Ben Heck’s mini pinball game: Building walls

There’s a problem with Ben’s mini pinball game project: Everything is too big! Ben realizes that it’s time to decide on the design for the playing field, adding space for the various lanes, the larger bumpers and free travel for the ball. But can Ben do the math correctly? Perhaps Karen can help! What do you want the theme of the pinball game to be? Let the team know over on the element14 Community.

Australia may offer facial recognition data to telecoms and banks

The concerns over government facial recognition systems don’t just revolve around the possibility of Orwellian control — it’s that they may share that data with others you don’t completely trust. Australia is learning this first-hand. The Guardian has obtained documents showing that the country’s Attorney General office is talking to telecoms and banks about testing private use of the Facial Verification Service in 2018. Companies would need to get your permission and would have to show that they’re honoring Australia’s Privacy Act, but they could otherwise use it to fight fraud or otherwise verify the identities of their customers.

The approach would be similar to the existing Document Verification Service, where companies pay a fee every time they want to verify info from documents like your driver’s license or passport.

Whether or not this goes forward depends on an independent privacy assessment. However, there are already a number of outstanding concerns about how this would be implemented, even in a country where facial recognition has seen relatively widespread adoption. Will a company clearly explain what happens if you agree to use facial recognition? Will they keep the data secure, and avoid selling it? And will they force customers to use the system if they want full access to services? Permission won’t mean much if your choice is to either submit to a face scan or receive sub-par treatment.

This doesn’t mean that privacy could be dead in Australia. However, the government will need to show that it’s holding companies’ feet to the fire. If there’s going to be facial recognition in the first place, it’s important to know that it won’t be hoarded or compromised by a data breach. And given other companies’ less-than-stellar security records, achieving that kind of confidence could require a lot of work.

Source: Guardian

How to photograph the stars: 9 steps to stunning night images

With the right settings, a camera can literally mix heaven and earth. The night sky can create some stunning images, but since cameras are at their worst in the dark, photographing the stars is also one of the trickiest types of landscapes to shoot. Autofocus is useless, a tripod is a must, and to top it all off, you’re fumbling with all those camera controls in the dark. But because star photography is so tricky, if you do pull it off, you’ll have a shot that few are able to achieve — you just need the right techniques, the right gear, and the right location to get the shot. Ready to capture the night sky? Here’s how to photograph the stars.

Hillary Grigonis / Digital Trends

Step 1: Get the gear

Star photography doesn’t require the $5,000 camera body that NASA uses, but there are a few items that are musts when it comes to the night sky, starting with a tripod. You’ll be shooting long exposures, and without the tripod you end up with nothing but a dark blur.

While you don’t need the most expensive camera around, star photography is better suited for DSLRs and mirrorless cameras. There are cameras designed specifically for the night sky, but you don’t need a specially modified camera to get some nice star shots — any camera with manual exposure and manual focus will work. (Smartphone star photography is certainly possible too, however, if you’re up for an even bigger challenge).

Lens choice is purely a creative one. If you’re shooting a celestial event, a telephoto lens will bring that phenomena closer, while super-wide-angle lenses help capture the expanse of it all and keeps the shot grounded with the scenery on the ground.

Since you’re shooting in the dark, grab a flashlight too. It’s also a good idea to make sure your are familiar with the camera controls before you go, and if your camera has backlit controls, to find out where that option is located. (On a Nikon DSLR released within the last few years, for example, a light option is on the on/off switch). A camera remote or a smartphone with an app for Wi-Fi enabled cameras, is also helpful but not necessary.

Step 2: Plan around the weather

Perhaps it goes without saying, but don’t do all the planning and traveling only to realize that you can’t actually see any stars because, well, the sky is full of clouds. A less obvious thing to watch out for, however, is the phase of the moon. The light from the full moon can drown out some of the stars. You can still shoot some stars while the moon is lit, but you’ll notice more stars during a new moon.

If you’re imagining a specific landmark with the Milky Way in the background, you’ll also need to plan the shoot around where those stars are at any certain time. This isn’t necessary if you have a location with a good view in every direction (the samples shown here, for example, were all a result of shooting a few test shots, and then finding the largest concentration of stars to find the Milky Way). But, if you’re dreaming up a shot that requires the Milky Way to line up perfectly, an app like the like PhotoPills can save a lot of hassle.

Step 3: Get far (far, far) away

Photographers have a love affair with light, but when it comes to photographing stars, there’s such thing as too much of a good thing. City lights will drown out any stars; the light pollution makes it impossible for the camera to capture any stars. The farther you get from city lights, the more stars you’ll see in your shots. Ideally, you should be at least an hour away from any cities — and even farther if that city is a major one.

If you have the opportunity to shoot stars and you’re not quite so distant from manmade light, you can still try to shoot some stars if they are visible in the sky, you just won’t capture as many. For example, the two images above at a campground had a small town nearby, plenty of campfires, and light pollution you can see around the shoreline, but we decided to try the shot anyways since we were already there and still had a few nice stars in the image.

Hillary Grigonis / Digital Trends

Hillary Grigonis / Digital Trends

Step 4: Find your ground (as in foreground or background)

You can photograph nothing but the night sky, but often, mixing the night sky with the surrounding landscape creates a sense of just how vast and impressive that sky is. Scout out your location for elements to ground the shot. This can be elements in the foreground, such as with trees in front of a starry sky, or in the background, like a starry sky reaching out across a distant mountain.

There are two different ways to incorporate that ground into the shot. You can leave the ground as is and expose for the sky, which turns everything into a silhouette. Or, you can use a flashlight or another continuous light source to paint some light onto those foreground elements so they appear in full color with the sky. Again, this is a creative choice, so there’s no right or wrong answer, though light painting might be the more difficult one to master.

Once you’ve found your shot, make sure to set up that tripod.

Hillary Grigonis / Digital Trends

Step 5: Set your exposure

Night sky photography is long-exposure photography — but only to a point. The stars move across the night sky (or rather, the earth you are standing on spins, but you get the idea) and if you set your exposure too long, your stars will blur. For star photography use either shutter priority mode or manual mode, with a shutter speed less than 30 seconds (ideally, less than 20 seconds). To capture the Milky-Way-level detail, we would overexpose a bit, enough to get the sky lighter than the scenery on the ground. Wide apertures are handy for that low light and the ISO can tie it all together, but the exact settings are going to vary a bit based on your location and any other light in the scene.

A shutter speed of less than 30 seconds will get you pinspots of light, but that’s not the only way to photograph stars. Star trails blur the light as it moves across the sky. For star trails, you’ll need an exposure time of at least 30 minutes. If you really want to show how the stars move across the sky, point the camera towards the north pole (or to the south if you live in the southern hemisphere) and leave the camera shooting on bulb mode for a few hours. Another option is to blend multiple shots under 30 seconds to create star trails or stitch those same images together into a time-lapse star video.

Step 6: Set your focus

Autofocus needs light to work, which means manual focus is a must for photographing the stars. Thankfully, the stars are all pretty far away, which makes it a bit easier to get a sharp focus manually. Start by turning the focus dial all the to infinity, then fine-tune from there. Focus peaking can be helpful, so if your camera model offers that feature, try to turn it on. Another trick for checking the focus is to switch to the live view mode and hit the magnifying glass to check the shot.

Step 7: Use the self-timer or a camera remote to shoot

Touching the camera during any long-exposure can sometimes add camera shake, even with a tripod. With the composition, exposure, and focus set, you’re ready to shoot, but shoot hands-free for the best results. If you have a remote or a Wi-Fi enabled camera with a smartphone app, use that, but if you don’t have a remote available, turning on the self-timer to delay the shot long enough to take your hands off the camera gets the same results.

Hillary Grigonis / Digital Trends

Hillary Grigonis / Digital Trends

Step 8: Review and adjust

After waiting for that long-exposure to finish, check the shot on the LCD before moving on to the next one. Make sure that focus is tack-sharp by zooming in on those stars. If both the landscape and the sky is about the same color, increase your exposure. While you can adjust exposure in post to some extent, drastic changes in exposure is going to bring out the noise in the image, so get it as close as possible in camera. Check the composition for any potential improvements — sometimes, spotting the view with the most stars is easier to do after you’ve taken a few shots. Once you’ve pinpointed any potential issues, make corrections and reshoot before trying a different composition.

Step 9: Edit

Once you’ve finished shooting the stars (and maybe caught up on your sleep) a bit of fine-tuning often gives the shots the extra push. Start by fine-tuning the exposure to make the most stars pop, but don’t get too extreme or you’ll notice a lot more noise. White balance can come in handy when editing star shots as well — in some of these shots, for example, we like to make the sky closer to a dark blue or even purple more than a black or gray and we do that all through white balance.

Contrast can also help those stars pop a bit more, but avoid using the contrast slider or at least use that option last — start by bringing up the highlights and whites and bringing down the shadows and blacks. In shots of the Milky Way, using clarity and vibrance can help bring out the gas and dust in that band of stars.

Learning how to photograph stars isn’t just about great images — it’s getting away from the city lights, staying outside when most retreat to their beds, and standing under a view that’s stunning from nearly anywhere in the world. The limited light may make photographing the stars tricky, but both the experience and the final images make it a challenge worth mastering.

Companies pull ads from YouTube over comments in child videos

YouTube is once again facing an advertiser fallout. HP, candy giant Mars and other big-name brands are pulling their ads from the streaming site after BuzzFeed and Times stories revealed that their ads were running alongside videos of children that were either clearly exploitative or innocent and loaded with pedophilic comments. In multiple cases (such Mars, Smirnoff’s owner Diageo and German retailer Lidl), the companies have vowed not to come back until there are “appropriate safeguards.”

YouTube has already been taking down exploitative videos and disabling ads for other clips. It’s “working urgently to fix this,” a spokesperson said to Reuters. In a statement to the Financial Times, YouTbe stressed that it was clamping down on videos that might give “cause for concern” even if their content was illegal.

However, the move clearly came too late for many of the advertisers — they want to know their ads won’t display next to horrifying videos or comments. And like the uproar over videos promoting hate speech and extremism, it appears that companies are taking action because YouTube took a long time to respond. It also suggests that YouTube’s dependence on a mix of algorithmic filtering, trusted viewers and reports from authorities isn’t enough to prevent significant numbers of questionable or illegal videos from slipping through the cracks.

Source: Reuters, Financial Times

Uber’s new chief knew about hack months before the public

Uber may have come clean about the grievous hack that exposed data for 57 million users, but it apparently took its time getting to that point. Wall Street Journal sources have learned that new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi was informed about the data breach two weeks after he took the reins on September 5th, or more than two months before informing the public. There were reasons for the delay, according to the tipsters, but it still meant leaving people out of the loop.

Khosrowshahi did order a prompt investigation, as he claimed, but Uber and Mandiant (the digital forensics unit of FireEye) wanted to determine exactly how many users were affected and fire the two executives that covered up the attack. Uber told its would-be investor SoftBank about the breach roughly three weeks before the WSJ scoop, but it still didn’t know just how many people were at risk.

Uber has confirmed the broader claims of the report. The company informed SoftBank with incomplete info because of its “duty to disclose to a potential investor,” according to a statement, and revealed the breach in a “very public way” once its investigation wrapped up.

While Khosrowshahi inherited the hack from the previous management under Travis Kalanick and isn’t facing much of a direct threat, the revelation isn’t exactly going to help Uber as investigators from the FTC and individual states look into what happened. They may want to know why Uber’s inquiry took so long, and whether or not Uber could have offered a basic warning to customers as soon as it knew their data was at risk. It’ll need to have satisfactory answers if it wants to avoid the same kind of scrutiny as Equifax and other high-profile hacking targets.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Wikipedia can now be found on the dark web

Wikipedia, for all the issues it has, is still an invaluable resource for many people. While it’s true that you should be careful about citing it in a research paper, the site remains a great resource to get a general overview of a topic and find more in-depth resources. In the United States and nations with similar freedoms, we often take Wikipedia for granted, but there are many parts of the world where accessing the site can be very difficult and illegal.

In order to help at-risk users access the site, cyber security expert Alex Muffett has created a version of the website for the dark web accessible by the Tor browser.

1/ As an experiment, I’ve set up a Wikipedia Onion Site at: https://t.co/NhGD8w3nSU – I’ll keep it running for a few days. pic.twitter.com/KMlF8k3snS

— Alec Muffett (@AlecMuffett) November 23, 2017

Tor is a web browser that allows users to browse the web anonymously. It works by bouncing your information through several routers around the world in order to hide your location. In addition to providing anonymity, Tor allows users to access the dark web. While the dark web is used for illegal activities, the service is also valuable for those who live in countries where freedom of speech and access to information is restricted. Beyond that, many legitimate organizations, such as the New York Times, have a presence on Tor.

It is the latter that Muffet’s dark web Wikipedia is meant for. The site is a read-only version of Wikipedia as, in order to deal with trolls, the organization does not allow the site to be edited by the Tor browser.

Currently, the site is not supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, but Muffett told Motherboard that he would be “delighted” if the non-profit used his solution or created its own.

“I’d like to demonstrate the experience to people, so it’s no longer something abstract,” Muffett told Motherboard. “I’d be delighted if Wikimedia use this, or even roll their own solution; the important thing from my perspective is to demonstrate the concept, and my open-source EOTK tool makes it nearly free to provide such a proof of concept.”

The creation of an Onion-supported Wikipedia has been discussed in the past, but Muffett’s is the first version to go live. He said that he would keep it up for a few days as a proof of concept, but it is pretty clear that he would support a more longterm solution.

‘My Tamagotchi Forever’ coming to Android and iOS next year

Tamagotchi was one of the most popular fads of the 1990s. The hallways of elementary and middle schools were full of kids taking care of their virtual pets or, in many cases, lamenting their tragic ends. Like most fads not named Pokémon, Tamagotchi’s popularity failed to survive the turn of the century, but ’90s nostalgia is big business right now, so it’s little surprise that Tamagotchi is making a comeback in the form of My Tamagotchi Forever for iOS and Android.

The upcoming mobile game gives the creatures a long-needed makeover with improved visuals for extra cuteness. The original versions of the Tamagotchi were fairly simplistic and limited in scope, but the upcoming game is expanding things a bit by taking place in Tamatown. The brightly-colored townscape will play home to similar creatures that players can befriend and interact with, in a variety of ways. If you’ve ever played Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, then you probably have a good idea of what this game will be like.

As with the original game, users will be tasked with ensuring their digital pets are fed, clean, and in bed on time. As it is a free-to-play mobile game, we expect to get daily push notifications reminding us to take care of the creatures. In addition to those aspects, the game will also feature mini-games that allow users to earn currency in order to unlock costumes, food, and other items. Of course, since this a free-to-play game, you’ll be able to pay real money to unlock those items. On the bright side, at least this one doesn’t cost $60.

Touch Arcade has reported that My Tamagotchi Forever is already available in Canada, but the rest of the world will have to wait until 2018. In the meantime, interested users can register on the game’s official website for “chance to become the inspiration for a brand new Tamagotchi character, which will be added to the game for everyone to enjoy!”

This is actually the second Tamagotchi game to come to Android through the first one didn’t fare so well in retrospect. Hopefully, the new coat of paint and modern features will make My Tamagotchi Forever a bit more fun.

The new amazing video from OK Go features lots and lots of printers

As well-known for their videos as their music (if not more), the quartet known as OK Go has delivered some visually impressive music videos over the years. From an elaborately choreographed routine captured by a flying drone camera, to a zero-gravity adventure aboard the “Vomit Comet,” to a slow-motion extravaganza of destruction made from just four seconds of video, their videos are technical masterpieces.

The video for their latest single Obsession, from the 2016 album Hungry Ghosts, stars lots and lots of printers. 567 of them, to be exact. The enormous double wall of printers behind the band pumps out reams and reams of paper, creating a kaleidoscope of shapes and colors during the song. Although it features lots of stop-motion, the video was shot continuously, and perhaps the most amazing thing is that not a single printer jammed up.

Renowned digital artist Daito Manabe conceived and designed the project known as “Paper Mapping” using Double A paper. “Because of the huge scale of the printers, we only have one-time shoot,” he said. “It has been a trial and error process to make perfect synchronizing system.”

Karen Singh created the designs printed on each sheet of paper, and well-known choreographer MIKIKO conceived the movements of the band members, which included spinning in the air while suspended in front of the weall of printers.

The video was directed by band member Damian Kulash, Jr. & Yusuke Tanaka and was shot in one take over five days of filming in Japan. From initial concept to release, the video took more than two years to complete.

The video was actually delayed in publishing to YouTube, as the site’s Auto HD function caused some problems. “Just leaving it on ‘Auto HD’ results in some pretty intense distortion during a few sections, because when the colors and patterns get crazy, there’s actually just too much information flying by for YouTube’s normal HD compression. We broke the matrix.” They recommend manually setting the resolution to 1440p or 2160p.

If you’re wondering what happened to all that paper, the band has promised that it was all recycled and the proceeds donated to Greenpeace. No word on the budget for ink cartridges, though.

Fernando Alonso is the first F1 driver with an eSports team

You’ve seen basketball and soccer (aka football) teams dive into eSports, and now it’s the turn for individual Formula One drivers to get in on the action. McLaren Honda driver Fernando Alonso has launched an eSports team in partnership with Logitech, with Alonso serving as a team principal. The FA Racing G2 Logitech G team — yes, it’s a mouthful — will compete in a slew of games across multiple platforms, and has already enlisted F1 eSports league finalist Cem Bolukbasi.

The team creation came shortly after McLaren appointed Rudy van Buren as an official sim driver following a “World’s Fastest Gamer” competition. McLaren is also the first racing team with its own eSports director.

Alonso explained the move as a logical extension. Each F1 driver is a “gamer at heart,” he said, and virtual racing opens doors for a younger audience that might not get a chance to race in the real world. There’s also the simple matter of marketing: virtual racing serves as a promotional tool that can get fans excited and might even lead to some taking up motorsport as a career.

The next question is whether or not other teams follow suit. The jury’s still out on whether or not eSports teams ultimately help, but it’s hard to see other F1 drivers and teams sitting by the wayside. If there’s even a hint of success, don’t be surprised if a large chunk of F1 eventually fields eSports outfits.

Via: Reuters

Source: G2 eSports (Twitter)

Over 1.3 million anti-net neutrality FCC comments are likely fakes

It’s no secret that bots flooded the FCC with comments supporting its plans to kill net neutrality. But just how many comments were fraudulent? All too many, according to data scientist Jeff Kao. He recently conducted a study that used natural language processing to conclude that “at least” 1.3 million of the anti-net neutrality comments were fakes originating from a central source. They appear to have come from a giant mail merge that made the messages appear superficially unique, but was really just swapping in synonyms for what was clearly the same core statement. The language sounds familiar, too, mimicking that of a giant telecom or lobbying group than everyday people.

The actual number of fake grassroots (aka astroturfing) comments is likely to be considerably higher, Kao added. Out of 22 million total comments, only 800,000 appear to be genuinely original — and 99 percent of them support net neutrality. There were form letter campaigns on both sides, but anti-neutrality comments were more likely to be duplicates and submitted in large blocks that suggested targeted spamming efforts instead of real submissions from concerned Americans.

The ratio isn’t completely surprising, but it does make the FCC’s refusal to cooperate with fraud investigations that much more disconcerting. There’s now stronger evidence that a pro-telecom entity was trying to manipulate the comments in a deceptive manner, but it seems likely that the FCC will do nothing to address this or prevent it from happening again. The FCC’s spokesperson has even tried to flip the argument, claiming that 7.5 million pro-neutrality comments came from a “fake email generator website.” Even if that’s true, real public input appears to be meaningless at the FCC — for now, the spam bots are winning.

Via: Washington Post

Source: Hackernoon (Medium)