Two related links, both involving using your phone to shoulder surf your passwords. Both attacks take advantage of the fact that smart phones with accurate accelerometers are now ubiquitous. By monitoring the the vibrations of the phone, the attacks inver what keys were pressed on a keyboard. Both of these a much more proof of […]
Emily Bazelon at Slate has written a short essay lamenting the fact that access to polls has become a partisan issue. In other words, the Republican Party is transparently engaging in widespread voter suppression. I will never understand why someone would not want to make it as easy as possible to let people vote. There’s […]
Rice people with nori faces, bathing in curry. via Tokyo Mango.
Today I learned that NASA makes available for download 3d models of various spacecraft and ancillary equipment. Want a LEM? They got that. Want a a space shuttle? They have five. Vehicle Assembly Building? Launch Gantry? Crawler? Got it. Got it. Got it. Want an astronaut? Sure thing. Don’t want the whole thing? No problem. […]
Recently a group of us were laughing about how we could mess with children by teaching them the wrong names for colors. Just buy a Stroop Effect novelty poster, and pretend that nothing is wrong. Since the effect is because the language center of the brain is being stimulated in a way that is incongruent […]
Using census data, the New York Times posted a table of birthday distributions in the United States for people born between 1973 and 1999. The Daily Viz then turned the table into a heatmap with the colors indicating the order of the birthdays, not their likelihoods. If you look at number of births in each […]
This reminds me of Paula Scher in Helvetica saying that Helvetica was the font of the Vietnam War. Why I hate Helvetica As it concerns identity design we all recognize Helvetica as a bastion of the rise of the practice of corporate identity in the 1960s, deployed with unrelenting passion by the likes of Massimo […]
I took my laptop to the Apple Store to get it repaired. (The keyboard doesn’t work.) After explaining to the guy at the store, he starts taking down my contact info. When he’s done, he says. “And what’s your username and password? Don’t worry. Your data is safe.” Aghast, I say “But my data is […]
Areoshot is inhalable caffeine. For $2.99 you get 100 mg of caffeine (the same as a cup of coffee) and B vitamins, but divided into four doses. It was invented by a Harvard professor David Edwards, and it’s manufactured in a real factory, so I suspect that it’s safer than freebasing caffeine in your kitchen. […]
Now this is interesting. Supermechanical has created a Kickstarter project to manufacture very simple wireless sensors such as sensor, temperature, moisture and switches, people to monitor their surroundings by using a web interface to define rules for when each sensor should alert via SMS, Twitter, or email. Want to know when the dryer shuts off? […]