Thijs Broenink audited the AnalyticsCore.apk app that ships pre-installed on all Xiaomi phones (Xiaomi has their own Android fork with a different set of preinstalled apps) and discovered that the app, which seemingly serves no useful purpose, allows the manufacturer to silently install other code on your phone, with unlimited privileges and access. (more…)
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Xiaomi phones are pre-backdoored; your apps can be silently overwritten
They put out a compilation of scenes from Mad Max: Fury Road as they were shot, with no CGI or no artsy color grading. It makes me love the film even more: I want a minimalist cut of the whole thing like this, with the only CGI work being what’s absolutely necessary to make things work (painting out other cameras and wires, adding key explosions, the waterfall…) and CGI-heavy scenes like the sandstorm interior completely removed. One thought, though: this would probably make Fury Road’s sustained, stylized violence (which is rather different from the startling, crude violence of the first two Mad Max movies) less palatable. You’d be surprised how many people already have a problem with it, even if they love the series. It would be an interesting editing challenge. [via io9 ]
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Fury Road before the visual effects were added
Adblock Plus is to begin reselling the ads it blocks, replacing websites’ original ads with ones under its control—and which it takes a fat cut of the revenue from. The program is meant to be friendly to publishers — it is, after all, letting them display some ads instead of none whatsoever. But there’s still obvious reason for publishers to be unhappy. Acceptable ads [AdBlock Plus’ in-house advertising] are likely to be less valuable than the ads a publisher could otherwise display, limiting what a website can earn. And in setting up its own marketplace, Adblock Plus continues to position itself as a gatekeeper charging a toll to get through a gate of its own making. This was always the gameplan. AdBlock Plus marketed itself as about blocking ads, but it’s really about providing a temporary improvement in user experience to convince readers to insert it as a middleman between them, publishers and advertisers. Once secure, AdBlock Plus can let advertising (and the user experience) creep back to the profitable way it was before, but with it charging rent to everyone. If you block ads, at least block them with something that isn’t taking a shit on both of us: get rid of it and try uBlock Origin . If you don’t like ads but would like to support Boing Boing, buy a t-shirt or an inexpensive gadget from our store. Correction : an earlier version of this post referred to AdBlock Plus as AdBlock. They are different products from different vendors.
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Adblock Plus now selling ads
Dmitry Zakharchenko, the deputy head of the Energy Industry Department of the General Administration of Economic Security and Combating the Corruption, also had €2m in cash. (more…)
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Top Russian anti-corruption official had $120M in cash in his apartment
With the Icelandic Pirates crushing it in the polls and set to form the next government of a sovereign, carbon-neutral, strategically located nation, it’s worth asking how a party whose two issues — internet freedom and copyright reform — are wonky, minority interests rose to prominence. (more…)
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Why the Pirate Party could end up running Iceland
The Ray Bradbury Theater was a far out 1980s television series with each episode written by Bradbury himself. With 65 suspenseful (and sometimes terrifying) episodes of dark science fiction/fantasy, The Ray Bradbury Theater shined the freaky flame of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits down the shadowy path of The X-Files and Stranger Things. And now you can watch all the episodes free on YouTube ! Below are two to get you started: Marionettes, Inc. and The Playground:
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Watch all of the classic 1980s episodes of Ray Bradbury Theater free on YouTube
In June, the Defense Department’s Inspector General released a report on the US Army’s accounting, revealing that the Army had invented $6.5 trillion in “improper adjustments” ($2.8T in one quarter!) to make its books appear balanced though it could not account for where the funds had gone. (more…)
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US Army committed $6.5 trillion in accounting fraud in one year
On August 9, Facebook announced that it had defeated adblockers ; on August 11, Adblock Plus announced that it had defeated Facebook. (more…)
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48 hours later, Adblock Plus beats Facebook’s adblocker-blocker
Martin O’Leary not only made a cool fantasy map generator , he’s giving away the source code and has described the process at a high enough level for an idiot like me to partly understand how it works. I wanted to make maps that look like something you’d find at the back of one of the cheap paperback fantasy novels of my youth. I always had a fascination with these imagined worlds, which were often much more interesting than whatever luke-warm sub-Tolkien tale they were attached to. At the same time, I wanted to play with terrain generation with a physical basis. There are loads of articles on the internet which describe terrain generation, and they almost all use some variation on a fractal noise approach, either directly (by adding layers of noise functions), or indirectly (e.g. through midpoint displacement). These methods produce lots of fine detail, but the large-scale structure always looks a bit off. Features are attached in random ways, with no thought to the processes which form landscapes. I wanted to try something a little bit different. It’s an odd feeling to look at these instantly-generated, detailed maps and realize that they represent nothing. I feel like I’m being wasteful pressing the “Generate high resolution map.” The Uncharted Atlas is a twitterbot that posts a new map every hour.
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Generate your own random fantasy maps
The German newspaper Bild am Sonntag says that US investigators have discovered three more hidden cheat apps in a Volkswagen product line: these ones were discovered in 3-liter Audi diesels. (more…)
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Return of Dieselgate: 3 more hidden programs found in VW Audi/Porsche firmware