Here’s an interactive collection of the world’s biggest data breaches. It goes back to 2004, where about 92,000,000 email addresses and screen names were stolen by an AOL employee, and covers most of the major events up until and including 2016. There are a few ways to filter the data and change the representation.
Overall, should give you a pretty good idea of how safe and secure your online data is. Oh, and how private it is too.
Here are a couple of useful Bash resources that came upon my radar recently.
First one is Julia Evans’ blog post “Bash scripting quirks & safety tips“. It’s quite introductory, but is has a few useful tips. The one in particular I either didn’t know about or completely forgot mentioned recently is on how to make Bash scripts safer by using “set -e“, “set -u“, and “set -o pipefail“. These go well with another post of mine not so long ago.
The second is Sam Rowe’s blog post “Advancing in the Bash Shell“, which I found useful for all kinds of navigation and variable expansion in Bash command line. Especially the bits on searching and reusing the history.
One of the recent Julia’s Drawings exposes how fast computers really are. See this page for more examples of how much a computer can do in just one second.
Not being religious at all, I try to avoid the subject in this blog, but I think Bible Or Qur’an website deserves a mention. Mission statement from the front page:
The mission of BibleOrQuran is to educate people about the true nature and content of the Bible and Qur’an. False statements such as “81% of the Qur’an is about killing infidels!” and “The bible teaches only peace!” are commonly thrown around with little evidence to back them up. Despite their lack of credibility, however, they still continue to polarize and cause irrational hate and fear. We hope that by showing random Bible or Qur’an passages, we show how similar the two texts are and allay many of the fears of Islam and its teachings.
Basically, you get to see a short quote and then pick which of the two books it is from. The website keeps the score, showing you how well you are doing on the guesswork. In the meantime it drives the point of similarity in the depth and mood of both the Bible and the Qur’an.
Simple and effective, for those, of course, who can be convinced…
As someone who works with technology for years now, I might sometimes appear as a “know all, seen all” kind of guy. But that’s far from the truth. Sure, there is plenty of technology I know or even slightly aware of. But there is still a whole lot that blows my mind when I come across it.
Via this blog post, I came across an X27 – ultra low light night vision color camera. And my mind is blown. This technology provides high definition, color video images in ultra low light conditions (no moon, overcast). The level of detail this camera picks up is simply unbelievable. Check out this video comparing X27 to some other night vision technologies.
The X27 camera takes videos in darkness that looks like they were shot in the daytime. And they’re in color…none of this black and white, thermal, or infrared stuff. The camera was developed for military use, has an effective ISO rating of 5,000,000, and has a comically long name: “X27 Reconnaissance Day/Night high Fidelity true real time low light/low lux color night vision Imaging Security / Multi Purpose camera system”. Pricing information is not available, but I bet you’re paying for every single one of those words. (via digg)
Sure, military is probably the first and only sector that can afford this. But as with anything, once the technology is available, it will make it’s way down to the rest of us, opening new doors in law enforcement, security, photography, movies and TV, entertainment, health and safety, environment and animal welfare, and other areas.
Super cool stuff!