Multiverse 2.357
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Google filed a patent application for “Smart-home automation system that suggests or automatically implements selected household policies based on sensed observations”. This is a futuristic look at automated systems that monitor “temperature, humidity, lighting, water, power usage, sound signals, ultrasound signals, radio-frequency, other electromagnetic signals or fields, GPS, proximity, motion, light signals, fire, smoke, other […]
Welcome back to another Python programming post. This is a followup to my previous posts about using scapy – that versatile network traffic utility. We went through the basics of creating custom packets, using the basic scapy commands, and then looking at how to build a simple DNS query program using scapy. Feel free to […]
What will facial recognition systems look like in five or ten years? Welcome to the first post in this whole biometrics series to consist entirely of idle speculation! After building up a basic description of the status quo, it’s time to extrapolate forward based on nothing more than intuition. Some trends are obvious: increasing resolution […]
Interest in steganography is increasing. In some ways that’s a good thing, but advanced pesistent threat (APT) groups are showing more interest than ever and that is troubling. These threat actors have the means to invest in the time and expertise needed to use these techniques to be highly effective at covertly moving information in […]
We would be remiss if we did not mention specialized search sites in one of these posts. There are so many websites that index links in a particular industry or links to specific types of documents like patent applications. They don’t fit neatly into other categories but are incredibly useful for people with specific research […]
Smart homes are on the horizon, and we can get a glimpse of things to come by seeing what companies like Google and Amazon are planning and developing. We currently have a variety of connected devices we can buy, but we are just starting to see integrated household systems on the market. There are convenience […]
Searching is one of the core activities people do online. We’ve been posting about it since our introductory post about Google and searching. But in spite of the fact that most people use Google to search there are actually plenty of choices, including some specialized choices. We saw that in our previous post about searching […]
In our previous posts we discussed using physical identifiers including facial recognition and other physical characteristics like eyes, fingerprints and veins for authentication and identification. But how does that help providers of online services know who is using the service? The answer might involve behavioral biometrics. Behavioral biometrics refers to specific behaviors that are tied […]
Welcome back to another installment in our series on steganography. After introducing Digital Steganography Basics, we just finished looking at a modern form of hiding text within text using the snow technique in the post titled Digital Text Based Steganography. Let’s move on to talk about binary files now, as they represent a more popular […]
Google continues to dominate online search, as we outlined in our introductory post about search engines aptly titled Search Engines and Google. We then dedicated an entire post to decentralized search engines, since your search topics colectively paint a highly detailed view of your personal life. They allow users to run their own nodes. This […]
There’s a lot of excitement around blockchain-based games and the promise of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to enable new opportunities for players to own in-game objects that have utility across game platforms. I get the vision, yet I think it’s mostly a case of overinflated expectations. Let’s break it down. Tokens are standardized digital assets issued […]
The creation of viruses goes way back in computer history, but the commercial explosion of virus remediating software began in earnest in 1987. Several virus removal programs were released in that year, including McAfee Company’s VirusScan software, and Ross Greenberg’s Flushot Plus. Viruses have proliferated and grown in complexity since then, and in the 1990s […]