Items of Interest

Trennd

Trennd collates the top google searches over time, to show you the popular topics as and when they blow up. You can search from 5 years to 3 months and you can see the monthly growth exponent and curve growth gradient.

Sting & Shaggy!

Sting and Shaggy, a match made in Tiny Desk heaven! You may not initially think that the silky smooth Sting groove would go well with a generous helping of Jamaican timbre from the sensational Shaggy, but you would be wrong my friend! :-) Sit back, relax and crank up the volume on this class Tiny Desk performance! (They also have an album out called 44/876)

Flight Carbon Calculator

The Guardian have released a flight carbon calculator, allowing you to select your starting and destination airports to see how much kilograms of CO2 emmissions are released per passenger on that return flight. it also shows you how many countries emit less CO2 per person per year compared to that flight. Aviation is responsible for 2% of global emissions and are set to at least double by 2050 :-(

Hololens Hologram Language Transaltion

Julia White from Microsoft Azure Marketing demonstrated the use of Hololens 2 to project a motion captured holograph of herself speaking in Japanese using her own speech patterns. The demonstration was created using Azure mixed reality to record the hologram, Azure text to speech and translate to create the spoken content and Azure neural text to speech technology to imprint her speech patterns in Japanese.

Spear Phishing

Many are now aware of the term phishing, the attempt to obtain sensitive information by luring people into clicking links in an email from what they think is a trsuted sender. A new subset of this, spear phishing, is the attempt to lure into the same using emails sent from legitimate and trusted sources which have been compromised.

20 Years of Online Game Hacking

Despite having recommended the Darknet Diaries podcast way back in Edition #150, I fell behind in my listening and have just started catching up. This week I listened to a fascinating two part story about Manfred, an online game hacker who earned a living from his hacking for 20 years! Manfred found and exploited insecurities in pretty much every online game going, except World of Warcraft, for years.

Hacking Hotels

Bloomberg has an interesting piece that follows a group of consultant hackers trying to hack a hotel. The piece describes the usual targets that allow would be hackers to gain access to a hotel's physical infrastructure, such as isolated POS systems, smart TV internet ports or even ports for automated window blinds.

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