Ninjazzon

THe Great Green Wall being built in Africa to halt the southern progress of the Sahara Desert is a favorite public works project of mine — it’s massive, ambitious, long-term, important, and if it works, the effect will repay the cost many times over. This video takes a quick look at some of the work being done on the wall in Senegal.

On June 5, 1981, journalists from around the world gathered at NASA’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. to watch as the Voyager 2 spacecraft became the first man-made object to reach Saturn. In the aftermath of this historic event, the main attraction wasn’t NASA’s staff. It was fellow journalist Jerry Pournelle. Pournelle had something none of them had ever seen before: a portable computer, the first mass-market one in history.

“There were over 100 members of the science press corps packed into the Von Karman Center (the press facility),” Pournelle wrote in his regular column for Byte magazine a few months later. “Most had typewriters. One or two had big, cumbersome word processors…nobody had anything near as convenient as the Osborne 1.”

Just six years earlier, the Altair 8800 had been unveiled at the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club. There, Steve Jobs recognized that the future of computing lay in the consumer market, not the hobbyist. But Jobs was not alone. He stood alongside someone who would go on to become a “frenemy” of sorts. Like Jobs, he was intensely charismatic. Like Jobs, he had a near-supernatural ability to sense what consumers wanted before they knew it themselves. And, like Jobs, he knew how to sell his ideas to the world.

A title drop is when a character in a movie says the title of the movie they're in. Here's a large-scale analysis of 73,921 movies from the last 80 years on how often, when and maybe even why that happens.

Today, almost everything about our lives is digitally recorded and stored somewhere. Each credit card purchase, personal medical diagnosis, and preference about music and books is recorded and then used to predict what we like and dislike, and—ultimately—who we are.

This often happens without our knowledge or consent. Personal information that corporations collect from our online behaviors sells for astonishing profits and incentivizes online actors to collect as much as possible. Every mouse click and screen swipe can be tracked and then sold to ad-tech companies and the data brokers that service them.

In an attempt to justify this pervasive surveillance ecosystem, corporations often claim to de-identify our data. This supposedly removes all personal information (such as a person’s name) from the data point (such as the fact that an unnamed person bought a particular medicine at a particular time and place). Personal data can also be aggregated, whereby data about multiple people is combined with the intention of removing personal identifying information and thereby protecting user privacy.

Sometimes companies say our personal data is “anonymized,” implying a one-way ratchet where it can never be dis-aggregated and re-identified. But this is not possible—anonymous data rarely stays this way. As Professor Matt Blaze, an expert in the field of cryptography and data privacy, succinctly summarized: “something that seems anonymous, more often than not, is not anonymous, even if it’s designed with the best intentions.”

In its 10 years of operation, Grindr had amassed millions of users and become a central cog in gay culture around the globe.

But to Yeagley, Grindr was something else: one of the tens of thousands of carelessly designed mobile phone apps that leaked massive amounts of data into the opaque world of online advertisers. That data, Yeagley knew, was easily accessible by anyone with a little technical know-how. So Yeagley—a technology consultant then in his late forties who had worked in and around government projects nearly his entire career—made a PowerPoint presentation and went out to demonstrate precisely how that data was a serious national security risk.

As he would explain in a succession of bland government conference rooms, Yeagley was able to access the geolocation data on Grindr users through a hidden but ubiquitous entry point: the digital advertising exchanges that serve up the little digital banner ads along the top of Grindr and nearly every other ad-supported mobile app and website. This was possible because of the way online ad space is sold, through near-instantaneous auctions in a process called real-time bidding. Those auctions were rife with surveillance potential. You know that ad that seems to follow you around the internet? It’s tracking you in more ways than one. In some cases, it’s making your precise location available in near-real time to both advertisers and people like Mike Yeagley, who specialized in obtaining unique data sets for government agencies.

Questions like “Which browser should I use?” regularly come up on the r/browsers subreddit. I sometimes respond to these posts, but my quick replies usually only contain one or two points. To be honest, until recently I wasn’t even sure myself why I use Firefox. Of course it’s a pretty good browser, but that doesn’t explain why I’ve stubbornly stayed loyal to Firefox for more than a decade. After giving it a bit more thought, I came up with the following reasons.

New documents filed Monday, February 26 reveal that videogame giant Nintendo is taking action against the creators of the popular emulator tool Yuzu.

The copyright infringement filing, from Nintendo of America, states that the Yuzu tool (from developer Tropic Haze LLC) illegally circumvents the software encryption and copyright protection systems of Nintendo Switch titles, and thus facilitates piracy and infringes copyright under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Nintendo alleges that Tropic Haze's free Yuzu emulator tool unlawfully allows pirated Switch games to be played on PCs and other devices, bypassing Nintendo's protection measures.

The official Yuzu website suggests that the tool is to be used with software you yourself own: "You are legally required to dump your games from your Nintendo Switch" — but it's common knowledge, that this is not how these tools are primarily used.

Vehicle theft is an issue that affects us all collectively. As cybersecurity and technology professionals, we recognize the importance of acting rapidly to reduce its impact on Canadians. That being said, we believe the federal government’s proposal, particularly the prohibition of security research tools, is ill-advised, overbroad and most importantly, will be counterproductive.

Now there’s two words you don’t often see together. In fact, Google Trends lists zero occurrences of the phrase between 2004 and now. Even “German humor” produces a graph (albeit a rather flat one). But not only is there some evidence that Swiss comedy does exist, it might just be that being well-hidden is kind of its thing. Find it and laugh. Or don’t, and the joke’s on you!

That evidence, as it turns out, is cartographic. The Swiss Federal Office of National Topography, Swisstopo for short, is a decidedly serious institution. Many serious things—time and money, for starters—depend on the accuracy of its maps. In the case of its mountain maps, actual lives hang in the balance. Yet in decades past, the austere institute’s maps have served as the canvas for a series of in-jokes among its more fun-loving cartographers.

Open source Spotify client that doesn't require Premium nor uses Electron! Available for both desktop & mobile!

Curated lists of tools, tips and resources for protecting digital security and privacy