Thanks to sexy geek extraordinaire Simone Giertz, the future is now here. First, she invented an alarm clock that slaps you in the face to wake you up. Then she built a robot that prepares and feeds her breakfast. A few weeks later, she created a machine that applies lipstick to her face automatically, and now, to properly congratulate herself, she came up with an automated applause machine.
Behold the magnificence of her latest invention:
Julia Lepetit and Andrew Bridgman from Dorkly take a look at some of the difference between Marvel and DC and try to establish which is better.
[Source: Dorkly]
You’d think delegates at Mobile World Congress would be security conscious with their phones. However, one security firm says it found more than 2,000 users who fell for a pretty basic trick.
Avast researchers went to Barcelona, host city for the event, and set up three Wi-Fi networks in the airport at a peak time for delegates passing through. They gave the networks the highly misleading names of “Starbucks”, “Airport_Free_Wifi_AENA“ and “MWC Free WiFi.”
The networks had no password protection, meaning anyone could connect to them, but the web traffic was visible. Avast says more than 2,000 people connected to the networks in the space of four hours.
In some cases this will have been people looking through the list of available networks and trusting what they assumed to be a free service. However, Avast also believes many of the connections may have come from phones that have previously used a network with the same name and are set (often by default) to automatically connect to any network it “recognizes.”
Exactly how much detail Avast was able to access from the web traffic is unclear; the company says it only scanned the traffic and made a point of not storing anything. It does say it was able to identify 63.5 percent of users by both their device and their user ID.
The company also says the user base was split with 50.1 percent on Apple devices, 43.4 percent on Android and 6.5 percent on Windows Phone. It doesn’t explain why no laptops are among this statistic.
The rest of the stats mainly covered the sites visited and apps used while connected to the networks, with the unsurprising news that most people used either Gmail or Google search, but only a few people used Tinder.
What Avast doesn’t address is whether any of the data it scanned revealed accessible confidential or personal information. It’s also quiet on how many people were using https connections, or how straightforward it would have been to overcome this had it wanted to make the experiment a more realistic portrayal of hacking possibilities.
Avast does recommend that people using unsecured public networks do so with a secure VPN, which, wouldn’t you know, they just happen to offer.
As a movie, ‘The Martian’ was awesome, but if you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend that you do so. For me, it was significantly better than the movie and goes into much more details.
It might be excessive, but that’s exactly why people love the movie so much.
[Source: Lord Mesa Art]
A fantastic gritty Pac-Man reboot inspired by the classic gangland film ‘The Warriors’ (1979.) This one was made by my pals over at Fury Fingers, so be sure to give it a lot of love! These guys are still small and are producing fantastic short films, so if you want to keep up with them, be sure to subscribe to their channel!
Filming took place in the city of Adelaide (Australia) across 5 late nights. The piece was made for next to no money and shot guerrilla style.
Team Gale or Team Peeta? :)
We all know that this is the real plot in the Hunger Games series!
HTC has announced its Vive virtual reality headset will cost $799, making it clear the idea is to compete on quality rather than price.
The cost is $200 more than the Oculus Rift, though the package does include two controllers, something that will carry a separate charge for Oculus. The package will also include two games, Fantastic Contraption and Job Simulator: The 2050 Archives, though these sound like relatively simple titles designed to demo the technology and acclimate players to the experience.
That doesn’t include the cost of a fairly high-end PC needed to run Vive, which looks to have broadly similar spec requirements to the Rift. To give some context, branded PCs which are being sold as part of a complete Oculus Rift package will start at a thousand dollars.
The Vive has a few tweaks for the final version including a front camera that can turn real-world objects into a blue wireframe in the virtual view, Tron style. It’s more of a safety than gaming feature, the idea being to stop players from bumping into furniture while they move about.
There’s also the addition of a microphone, which seems mainly for using phone features. Meanwhile the two base stations, which are used to mark the edge of the area in which the player moves about while gaming, have been redesigned to make less noise.
Pre-orders for the Vive begin next Monday and the units should be delivered in early April.
Henry Cavill asks kids: Who would win in a fight, Batman or Superman? Watch these super-fans-in-training give Superman their (brutally) honest answers, then enter to hang with Henry, Ben Affleck and Jesse Eisenberg at the premiere of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
[Omaze]
There is no Hollywood franchise J.J. Abrams can’t revitalize… and he’s going to fix racism and sexism too!
In its latest Oscars nominee parody, Above Average imagines a film where J.J. Abrams fixes movie franchises like “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “Indiana Jones,” and “The Hobbit.”