Monthly Archives: July 2016

New Site Checks Your Browser's Fingerprint

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“Does your web browser have a unique fingerprint? If so your web browser could be tracked across websites without techniques such as tracking cookies…” warns a new site created by the University of Adelaide and ACEMS, adding “the anonymization aspects of services such as Tor or VPNs could be negated if sites you visit track you using your browser fingerprint.” AnonymousCube contacted Slashdot about their free browser fingerprinting test suite:
On the site you can see what data can be used to track you and how unique your fingerprint is. The site includes new tests, such as detecting software such as Privacy Badger, via how social media buttons are disabled, and CSS only (no JavaScript or flash) tests to get screen size and installed fonts.

If you’re serious about privacy, you might want to test the uniqueness of your browser’s fingerprint.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – New Site Checks Your Browser’s Fingerprint

How Different Camera Lenses Can Make You Look Fatter

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I’m underweight, so going with a much longer focal length is a no-brainer for me—but really, it seems like a bad idea to do portraiture with anything shorter than a 50mm lens. Less distortion aside, longer lenses let you shoot farther away from your subject, which generally makes them much more comfortable.



There’s a combination of factors that make you look fat. The focal length of the camera can flatten out a person’s features thus making them look much bigger in comparison. Barrel distortion—that is, when straight lines look like they’re curving out because of the nature of the lens—can also make a person’s face look more plump than usual.

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Source: [H]ardOCP – How Different Camera Lenses Can Make You Look Fatter

British Newspaper Fooled By Online Harry Potter/Pokemon Go Hoax

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An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: “The creators behind Pokemon Go are developing a new Harry Potter version of the app, according to reports,” claimed The Metro — citing as their source the web site “Hello Giggles”. But that site’s source — as well as the source for an inaccurate article in Yahoo! Style — was the infamous JTXH, a paraody news sites created three months ago, whose other false scoops have included “NASA to make announcement involving ‘religious’ implications” and “Denny’s waitress assaulted by Muslims for serving bacon during Ramadan”.

From Snopes.com: There is no real radio or television outlet with the call letters JTXH; that identifier is purely the province of a fake news web site masquerading as a legitimate news outlet. JTXH News has previously published fabricated clickbait stories such as “Bernie campaign caught distributing LSD to youth” and “Chick-Fil-A is considering banning anyone who ‘can’t figure out their gender.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – British Newspaper Fooled By Online Harry Potter/Pokemon Go Hoax

Nvidia offers $30 to GTX 970 customers in class action lawsuit over RAM

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A class action lawsuit brought against Nvidia over a slow RAM partition has resulted in a proposed settlement (PDF) that could pay $30 to anyone who bought the company’s GTX 970 graphics card before its troubles came to light.

In early 2015, a group of customers found that the GTX 970—which was advertised to have 4GB of high-speed GDDR5 RAM—experienced performance issues when pushed to the limits of that memory allotment. It then came to light that the graphics card only had 3.5 GB of the high-speed RAM, with the remaining 0.5 GB running roughly 80 percent slower, as Ars Technica reported last year.

Nvidia claimed at the time that there was an error in communication between the company’s engineers and its technical marketing team, but that it had not been intentionally misleading. A year later, that position hasn’t changed: according to the motion for preliminary approval of the settlement filed in Northern California District Court last week, Nvidia “[continues] to vigorously deny all of the claims and contentions alleged in this Action.” The company, however, “considered the risks and potential costs of continued litigation of this action,” and decided to work toward a settlement, the motion adds.

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Source: Ars Technica – Nvidia offers to GTX 970 customers in class action lawsuit over RAM

The Scientific Reason Some Couples Always Post Sugary-Sweet Status Updates

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We’ve all seen couples who flood our timelines with photos of themselves on vacation, out to dinner, walking around, at home, doing nothing….you get the drift. A few aren’t an issue, but when it gets obsessive, there may be a psychological reason at play, and this Science of Us video explains why.

Read more…



Source: LifeHacker – The Scientific Reason Some Couples Always Post Sugary-Sweet Status Updates

New Solar Cells Can Convert CO2 Into Hydrocarbon Fuel

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“Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have engineered a potentially game-changing solar cell that cheaply and efficiently converts atmospheric carbon dioxide directly into usable hydrocarbon fuel, using only sunlight for energy,” reports Next Big Future. Slashdot reader William Robinson writes:

This artificial leaf delivers syngas, or synthesis gas, a mixture of hydrogen gas and carbon monoxide. Syngas can be burned directly, or converted into diesel or other hydrocarbon fuels. The discovery opens up possibilities of clean reusable energy.
“A solar farm of such ‘artificial leaves’ could remove significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere and produce energy-dense fuel efficiently…” according to the article, which adds that the process could prove useful in the high-carbon atmosphere of Mars. “Unlike conventional solar cells, which convert sunlight into electricity that must be stored in heavy batteries, the new device essentially does the work of plants, converting atmospheric carbon dioxide into fuel, solving two crucial problems at once.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – New Solar Cells Can Convert CO2 Into Hydrocarbon Fuel

U.S. Government Says SMS Codes Aren't Safe

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The National Institute of Standards and Technology has declared that SMS is dangerous for two-factor authentication. One reason they give is that SMS is linked to a SIM, which can be compromised by manipulating carriers. Suitable alternatives would include hardware (dongles) or software (apps) solutions that generate unique keys.

The goal of a 2FA system is to help guarantee that the person logging in with your password is actually you rather than a hacker who has guessed or stolen your password, or recovered it by cracking the passwords in a password dump from a hacked web site. “Two factor” refers to the fact that the system uses more than one way of verifying your identity – the password is the first factor, and the SMS code is one way of providing a second factor. There are several problems with SMS-based systems that led NIST to decide that SMS-based systems are insecure.

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Source: [H]ardOCP – U.S. Government Says SMS Codes Aren’t Safe

Fan-Made "StarCraft" MMO

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Check out this trailer for StarCraft Universe. Don’t you think this looks insanely well made for a fan project? Interestingly, Blizzard isn’t shutting this one down.



The tale of StarCraft Universe goes way back to 2011, when a group of modders headed by Ryan Winzen announced that they’d made a mod for StarCraft II that turned the real-time strategy game into a MMO kind of like that other game of Blizzard’s with orcs and purple elves. Appropriately enough, they even called it World of StarCraft. Blizzard bristled, and within hours YouTube pulled Winzen’s videos showing his progress. In the uproar, League of Legends developer Riot even offered Winzen to apply for a position at the studio.

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Source: [H]ardOCP – Fan-Made “StarCraft” MMO