unfamiliar, archaic scripts to 24 native English–speaking adults. The words were assigned the meanings of common nouns, such as lemon or truck. Then the researchers used functional MRI scans to track which tiny chunks of brain in that region became active when participants were shown the words learned in training.
The way letters look — curves or staunch lines — takes hold in the back of the ventral occipitotemporal cortex, the team found. But when sounds and meanings come into play, an area further forward in that brain region that better handles abstract concepts seemed to kick into gear.
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New Wave makes some amazing, fully functioning miniature retro arcade models – or replicades. One of their more recent additions was the ever-fabulous arcade fortune telling machine Zoltar.
From around 2009 to 2013 under the Obama administration, the U.S. intelligence community experienced crippling intelligence failures related to its secret internet-based communications system. Problems originated in Iran and spiderwebbed to other countries, and was left unrepaired — despite warnings about what was happening — until more than two dozen sources died in China in 2011 and 2012 as a result. This had been noticed in the media, and confirmed by 11 former intelligence and national security officials.
The failure? Utilizing a bunch of innocuous looking internet sites – including a fake Star Wars fan site – which were compromised and then patterns figured out on how the CIA ran other sites the same way. It caused a chain reaction of exposing sources – who were promptly arrested or killed.
Reuters report in 2022, America’s Throwaway Spies, which went into further detail on how individual CIA agents were exposed by the Iranians, and included the incredible revelation that the IP addresses for the CIA’s sites were sequential, meaning that once one was identified it was easy to find others that likely belonged to the same network.
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