One Second on the Internet
A visual display of the data being uploaded every second.
Sarah Stillman: The Use and Abuse of Civil Forfeiture
The basic principle behind asset forfeiture is appealing. It enables authorities to confiscate cash or property obtained through illicit means, and, in many states, funnel the proceeds directly into the fight against crime. But the system has also given rise to corruption and violations of civil lib...
Hasnain says:
Really long, equally horrifying.
"It involved, in Guillory’s analysis, “a government entity that enjoys the benefit of most doubts, and a D.A. who enjoyed the most gold-plated kind of immunity there is: absolute prosecutorial immunity.” That was why, he thinks, authorities in Tenaha had managed to keep their dirty work largely obscured from public view—“shitting in high cotton,” he calls it."
Posted on 2013-08-05T20:54:58+0000
Lab-grown burger eaten in London
The world's first lab-grown burger was cooked and eaten at a news conference in London on Monday.
Hasnain says:
Man eats burger. News at 11.
On a more serious note, this is pretty cool.
Posted on 2013-08-05T13:52:12+0000
Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers in scanned documents · D. Kriesel
In this article I present in which way scanners / copiers of the Xerox WorkCentre Line randomly alter written numbers in pages that are scanned. This is not an OCR problem (as we switched off OCR on purpose), it is a lot worse – patches of the pixel data are randomly replaced in a very subtle and da...
The Factoring Dead: Preparing for the Cryptopocalypse
A talk at Black Hat USA 2013 discussing recent advances in academic research that imperils two critical algorithms upon which Internet trust rests: RSA and Diff
Hasnain has not yet written a summary for this.
Posted on 2013-08-04T17:35:42+0000
Sprites mods - Hard disk hacking - Intro
Apart from this article, I also gave a talk at OHM2013 about this subject. As soon as the video recordings made at that time are available, I'll link there.
Hasnain says:
Root-kit in the hard-disk itself, so it stays on after a reinstall. Pretty cool stuff.
Posted on 2013-08-04T13:04:54+0000
Michael Lewis: Did Goldman Sachs Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?
With Sergey Aleynikov in prison for lifting computer code from Goldman Sachs, Michael Lewis convenes a private “jury” to determine what he actually did wrong.
Scientific Breakthrough Lets SnappyCam App Take 20 Full-Res Photos Per Second | TechCrunch
Your standard iPhone camera app is actually pretty slow, taking just three to six photos per second at 8 megapixels each. But with SnappyCam 3.0 you can shoot 20 full-resolution photos per second thanks to a breakthrough in discrete cosine transform JPG science by its inventor. 20 frames per secon..
Hasnain says:
This is cool, though "thanks to a breakthrough in discrete cosine transform JPG science by its inventor." does indicate how good the reporting is.
Posted on 2013-08-01T17:00:03+0000
Your app makes me fat
In 1999, Professor Baba Shiv (currently at Stanford) and his co-author Alex Fedorikhin did a simple experiment on 165 grad students.They asked half to memorize a seven-digit number and the other half to memorize a two-digit number. After completing the memorization task, participants were told the e...
Hasnain has not yet written a summary for this.
Posted on 2013-07-30T11:04:48+0000
Computer scientists develop 'mathematical jigsaw puzzles' to encrypt software
(Phys.org) —UCLA computer science professor Amit Sahai and a team of researchers have designed a system to encrypt software so that it only allows someone to use a program as intended while preventing any deciphering of the code behind it. This is known in computer science as 'software obfuscation,'...
Hasnain has not yet written a summary for this.
Posted on 2013-07-30T09:38:22+0000