Hackers are at it again. This time Fox News’ Twitter account was hijacked early yesterday. The infiltrators used it to tweet falsely about President Obama’s assassination.
Fox has since regained access to their Twitter and deleted the alarming and slightly inaccurate tweets. So here’s a screenshot of the hackers’ tweets for posterity’s sake.
A hacker collective called the Script Kiddies has claimed responsibility for the attack. It seems like a new collective is popping up every other day.
I just watched the Chinese movie If You Are the One
Shu Qi’s character Xiao Xiao is an attractive late-twenties flight attendant who is in love with a married man. This guy promised her that he’d leave his wife and marry her. But guess what? He renegs and leaves her hanging. Heartbroken but still not over him, she continues to wait for him to change his mind. But while she’s waiting, why not broadcast an online personal? That’s how she meets Qin Fen who did the same.
It was only a matter of time before the RadioShack sales rep asked me. I’d just brought $40 worth of electronic components to his checkout counter. Eleven small plastic bags filled with resistors, transistors, diodes, etc.
“Whoa. Are you making a bomb?” he asked.
“No. I think I’d need more parts than this.”
“Seriously. What are you making?”
“I’m doing the projects in this electronics book I’m reading. Besides, I think I’d need, like, some fertilizer.”
“Oh, you making a ghetto bomb.” he responded. “See. Just the fact that you know that…”
“Really? I thought that was common knowledge.”
“Naw.”
“Well, it was something I heard in chemistry class.”
“Everybody slept right through that shit.”
Christmas comes early this year. Yesterday I drove to Sears and bought myself a new toy – an $8, 30 watt, 700°F soldering iron. I know nothing about different types of solder, other than not to breathe the fumes, so I just bought the cheapest type ($4) to get me started: lead-free 96% tin, 4% silver solder with rosin flux core.
I’ve recently become interested in electronics because it’s cool to make home-made gadgets, but mostly because I re-watched Iron Man several days ago.
The packaging of both the solder and iron is marked with warnings. The solder packaging states, “May be fatal is swallowed.” The iron’s case reads, “When used for soldering, this product produces chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.” Why only California? Do other states genuinely not know the dangers or do they just think California’s being a wuss?
This page analyzes a text’s letter frequency and is an emulation of Tyler Atkin’s page. One application is decoding a Caesar cipher. A Caesar or “shift” cipher is an encryption technique in which each letter in the unencrypted message is shifted over a certain number of positions. For example, A encodes into B and B into C. The cipher is named after Julius Caesar who reportedly used a shift cipher of three to communicate with his generals.
So how do we break a Caesar cipher? One technique is to analyze its letter frequency. In English, certain letters like E and T occur more frequently than others like Q and Z. By getting the shape of the letter frequency distribution and comparing it to the known relative letter frequencies of the English language, we can sometimes determine if a Caesar cipher was used.
Growing up, I scrunched my nose when my mom opened the kitchen cabinet housing our supply of chinese medicine. Blackened twigs, pungent bark, shriveled roots, orange fungi, and miniature calabash gourd-shaped bottles of black beads. This trove of potions and powders looked medieval and mysterious. Enveloped during childhood by science books, I dismissed whatever didn’t have a scientific explanation, which included the seeming shamanism of Chinese medicine.
So what changed my mind? If it weren’t for Chinese medicine, my birth could’ve run into complications. The chances were slim, but you don’t want to mess around with the possibility of brain and internal organ damage.
Since I wrote this post three months ago, Foursquare has made their system stricter. You cannot do rapid-fire checkins and have to actually be near the venue. Nevertheless, I thought this was a pretty amusing post, so I’m putting it up anyways.
I just signed up for Foursquare and checked in several times to generate some data to experiment with their API. It’s easy to cheat.
After reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma
The Japanese eat raw fish, which can contain bacteria, with wasabi, a potent anti-microbial. Strong spices of cuisines originating from tropical areas have antibacterial properties because food is likely to spoil in hot temperatures. Asian cuisine often combines soy ingredients with rice because this makes these foods more nutritious than when eaten alone.
In my last post I said Weiner was most likely lying. Turns out I was right. I was, however, nearly convinced by an Ars Technica article that explained how the photo-sharing service linked to Weiner’s Twitter account could’ve been hijacked by a trouble-maker.
The news cycle moves so fast these days, that Weiner is already facing calls for his resignation by top Democratic officials. I’m still not clear on how/when Weiner had these online interactions, but my first instinct is to treat this whole scandal as frivolous political theater. If Weiner did all this on his own time in his own home, then this is a matter between him and his wife. If he was lurking around on the Internet at work and used the resources of his office to do so, that’s a different matter.