Archive of entries posted on 25th August 2014

You’re Not Paranoid – They Really Are Out to Get You. And It’s Legal, Too

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First, you couldn’t trust houseplants & potato chip bags.

But that’s not what’s going to do you in.

No, you’re doomed because of your super-fancy smart phone.

Not from the microphone or the GPS (although that’s not doing you any favors, privacy-wise), it’s the phone’s gyroscope, which automatically rotates the screen when you rotate the phone – it lets anybody eavesdrop on you [emphasis mine]:

The MEMS gyroscopes found on modern smart phones are sufficiently sensitive to measure acoustic signals in the vicinity of the phone. The resulting signals contain only very low-frequency information (< 200 Hz). Nevertheless we show, using signal processing and machine learning, that this information is sufficient to identify speaker information and even parse speech. ***Since iOS and Android require no special permissions to access the gyro, our results show that apps and active web content that cannot access the microphone can nevertheless eavesdrop on speech in the vicinity of the phone.***

This sort of thing is why I have a superunfancy blitheringidiotphone.

Oh, and at the link, you can also scroll down to find out what else that stalkerment officials don’t need permission to access.

If you need me, I’ll be over here under my tinfoil tent…

Wisdom of the Day: Confection Dragon Tuxedo Ponytail Motorcycle Earthquake

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Random Thoughts: Misogyny, Simpsons, and Partying

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Richard Dawkins doesn’t want children to grow up to lead sad, miserable lives, but how would you know if a child would grow up to be him?

There’s a lot of racism you can get away with if you make it clear you’re for higher taxes and more government.

To help end misogyny, have women tried being nicer?

See, the joke itself makes a misogynistic assumption. If I have to explain the joke, that means it’s very intellectual and thus good.

Can’t believe I had to mansplain my misogyny joke.

All of America’s enemies getting together for a golf tournament would be a great end to the President Obama movie.

The Obama presidency is stupid, but I like to think of it as a uniquely American kind of stupid I can still take pride in.

One of these days I need to sit you all down and have a long chat on how awesome I am because I still think you don’t quite understand.

We all hate millennials, but we still have to work on making them productive so they can eventually pay for our entitlements.

I should be subjecting my children to the Simpsons marathon, but I don’t have cable.

So it’s a 12-day Simpsons marathon — that’s how many good days?

Really, the first ten or so season of The Simpsons have to be the single biggest influence on my sense of humor.

I remember having long conversations with friends that was nothing but quoting lines from The Simpsons.

One of these days I should do my top 100 Simpsons lines/moments, though it would be hard to cut down to that few.

The Simpsons gave me ten good seasons, and I continued to watch them for about ten seasons more.

Last late episode I remember really liking was the book heist one that had Neil Gaiman as a guest voice. Great end joke.

I remember the last season I watched being pretty decent, but it was like “Classic Itchy & Scratchy! … What else is on?”

Understanding ISIS is best left to anthropologists who dig up their bones a thousand years from now.

I hope they finally have Mr. T do a cameo on Doctor Who. “I pity the Who!”

The new game from the Flappy Bird creator is about a hundred times harder.

Swing Copters would be insanely hard without the swinging hammers. With them, it’s just ridiculous.

You can basically name any episode from the first ten seasons of The Simpsons and I can come up with a few funny lines from it.

Did they change the actor for who plays the main character in Doctor Who? Do they think they can do that and we won’t notice?

I remember when we had presidents who respected us enough to pretend to care.

Okay, I’ll finally ask: How does one “party”? Do you dance to loud music? What are the mechanics of it?

I haven’t followed music in a while. Who is the popular new band now? Beck?

Autotune was made to help ease us into all music being computer generated.

If you actually remember when MTV mainly just played music videos, then you’re way too old to be watching MTV.