You have not yet voted on this site! If you have already visited the site, please help us classify the good from the bad by voting on this site. At last year’s fundraiser, Moss seemed apathetic, even apologetic, about Clinton as a candidate.

Statistical Techniques If you don’t really get or like picross puzzles, the game lets you skip through them using the fast forward button, but it’s more fun to play through the puzzles. Ever notice how Christopher Nolan’s movies (Interstellar, Inception, The Prestige) feel like an anxiety attack? Well, maybe that’s overstating things a bit. Cities: Skylines’ PlayStation version has a release date of August 15th. You can ruin tiny simulated peoples’ commutes on so many platforms!

This TV Backlighting System Fucked Me Up. This is opulence.

Suddenly, there is extra light blasting from behind my TV screen, making a day- glow title sequence positively atomic. The Dream. Screen, a backlighting system that’s designed to make your TV viewing more immersive, is a luxury that I absolutely don’t need. In theory, the supplementary lights change color based on the pixels on the TV screen for an “immersive theater experience.” In practice, it’s an overstimulating, distracting, nauseating novelty, and I can’t get enough of this shit. What is it? A group of LEDs on the back of a television that make viewing more immersive. Like. Those lights are very pretty.

No Like. It can be really distracting and there are a lot of wires. I’m a fan of the Phillips Hue wireless LED lights, and find the ability to change the color of my room with my phone delightful. Dream. Screen, loosely based on the original Philips Hue- adjacent Ambilux television, works in the same vein, so I was keen on it. I do a lot of stupid things to entertain myself, like acquiring a 5. Samsung television with a gimmicky curved display. Dream. Screen seemed like an upgrade.

I was naive. I didn’t realize how much I could loathe and love one product. Depending on what kind of TV you have, the kit costs between $1. HD or 4. K, and the size of your screen). The setup is a small feat in and of itself. There are chunky LED light strips to tape to the back of a TV, differently spaced depending on the size of your tv (there’s a guide). There’s a smartphone app that works with your wi- fi to download and set up.

This is opulence. Suddenly, there is extra light blasting from behind my TV screen, making a day-glow title sequence positively atomic. The DreamScreen, a.

Then you need to plug your video source into the video input of the round HDMI splitter, and plug the output into your TV. There are also two optional “sidekick” lights for extra glow ($6. This thing takes up three fucking outlets. Get ready for a wire rat king. You do get the “bigger, brighter” TV the product’s website promises, but the lights don’t exactly extend the screen space; they sometimes echo, and sometimes compliment the colors of pixels around the very edges of your screen, sending rays of color from behind your television across your walls in time with whatever is on. In the case of a dramatic explosion, this is all very sensible, as a good part of your wall will look onfire. It really shines with material intended to be trippy—like whatever the hell that was in episode eight of Twin Peaks: The Return (above), or that psychedelic 2.

A Space Odyssey sequence. The more you give it—pink and blue neons, deep reds—the more you get.

But it can be confounding in undramatic sequences, with bright blurry bits of clothes and other immovable objects echoing off screen, like dislocated fuzzy chunks. Daylight and black- and- white sequences result in a bright bluish- white screen halo. Letterboxing also presents an obvious, chasmic problem—gaps.

I want to emphasize the visual loudness of this thing. Even at the lowest brightness, without the two sidekicks, the Dream. Screen is really bright. I like to watch movies in complete darkness and concentrate on the screen. With the Dream. Screen, the entire room is illuminated, including the dirty laundry in the far corner that I’m trying to ignore. Say you’re the type of person with serious respect for cinematography. The screen bleeding out of the frame in blurry puddles every which way might not be what the cinematographer intended.

Despite and because of its flaws, this truly is an accessory of visual excess. There’s also the product’s weird “health benefits” claim that it “reduces digital eye strain.” The claim cites a single 2. TV not hurt your eyes so much. But the study also says that these results are “modest” and sometimes even the opposite. Speaking from personal experience, staring into a significantly brighter TV area is the opposite—my eyes ache after a while.

So I wouldn’t take this study very seriously. Where Dream. Screen really shines is gaming. I sit closer to the TV while I game and my focus is more sharply drawn to specific sections of the screen. This position allows the peripheral edges of the game space to blend with the Dream. Screen light extensions and I’m significantly more immersed, just as Dream. Screen wanted. When I’m not watching the entire screen, the patchiness of Dream.

Screen’s illumination isn’t a big deal. It’s also more dynamic because more is happening faster, so it’s swishing around me.

That’s neat. For most everything else, it’s immersive, but kind of like watching TV wasted is immersive. You’re going to get pulled into the light. You’ll want to squint. Your eyes might skid.

You might ask yourself, do I really need to do this? Am I enjoying it? Why am I doing this? Excess and novelty are perfectly good reasons to try something. Getting overwhelmed and bored is a great reason to stop. Until then, the trick is getting used to something completely unnecessary. Awhile back, I saw Wonder Woman in 4.

DX, which is extra 3. D, with moving theater seats and “effects.” For two hours in the theater the seat jostled me back and forth and gently spit water into my hair.

It was completely unnecessary. But now I wonder, how am I supposed to watch another movie again without steamy, bumpy smell- o- vision? I wasn’t even sure I liked 4. DX, but I’m going back, obviously. Maybe I want to be thrown around. Maybe I’ll always want a “bigger, brighter” TV.

Maybe I want to be perpetually overstimulated by entertainment technology. Maybe I want bright lights strapped to the back of my TV, for extra explosions. Nothing in life is perfect. A lot of the things aren’t even good. I think this thing is bad, but also good.

No one really needs it, but it’s awfully easy to get used to. When I don’t use the lights, I miss them. Sometimes I’ll even put them on the ambient setting when I’m doing something else. Like “rainbow.” Or “fireplace.” Twinkling in the background. Completely fucking with my head. READMEIt takes up to three outlets.

It’s really bright and dramatic. Best for really bright and dramatic sequences in movies and games. Great for gaming and explosions, not so much for movies you respect.

How much you’ll like it really depends on your definition of “immersive.”Easy to hate, hard to leave.

The Politics of Hacking in the Age of Trump. There are a lot of unusual things to do at DEF CON, the annual hacker conference that draws tens of thousands of security enthusiasts to Las Vegas in the depths of summer—you can learn to lockpick, go fed- spotting, or hack an internet- connected sex toy.

But last year offered something new. Jeff Moss, the founder of DEF CON and its more enterprise- focused sister conference, Black Hat, held a political fundraiser for Hillary Clinton. Fundraising for Clinton might’ve been standard behavior for most of the tech industry that summer, but doing it during Black Hat and DEF CON sparked backlash. Jake Braun, the CEO of Cambridge Global and a former White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, addressed the tension when he co- hosted last year’s controversial Clinton event. A month earlier, the cybersecurity firm Crowd. Strike had announced its investigation into a hack at the Democratic National Committee and attributed the intrusion to Russia- linked hacking groups.

Wikileaks and an individual or group calling themselves Guccifer 2. DNC. The impact wouldn’t become clear until November, but it was obvious to the assembled hackers that their industry was being yanked into the spotlight. The year of hacking- themed stories that followed thrust cybersecurity into mainstream politics like never before.

Election hacking is now an exhausted meme; Russia is synonymous not with onion domes but with network intrusion.“This last year, it really hit,” Moss told Gizmodo. It’s not as if election hacking is a new field (Moss recalled presentations about it at DEF CON in 2. Donald Trump’s presidency is giving hackers an exciting, if itchy, fame. Whether you love or hate him, he’s incredible for business, the best, big league. If you’re a DEF CON attendee, your grandma has seen stories about your world on TV, maybe even a pundit with your same job title.

A hacked election isn’t necessarily how you wanted your work to get notoriety, but here you are and you might as well ask for a raise.“A lot of hackers are happy in the sense that they’re being listened to more. Their advice is considered a little bit more. There’s a sense of, . We’ve been warning you about it for a decade, nothing’s happened, but at least you’re paying attention,” Moss told Gizmodo. At last year’s fundraiser, Moss seemed apathetic, even apologetic, about Clinton as a candidate. And there may have been professional consequences, too. Moss, who’s a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, has been told that the fundraiser earned him a spot on the Trump administration’s blacklist.

Despite his role on the advisory council, he was not sought after to consult on cybersecurity issues during the transition. But Moss isn’t backing away from the cause, and DEF CON is getting more deeply involved with election security than ever before—this year, the event will host its first Voting Machine Hacking Village. DEF CON villages are offshoots of the main event, where attendees get to tinker with technology. At the vote- hacking village, they’ll be invited to tamper with voting hardware and software. In addition to the hackers, the village is expecting visitors from Congress, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Department of Homeland Security, and voting machine vendors. Moss hopes to discover just how easy it is to compromise a voting system. Although states test components of their systems, Moss couldn’t find any examples of a state testing their complete voting apparatus.

Most manufacturers, he explained, test voting machines for their ability to withstand humidity rather than hackers. This is worrisome, particularly at a time when Americans are suddenly obsessed with qualifying the security of their electoral systems.“We wanted to get our hands on enough equipment to build and run a complete fake election,” Moss told Gizmodo. He’s been tracking down the machines on e.

Bay. The software, however, has been harder to obtain. Mass Effect 2 Dlc App. We have some leads on them but couldn’t get them in time for this year.”Security experts typically outline three possible routes of attack on elections. One is the Russiagate scenario that’s trickled out in intelligence assessments and headlines over the last year—an attacker steals compromising information from the leading candidate’s campaign, perhaps mixes it with faked documents to stir up even more scandal, and then leaks that information to level the playing field.

The second possibility involves breaching states’ voter rolls and removing names or otherwise altering the data to make life difficult for voters as they show up to the polls. The third option is attacking voting machines directly to manipulate the vote count. It’s this final possibility that’s the most exciting for hackers (and most alarming to everyone else). Although US officials have repeatedly said that there’s no evidence to suggest vote tallies were altered during the 2. At the vote- hacking village, participants will get a chance to find out how much impact they could have. Plus, hackers have a legal advantage on their side, at least for now.

New exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act were added in October that open a two- year window to allow cybersecurity research on certain devices, including voting machines. While many academics have experimented with hacking voting machines, Moss wants the village to conduct a test of a complete election system. It’s not intended as academic research, Moss says, but more of a temperature check to see just how vulnerable state systems might be. Whatever is learned at the village will hopefully be used by state officials when they’re evaluating which systems to purchase, and how to configure and maintain them. With an audience of Congressmen and DHS officials, the village could have a substantial impact. It’s an opportunity for attendees not just to test their skills, but to educate and shape policy on an issue, turning uninformed panic into experience.

Or if they have, nobody’s gotten attention. I guess it’s just the context of the presidential election.” The specter of last year’s election is still haunting security pros. But politics don’t always sit well at DEF CON, or in the security community in general. The liberal baseline that’s assumed in Silicon Valley vanishes when you’re surrounded by information security pros in Las Vegas, and many attendees, like Moss, seem uncomfortable taking an overtly political stance. There’s a pervasive (although often untrue) belief that security comes down to simple math—there’s one and only one right answer, with no room for opinion or nuance. A system is secure or it is broken, with no gray area in between.

Democracy, and the state- run election networks that come along with it, are very gray systems. Although some hackers may be unwilling to become entangled in politics, Moss sees the intense post- election interest in his community as an opportunity. It might’ve been happening but it wasn’t on their radar. Now they will start questioning, ?

Now Alexa can get my questions subpoenaed by police, do I not speak out loud at home?’ The optimist in me says, now people know to ask those questions,” he said.