Did you know that George Lucas originally wanted Luke Skywalker to become Darth Vader at the end of Return of the Jedi? His last lines were going to be "Now I am Vader. Now I will go and kill the [Rebel] fleet and I will rule the universe." That would have been cool. It’s one of ten unknown facts about the movie.
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You’re down and out. You need to make some quick cash. You’re not opposed to criminal activity. What do you do? Cook meth? Nah, just sell some stolen graphing calculators out of state.
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It’s no fun to be called names, but usually you only have to worry about it from people. That’s not always the case, as a Canadian woman learned when she cracked open a refreshing Vitamin water and was met with "YOU RETARD." That’s one hell of a glitch.
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The passcode can’t die yet. The iPhone 5s’s Touch ID fingerprint security system can be unlocked with your finger even if you’re asleep. That means a jealous lover could hold your phone to your thumb while you slumber and read all your texts, call logs, emails, and more.
Apple confirms that a dead thumb won’t work. Chloroforming the victim might, but international spies will have no luck cutting off a Prime Minister’s thumb to access their secure files / selfies. Apple also doesn’t send a copy of fingerprints back to its servers, and instead stores them in a “secure enclave” in its A7 processor designed to be inaccessible by hackers or other apps.
Apple worked hard to make the the Touch ID security system easy to use. So easy a 5s can be unlocked by a cat, your toe, or even your…member, if it’s registered with your phone. The real issue, though, is that Touch ID has no way of telling if someone is passed out.
Frat dudes, heads up. You could wake up from a night of drinking to find your bros messaged all your exes and creatively rewrote your Facebook profile. Yet the biggest threat is likely that of misuse by significant others.
It’s common to hear the story of a suspicious girlfriend or boyfriend who went through their guy/girl’s unlocked phone while he was asleep, found them flirting with someone else, and dumped them. Numeric passcodes would prevent this.
But Touch ID is vulnerable to “sleephacking.”
As long as someone knows what finger[s] you’ve registered with Touch ID, they can pick your phone up off the nightstand, press it against your sleeping finger, and voilà, the phone unlocks.
If you have shady personal stuff in your phone, you should…not have shady personal stuff in your phone. And if your significant other will rifle through your phone while you sleep, you’ve got bigger problems. But if you’re stuck sleeping by someone unscrupulous, you might want to go into your settings, enable passcode lock, and delete the fingerprints you have on file.
Really this all boils down to the idea that no password that humans have developed yet is both convenient and 100 percent secure. Not long strings of characters, not facial recognition, and not fingerprints. The lack of perfect digital security has become part of our culture — a risk and inconvenience no one is above for now. On that note, I’ll leave you with this touching painting/poem by graffiti artist Banksy:
So it’s come to this. We knew iOS 7 had some dumb and frustrating imperfections, but hadn’t scoured every bit of it for flaws in the small details that Apple used to nail. Well, some industrious design head has given Apple’s new OS a proper fisking, and put all the screwups on a Tumblr. This might be what finally kills Jesus Diaz.
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Okay, this is the best beer belly any one of us could ever dream of having. A 61-year-old man found himself getting drunk without ever drinking alcohol because he had brewer’s yeast in his gut. Basically, whenever he ate any carbs, the man’s intestinal tract would start turning that into beer and make him drunk. He had a brewery in his belly.
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The folks at RoboBand have created a robotic band that plays the soundtracks to famous Nintendo games using a Raspberry Pi, a Yamaha Disklavier, and a robotic drum kit. The system took the audio output from the NES, converted it to MIDI, which in turn either controlled the solenoids on the drum machine or the piano keys. The result is a sometimes cacophonous, sometimes sublime rendition of some NES classics including the Legend of Zelda, Duck Hunt, and the Mario series.
To their credit, the band admits that things weren’t perfect. “In full disclosure, there is normally a half-second audio delay that was removed in editing, but it’s still very playable live,” they wrote on YouTube. Given that most sprite-intensive NES games ended up with more than a second lag, it’s a pretty impressive feat regardless.
Personally I’d love to see some Metroid played this way. It would be like watching The Matrix at one of those silent movie theaters with a dude up front playing the organ.
Have you had the sneaking suspicious recently that your iPad has quadrupled in size? Do you find yourself frustrated by a perpetually-frozen screen? Good news! It’s because you’re holding printer paper. But no need to be embarrassed; it happens to the best of us—just ask our avant-garde newscaster friend from the other side of the pond.
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When you stick anything metal into a toaster that’s plugged in, something like this will happen. This is a pretty extreme/dumbass case, but something bad will happen. Every time. No no. No need to test it. This is what’s up. What if it’s a fork? Risk of electrocution. Spatula? Explosion. Tongs? Kaboom. If you’re still not getting it, be sure someone is shooting a Vine while you run tests of your own. But really, be safe kids. [Boing Boing via Digg]
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Volvo’s new trucks are so easy to drive, a hamster could do it! No, really. Volvo Trucks built a makeshift hamster wheel onto the tiller of one of its rigs, and using nothing but the orange-y allure of a carrot, a hamster steered a 15-ton truck all the way up a quarry, with sheer cliffs off each side. Holy crap.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
