If you plan on hiring Batman to come and entertain kids at your child’s birthday party, be careful on which version of the caped crusader you choose… because as you’ll soon see, the Dark Knight might not be the best choice for young kids.
[Via Neatorama]
SOUND UP! LIGHTS OFF! FULL SCREEN!
The International Space Station Expedition 30 crew has shot some truly awe-inspiring time-lapse sequences flying over practically every square mile of the globe.
I downloaded the high-resolution image sets that have been made available and constructed this short time-lapse piece in hi-res 2K project format. I was amazed at how clean the Nikon D3S images turned out (even at ISO 3200 and above) which kept the post-processing requirements to a minimum.
Clearly, this is the most intelligent thing I’ve posted today… but somehow, my wife seems to disagree with me.
[Via CB]
A non-profit group has unveiled a tool to check how secure sites using the Secure Sockets Layer protocol really are. But reports that it plans to name and shame “offenders” appear to be something of a stretch.
The group is the Trustworthy Internet Movement which gives itself the catchy description of “a non-profit, vendor-neutral organization leveraging the power of the global security community to advance industry-wide technology innovations and initiatives for actionable change.”
It’s just unveiled SSL Pulse, which is an ongoing survey of 200,000 websites that use SSL to encrypt data passing back and forth between the user and the site. Each site is ranked for a variety of technical measures about how SSL is implemented and results will be continually updated.
Each site surveyed is given both a percentage score and a letter grade. At the time of writing, around 50 percent of sites have been given an A grade. However, only just under 10 percent of sites are declared completely secure.
The two main reasons for sites falling short are insecure renegotiation and vulnerability to the BEAST attack. The former, affecting 13 percent of sites, means that a flaw in SSL discovered in 2009 hasn’t been patched on the site; this makes it easier to carry out a “man in the middle” attack. The latter is a longstanding vulnerability that means a hacker could access a user’s session cookies; 75 percent of sites are still at risk of this because they use outdated protocols.
The group isn’t publishing tables of the most and least secure sites as such. However, people who use the tool to check a specific site can see listings of the results of the last 10 checks, along with the ten highest and lowest scoring sites of “recent” tests.
Have you ever wondered where “Ye Olde” spelling comes from? Today, Minute Physics unravels this thorny linguistic issue. Check it out!
Movies are a passion of mine. I relish in the visual wonders and audio experience of these cinematic achievements. However, there are those of us who are not so fortunate and by one means or another may lack one of the senses used to appreciate films.
But now, thanks to science (and Sony Entertainment teaming up with Regal Entertainment Group,) a new technology is going to be introduced to cinemas in the form of a pair of glasses to aid the hearing and visually impaired.
These new glasses will work with both 2D and 3D films, and will project subtitles in the field of vision of its wearer allowing the hearing impaired a solution that would not require them to look away from the screen.
I know in some local cinemas they have seats designated to the hearing impaired that come equipped with a specially designed mirror that allows them to see subtitles that are being displayed on the back wall of the theater. However this process can be tiring on the eyes since the user constantly has to look to the screen and back to the mirror, refocusing each time.
These glasses will project the subtitles in the line of sight giving a more seamless experience that only its wearer will see.
But this initiative is not only for the hearing impaired. For the visually impaired, Sony has also developed earphones that simultaneously provide a secondary audio track of descriptive audio.
Regal anticipates this technology to be available at its digital projected cinemas by the first quarter of 2013.
Technology may not be at the point of curing the deaf and the blind yet, but in the meantime we can find ways for them to fully experience the same hobbies that many others enjoy.
[Via Slashfilm]
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