I've found a delightfully exploitable social hack which I presented at UK GovCamp. It applies to any uncooperative bureaucracy. Here's how it works. You ask someone to do something and they reply with "I'm sorry sir, that's against our policy." You should say "I'm sorry to hear that. Please can you send me a copy of the policy?" Turns out, most times, there is no policy! Shocking, I know. …
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An annoying privacy violation from leading email newsletter company MailChimp. Responsibly disclosed on 2017-12-04. When you click a link on a webpage or an email, your browser opens up that link and sends the newly visited webpage a Referer Header. (The misspelling is a historical artefact.) This says "Hello new site, I was referred here by this previous website." This has some privacy…
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"Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow!" "I'll create a GUI interface using VISUAL BASIC, see if I can track an IP address." "I love you, let's get married!" Technobabble sounds convincing to a lay audience. If you're not a computerist, then "hacking the mainframe" sounds plausible. If you're emotionally immature, then "I love you! That's why I have to leave you!" sounds like something a…
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The good folks at BlueSkySea have sent me their 1080p dashcam to review. It's a sub-£50 dashcam with built in WiFi and a 150° field of view. Let's take it for a spin! Unboxing and first use Video Samples Video resolution: 1920x1090 formatted to play back at 1920x1080. Audio: 16KHz AAC stereo - although seems to be mono. Just about good enough to clearly pick up voices in the car. File S…
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I've started using Google Cloud Vision for running text detection on OpenBenches images. There's just one problem - Google limits the size of the files that it will accept to 4MB. Why? Who knows! Obviously, it's easy to shrink an image server-side, but how do we do it in the browser? First, let's take a bog-standard file chooser and add a <canvas> element. <input id="userFile" type="file"…
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The good folk at RC Moment have sent me another drone to review! This is the Linxtech IN1601 Mini Drone and it is crazy small! Fits in the palm of your hand, sends 720p video, is USB rechargeable, and costs under £30. Let's get straight on and give it a whirl! What's in the box? Drone! Tiny! It comes with a battery which is 3.7V 200mAh - good for several minutes of flight. There's a USB …
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I've an unhealthy amount of smart gadgets at home. Enough so that it's worth running an orientation session when friends come to visit. This is what the Alexa does, here's which light switches not to use, don't be scared if the Roomba attacks. That sort of thing. I don't know how long we'll live in this place. It's more than likely we'll move at some point. So what happens to the smarthome…
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I go to lots of conferences, unconferences, hackdays, and tech events. As a vegetarian, I'm used to being relegated to second-class when it comes to event catering. If I'm lucky, I get some cheese sandwiches mingled with a plate of meaty snacks. That's why I was overjoyed at ODF Plugfest Rome when the organisers made this announcement: Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edent"All lunch boxes will be…
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Me being grumpy and stupid again. I have an IP Camera on my LAN, I want to connect to it via HTTPS. I can't. Why is that? Why do this? I have a username and password to access my IP camera. And my TV. And my lightbulbs. And all my networked gadgets. If I try to enter the passwords on a modern browser, I get this error message: It is now an accepted fact that data should be encrypted…
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When I was a small child, I took an IQ test. One of the first questions I stumbled on was "A piece of candy costs 25¢. Jonny has a dime. How many nickels does he need to buy the candy?" My 7-year old brain popped. WTAF is a nickel? Or a dime for that matter? We don't have those coins in my country! We don't spend in ¢ either. There was no way to get around the cultural knowledge required by the t…
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You may not realise it, but bandwidth is expensive. It costs you time, money, and battery power whenever you download a file larger than it needs to be. That's why I've become a little bit obsessed with SVG - Scalable Vector Graphics. They're the closest thing to magic that the web has when it comes to image compression. Let me show you what I mean. This is the standard Twitter Logo. It's 512 …
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Way back in 2006, I got my first projector - a 720p model for a few hundred quid. Even after all these years, there's still something magical about watching a movie on a humongous screen. But projectors are still wildly expensive and out of reach for most people. Aren't they? DBPower have sent me their RD810 projector to review. It costs £60. That's not a typo. Sixty Quid. Let's get two …
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