Fake your online death and move to New Zealand

Okay, this is a weird one. Frank Ahearn, an expert in “disappearing” – the art of creating false paper trails and deleting your identity so that you cannot be traced – has written a book and conducted an interview with KiwiFM, a radio station based in New Zealand, on how, exactly, to “fake your death,” or more accurately, to sever all ties to the people who know you – not a literal faking of death. So long as you don’t travel using a fraudulent identity or defraud insurance companies or the like, “disappearing” remains an option for people who believe they have no other option but to start their lives over.

In the following video, the people from TVNZ’s “Close Up” interview Frank. At 1:39, he suggests that you could use disposable memory sticks with this advice:

“Not that I’d ever suggest this, but you could actually wrap it up and stick it in your anus and hide it.”

In fact, Ahearn suggests that the privacy-concerns of Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, and Google can, in fact, be used as a “double edged sword” – yes, people can use it to track you, but you can also use it to disseminate false information.

With the warning that “your old life and new life must never connect,” Ahearn’s advice is to run to New Zealand, which is an English-speaking country that is far away and has great beaches.

All this is true, of course. New Zealand takes at least 13 hours to reach from LA, it is primarily English speaking, and it does, of course, have beautiful beaches, including the beaches at Mt. Maunganui, which I can tell you from personal experience, are absolutely divine.

However, anyone expecting New Zealand to be technologically remote will find that the country remains just as much a technologically connected society as anywhere else, and in fact, since Kiwis do a great deal of overseas travel, they rely greatly on social networks to keep up with friends overseas and across the country.



Jaw-dropping driving

In this video Ken Block races on a 1.58 mile oval track in Linas, France with banks as steep as 51 degrees. (The standard NASCAR incline is less than half that.) That would be impressive enough, but Block doesn’t just race on the track – he races onto the track, on the poorly paved side-roads leading up to the track, around obstacles placed on the track, doing donuts around water barrels, traffic cones, and, in one case, a man on a segway.

Even if you’re not a fan of car racing, you’ll enjoy this video, which is on YouTube in high def. By the end of it, Block has done so many donuts and outrageous stunts that he’s completely and utterly worn out both of his rear tires and continues to do donuts on the sparking rims.

Here’s the kicker: Racing isn’t even Block’s day job – he’s one of the co-founders of a shoe company.



A 64-bit version of Flash & Beta IE9

Adobe announced on Wednesday that they’ve put out a preview release of a 64-bit version of the Flash player, codenamed “Square,” (because 64 is 8^2, and 32 isn’t, I guess).

It’s not much news, except that it has taken Adobe a very, very long time to get a 64-bit native version of Flash in the works. I remember writing about Flash not having 64-bit support, and the problems it caused me, back in early 2007.

In other related news, Internet Explorer 9 is now available in beta. Ars Technica has an in-depth look at the new Microsoft browser.

Terrifying Tower Climbing Video

This video shows the view of a maintenance worker while he’s climbing up a 1768 foot transmission tower. I dare you all to try and watch it till the end.

Edit: Sorry folks, had to remove the video at the request of the people who own the footage. They will apparently put it back up at one point, so we’ll be sure to publish it back when this happens.

[Via]

HD copy protection may have been busted

What’s purported to be the “master key” that protects Blu-ray and other HD content has been published online. But even if it is genuine, it’s debatable how much practical difference there will be.

A poster on the Pastebin site, designed for easy sharing of text and code, has published what’s billed as the HDCP master key, a grid of 1600 numbers, each made up of 14 hexadecimal characters. It also has the instructions:

To generate a source key, take a forty-bit number that (in binary) consists of twenty ones and twenty zeroes; this is the source KSV. Add together those twenty rows of the matrix that correspond to the ones in the KSV (with the lowest bit in the KSV corresponding to the first row), taking all elements modulo two to the power of fifty-six; this is the source private key. To generate a sink key, do the same, but with the transposed matrix.

Now, I’ll be honest enough to admit that this hurts my head a little bit (this is where our more mathematically literate readers can jump in!), but the points is that if these instructions are correct, it’s a relatively simple task to generate your own key. That allows you to hook up a Blu-ray player or other HD device to a recording device, then use your generated key on the recording device to create a connection that both devices consider legitimate, thus allowing the content to pass through without encryption.

The leaks has already prompted speculation that plans by movie companies to stream protected HD video might have to be put on hold for fear that the movies would be pirated immediately.

There is a theory, though, that this isn’t the master key and that such a thing doesn’t exist. Instead what may have happened is that it’s a key used by many (but not all) manufacturers that get their HDCP hardware from the same source. That means that although in theory any key found to be used in equipment for piracy could be disabled by the people behind the HDCP system, doing so would be impractical as it could stop legitimate devices working and prompt legal action.

[Picture credit: Leo Reynolds]

Night of the Living Trekkies Trailer

Can you believe that this trailer was made to promote a book? Night of the Living Trekkies was released last month and is from the same publisher who released Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in 2009. Enjoy!

Transformers Test Film #1

Produced by Vimeo user Alexander Vladimirovich Semenov, this short transformers fan film was entirely shot in just two hours on a Canon 550D and a Nikon D5000. Post-production then took him around a month. Enjoy!

[Via Vimeo]