morpher

"...and update to the latest version of the Facebook app."

The measure of an angle in units of radians is equal to the length of the arc subtending that angle in units of radii.

From the comments, it sounds like the preference pane was hidden and had to be enabled by installing 3rd party software. Having experimental features in software that are hidden (but included for testing in limited situations) is not surprising, nor WTF worthy.

You could use LD_PRELOAD to load a library that does the replacement[1]. [1] http://stackoverflow.com/a/10008252

Very nice. I wonder if a similar lens could be purchased individually so a bunch of laser pointers don't have to be sacrificed.

I don't know about other fields, but in physics, the "small extra fee" is $1700 - $2700.[1] Many researchers prefer to spend this money on actual research. Fortunately, most physics journals also allow the author to retain publishing rights (just not on the final typeset version). So, sites like arxiv.org provide a better alternative. Free-to-reasearcher publishing in a prestigious journal plus free-to-researcher-and-public publishing elsewhere.

[1] http://publish.aps.org/edannounce/CC-launch-press-release

I'm surprised that the criticism of the "Kenya" infographic is limited to deriding its visual style as childish (and its lack of message). This graphic is much worse for the fact that there is no relationship between the numeric and graphic quantities (other than monotonicity). For example, 39.5 million people is about twice as many as 35.8? Why be snarky about it looking like something a kindergartner would do when there is substantive criticism to be given?

The wikipedia page doesn't seem to have any information about "record amounts of energy produced" at NIF. The closest thing I've found is a press release[1] that mentions "highest [neutron] yield achieved so far from a layered DT implosion". Neutron production should be proportional to the number of fusion events (and thus also the energy released). But, its odd that they don't claim this specifically.

[1] https://lasers.llnl.gov/newsroom/project_status/index.php

I don't think the point of this post was anonymity against those with large resources, but rather day-to-day anonymity for social interaction.

Do you have a source that gives estimates of carbon output from vehicle shipping? I'm wondering roughly how many fumey-old-bug miles correspond to pre-owner new-car transport.

Why are you less impressed by small percentages than by numbers that are large only in the absence of a reference scale? It's generally not possible to design flawless systems, and failure rate a much more meaningful number.

The professors are interior designers.

It looks like this is just a design concept (not a prototyped device). In addition to the initial friction issue, the printed page would not be able to be placed on top of the stack after it got too tall. So, nice looking, but unlikely to be very practical.

It's also 2560 m/s, or ~8 x the speed of sound. Good thing the article is satire and not some misguided historical proposal...

This appears to just be a stubbed out simplistic API at this point[1]. Currently, only method names, without even parameter types are listed. The project is also requesting funding[2]. Seems a bit premature to me. But, I wish the project luck.

[1] https://github.com/gcloud/compute/blob/master/images.go

[2] http://gcloud.io/faq.html

Except with VC, the money is given with the expectation of an occasional huge return. With a crowd-funded open source project, one there is no possibility of getting anything more than a program you could get for free if others funded its development. This is clearly a very different situation.

The video is definitely worth watching. However, it feels like its only an introduction. For a building housing 2500 people, it seemed surprisingly empty. I can only assume that most of the adults were elsewhere trying to earn a living. I'd love to see more footage or read more interviews.

Most of the identifying information used by panopticlick requires using javascript/flash/java to obtain. As such, it isn't available when simply parsing HTTP headers and packets (as much of the data in XKeyScore appears to come from).

(That is, unless you visit panopticlick.eff.org, which then sends all of the processed information over the wire in the clear...)

Your visual language looks a lot like labview. I'm on a phone on a bus and haven't dug in too far, but have you used labview before?

The article discusses at the outset that the distinction between "storing info" and "stopping light" is subtle, I not nonexistent in this case. When light travels through a material, one can treat it either at a macro level of a light wave slowing down, or at a micro level of light travelling at vacuum speed but being continuously absorbed and re-emitted. The former is a much simpler picture and captures the essence of what is happening. So, if you use a material (as H^3 have done) in which the effective speed becomes vanishingly small, this is "stopping light" in the only sense one can talk about.

I agree about the yelling part. But, to clarify, you don't have to join a network, and you can always scan channels. Although chances are that most people around (e.g., at a coffe shop or airport) are broadcasting on a specific channel.

Using tcpdump after setting your wireless card into promiscuous mode will store all packets going over the air nearby. So, wireshark can easily be used to view tye contents of traffic that was not routed to your machine.

I don't have a lot of experience with NFC, but there are replay attacks of NFC-based credit cards, e.g., the NFCProxy app discussed a few months ago[1].

Does the small size of the inlay in this ring prevent unintended reading of the information contained? (It sounds like a larger version is necessary for some phones to read it at all...)

This is a compelling idea for another authentication factor, provided there were no concerns about data leakage.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5605499

EDIT: The "Privacy is Paramount" video explains how the ring solves this problem.

Sure, but average computer users probably have a much more default configuration, and thus the probability of unique match goes down.

That being said, people who tend to be worried about security also tend to have more unique computing configurations and thus would be more identifiable. Interesting.

Only if someone modifies an executable file to call preg_replace with exif headers.

If I'm reading this correctly, someone compromised a site (by other means) and then added the exif_read_data() and preg_replace() lines to the code somewhere as a back door?

If a site was compromised, wouldn't any modified files be replaced with canonical source? Or do people manually scan through files looking for code that looks suspicious?

Or am I misunderstanding and this site for some reason legitimately called preg_replace() with exif make/model parameters (which seems pretty unlikely to do anything useful)?

Wouldn't all default install browser installations on the same model of fresh-from-the-box laptops be identical? They quoted a 10-15% false match rate (excluding mobile phones which have a much higher false match rate due to lower configurability).

Wouldn't a better solution be to simply modify the bowser to report some base set of fonts / plugins (and any other high-information content fields)? How many sites actually legitimately serve different content based on your fonts or plugins? Also, the UA string could be simplified to reveal less.

Compared to data intercepted from "upstream", any data sent in response to a FISA request would be "directly from company X's servers". That doesn't necessarily imply that the NSA has direct access to the servers.

If you use vim, the syntastic[1] plugin has go support and gives you this sort of feedback directly in the editor (for any go code, not just app-engine -- and many other languages) every time you save.

[1] https://github.com/scrooloose/syntastic