“Elon Musk”
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Kind: Reposts
Child Abuse Ad Uses Lenticular Printing to Help Children While Remaining Invisible to Adults
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The ANAR Foundation and Grey Group Spain have created a unique advertising campaign that only kids can see. The ad campaign uses lenticular printing to show individuals below a certain height — children, in this case — a certain image, while taller people see a different image. Children looking at the ad see a photo of an abused boy, a help hotline, and the message ‘if somebody hurts you, phone us and we’ll help you,’ while adults can only see an unbruised photo of the boy with the text ‘Sometimes child abuse is only visible to the child suffering it.’
The ANAR Foundation and Grey Group Spain have created a unique advertising campaign that only kids can see. The ad campaign uses lenticular printing to show individuals below a certain height — children, in this case — a certain image, while taller people see a different image. Children looking at the ad see a photo of an abused boy, a help hotline, and the message “if somebody hurts you, phone us and we’ll help you,” while adults can only see an unbruised photo of the boy with the text “Sometimes child abuse is only visible to the child suffering it.”
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At long last, a use for lenticular printing (I mean, aside from making real-world stickers out of your favourite animated GIFs…).
No, Panera Bread Doesn’t Take Security Seriously
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tl;dr: In August 2017, I reported a vulnerability to Panera Bread that allowed the full name, home address, email address, food/dietary…
tl;dr: In August 2017, I reported a vulnerability to Panera Bread that allowed the full name, home address, email address, food/dietary preferences, username, phone number, birthday and last four digits of a saved credit card to be accessed in bulk for any user that had ever signed up for an account. This includes my own personal data! Despite an explicit acknowledgement of the issue and a promise to fix it, Panera Bread sat on the vulnerability and, as far as I can tell, did nothing about it for eight months. When Brian Krebs publicly broke the news, other news outlets emphasized the usual “We take your security very seriously, security is a top priority for us” prepared statement from Panera Bread. Worse still, the vulnerability was not fixed at all — which means the company either misrepresented its actual security posture to the media to save face or was not competent enough to determine this fact for themselves. This post establishes a canonical timeline so subsequent reporting doesn’t get confused.
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Authority and Usage and Emoji
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Maybe it’s a subconscious effect of my return to the blog, but I’ve found myself reading more essays recently, and so I found myself returning to the nonfiction work of David Foster Wal…
Maybe it’s a subconscious effect of my return to the blog, but I’ve found myself reading more essays recently, and so I found myself returning to the nonfiction work of David Foster Wallace.1 Despite the seeming topical randomness of his essays—John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign, the tennis player Tracy Austin, a Maine lobster fest—there is a thematic consistency in DFW’s work, which revolves around the tension between authority and democracy, high culture intellectualism and overthinking and low culture entertainment and lack of self-reflection. That is, his essays are about America and Americans.2
Nowhere is this truer than in “Authority and American Usage,” his monumental review of Bryan A. Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage.3 DFW uses this review of a single book to recount and assess the much longer debate between prescriptive language mavens who sternly offer correct English usage, and the more permissive, descriptive scholars who eschew hard usage rules for the lived experience of language. That is, authority and democracy.
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The Secret Language of Ships
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A ship’s markings may look like hieroglyphs, but to industry insiders they tell an important story.
Approaching the container ship in San Francisco Bay, the tugboat looks like a pit bull puppy chasing an eighteen-wheeler. When the vessels are an arm’s length apart, the ship’s mate throws down a line. Now leashed to the ship, the tug can push and pull it around the bay. Big ships can’t easily slow down or maneuver by themselves—they’re meant for going in a straight line.
Tugboat crews routinely encounter what few of us will ever see. They easily read a vessel’s size, shape, function, and features, while deciphering at a glance the mysterious numbers, letters, and symbols on a ship’s hull. To non-mariners, the markings look like hieroglyphs. For those in the know, they speak volumes about a particular ship and also about the shipping industry.
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Asymmetric Cryptography: Works Like Magic
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It’s a common complaint that cryptography is too hard for regular people to understand – and that all our current cryptographically secure applications are designed for cyborgs and not humans. While…
It’s a common complaint that cryptography is too hard for regular people to understand – and that all our current cryptographically secure applications are designed for cyborgs and not humans. While the latter charge may well be correct, I argue that the former most certainly isn’t, because we have been teaching children the basic security principles behind asymmetric cryptography for probably thousands of years.
What am I talking about? A fairly tail called Rumplestiltskin, which is actually about bitcoin!
You probably heard this fairly tale as a child – but let me refresh your memory.
There is a miller, who drunkenly brags that is daughter can spin straw into gold.
probably, he was posting about his half baked cryptocurrency ideas on bitcointalk, and creating money “gold” from pointless work “spinning straw” sounds A LOT like bitcoin mining.
Anyway, the king is very impressed with his story.
the king is a venture capitalist?
And wants to see a demonstration, oh and if it doesn’t work he will cut off both their heads.
I have not heard about venture capitalists being quite this evil, but it seems some of them are into this medieval stuff
Of course, the miller and his daughter don’t actually have the ability to create gold by magic, so they are in big trouble! but just then a magic imp appears.
a hacker, who understands cryptography
The imp says he can spin straw into gold, but for a price: the daughter’s first born child.
in the modern version he wants her naked selfies
It’s a terrible deal, but the alternative is death, so they reluctantly accept. The imp spins straw into gold in 3 increasingly dramatic episodes.
The kind is satisified, and marries the daughter, making her queen.
their startup is aquired
One year later, the first child is born. The imp returns demanding his prize. Because they love their baby, the King and Queen pleads with the imp to get out of the deal. They offer him all their riches, but the imp is not interested! Desperately, they ask is there any other way? any at all? The imp replies, “Of course not! not unless you can guess my True Name”
the true name is actually his private key. If they can guess that, the hacker looses his magical power over them
“Okay I will try and guess your name” says the Queen. The imp just laughs! “you’ll never guess it!” “but I’ll give you three days to try!”
The imp skips off into the forrest, and the queen trys to think of his name for 3 days… but can’t figure it out.
The queen trys to brute force his private key. but there is not enough compute in the entire kingdom!
But then, the a messenger is travelling through the forrest, and he happens past a strange little man, dancing around a camp fire, singing:
ha ha ha!
te he he!
they’ll never guess my private key!
just three days! not enough to begin,
to guess my name is rumplestiltskin!Being a messenger, he had a good memory for things he heard. When he arrived back at the castle, he mentioned the curious story to the queen.
the hacker had been careless with his private key
When the imp arrived in the morning, the queen greeted him by name. He was furious! He stamped his foot so hard the ground split open and then he fell into the gaping hole, never to be seen again. The king, queen, baby lived happily ever after, etc, etc.
they stole all his bitcoin
The simularities between this fairly tale and cryptography is uncanny. It has proof of work, it has private keys, it has an attempted brute force attack, and a successful (if accidental) end point attack. The essential point about your private key is captured successfully: the source of your magic is just a hard to guess secret, and that it’s easy to have a hard to guess name, but what gets you in the end is some work around when they steal your key some other way. This is the most important thing.
It’s not a talisman that can be physically protected, or an inate power you are born with – it’s just a name, but it must be an ungessable name, so the weirder the better.
“rumplestiltskin” is the german name for this story, which became wildly known in english after the brothers grim published their collection of folktales in the early 19th century, but according to wikipedia there are versions of this story throughout the europe, and the concept that knowing the true name of a magical creature give one power over it is common in mythology around the world.
How did the ancients come up with a children’s story that quite accurately (and amusingly) explains some of the important things about asymettric cryptography, and yet we moderns did not figure out the math that makes this possible this until the 1970’s?
Since the villian of the story is magical, really they have chosen any mechanism for the imps magic, why his name? Is this just a coincidence, or was there inspiration?
The astute reader has probably already guessed, but I think the simplest (and most fun) explaination is the best: extraterrestials with advanced cryptosystems visited earth during prehistory, and early humans didn’t really understand how their “magic” worked, but got the basic idea
To be continued in PART 2…
Inside the Deadly World of Private Prisoner Transport
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Tens of thousands of people every year are packed into vans run by for-profit companies with almost no oversight.
In July 2012, Steven Galack, the former owner of a home remodeling business, was living in Florida when he was arrested on an out-of-state warrant for failing to pay child support. Galack, 46, had come to the end of a long downward spiral, overcoming a painkiller addiction only to struggle with crippling anxiety. Now, he was to be driven more than a thousand miles to Butler County, Ohio, where his ex-wife and three children lived, to face a judge.
Like dozens of states and countless localities, Butler County outsources the long-distance transport of suspects and fugitives. Galack was loaded into a van run by Prisoner Transportation Services of America, the nation’s largest for-profit extradition company.
Crammed around him were 10 other people, both men and women, all handcuffed and shackled at the waist and ankles. They sat tightly packed on seats inside a cage, with no way to lie down to sleep. The air conditioning faltered amid 90-degree heat. Galack soon grew delusional, keeping everyone awake with a barrage of chatter and odd behavior. On the third day, the van stopped in Georgia, and one of two guards onboard gave a directive to the prisoners. “Only body shots,” one prisoner said she heard the guard say. The others began to stomp on Galack, two prisoners said.
The guards said later in depositions that they had first noticed Galack’s slumped, bloodied body more than 70 miles later, in Tennessee. A homicide investigation lasted less than a day, and the van continued on its journey. The cause of death was later found to be undetermined.
“This is someone’s brother, father, and it’s like nobody even cared,” said Galack’s ex-wife, Kristin Galack.
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21 Books You Don’t Have to Read (and 21 you should read instead)
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GQ asked its favorite new authors to dunk on the classics.
We’ve been told all our lives that we can only call ourselves well-read once we’ve read the Great Books. We tried. We got halfway through Infinite Jest and halfway through the SparkNotes on Finnegans Wake. But a few pages into Bleak House, we realized that not all the Great Books have aged well. Some are racist and some are sexist, but most are just really, really boring. So we—and a group of un-boring writers—give you permission to strike these books from the canon. Here’s what you should read instead.
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Personally, I quite enjoyed at least two of the books on the “books you don’t have to read” list… but this list has inspired me to look into some of the 21 “you should read instead”.
Far Cry 5 review
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A horrible story ruins an enjoyable world
Far Cry 5 had the potential to say something interesting by setting the game in America, but its murky story and themes do more to taint the game’s fantastic and playful open world than to give it purpose and meaning.
The goofy world and the serious story never line up, making this one of the rockiest entries in a series that has already delved so deeply into action tourism. It’s yet another mainstream game that takes crisis or tragedy and builds a Ferris wheel on top of it, while intimating that you’re bad for wanting to take a ride.
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Having just completed Far Cry 5, this review echoes my feelings perfectly. So much potential, falling so far short. Still fun, but not the masterpiece it could have been.
Precise Slice
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You can see the punchline coming from a mile away but it’s still awesome.
Violin Plots
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Lure
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Dwitter
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Visualisation of bike rides around Tampa, Florida
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A visualisation of bike rides around Tampa, Florida, taken from the GPS logs of bike-sharing scheme Coast Bikes‘ vehicles.
Ride the World’s Longest Zipline in the UAE
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