High Quality Undead: Interactive

I have to admit, this is rather old, but since it was offline for some time its resurfacing is enough for me to write about it. I'm talking about The Outbreak, an interactive movie by studio SilkTricky, who are usually busy making high end interactive flash features / movies for big brands like Lexus and Nike [which you should check out on their homepage btw.]. For someone as much into movies as me, it's nice to see this so well filmed and edited. Definitely not one of those cheaply produced interactive movies on YouTube I've seen in the past, but high quality delivered via broad bandwidth. And - of course - it has zombies. They make everything better.

So go, take a swing and try your luck in an interactive zombie outbreak!

Advice! Old TPB Torrents

In my torrent client were some old torrents I never really got completed. Looking in the tracker info I saw a socket error with the trackers of The Pirate Bay and thought my ISP had blocked them. Outrageous!

Quickly googling for it revealed that they changed their tracker url a while back, though. So if an old TPB torrent of yours isn't working and you can see a socket error in the tracker status, add »http://tracker.openbittorrent.com/announce« to the list of trackers and you should be fine.

Tracking Down The Dead

There's a fun new research project by public rights fighters at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Panopticlick. The boffins there believe it is very likely that you can be (almost) uniquely identified by the cumulation of info in your browser. They say that the sum of installed OS, browser handle, language, plugins, local time zone, usable fonts, etc. form a profile of you that is almost as unique as a fingerprint. A few lines of Javascript can read this out. Even if your browser has a private browsing setting, that doesn't help.

Now you can just add things up. Maybe you have cookies enabled, too. Oh, that will identify you very uniquely. Maybe not, but the server could still get additional info on your rough location and ISP by looking at your IP adress, unless you use a proxy all the time.

A website can easily identify you with those information and link what you do online to your profile and you. For example Google. Just think what the big G knows about you. Their Superbowl commercial made it quite clear, ironically. Life situation, hobbies, sexual preferences, possibly illegal actions even (not depicted in the ad). It can be as detailed as you wish.

There are certain restrictions, of course. For starters, however rare your browser fingerprint may be, it is probably not unique. One in 250.000 browsers may have your info. [check your browser's uniqueness here] But they could still get a specific zombie pinned down by ISP & location. The other restriction is bigger, though. What if I update my browser? Install new plugins? New fonts? Yep, your fingerprint just changed.

With that said you'd have to take certain heuristics into consideration when trying to log someones profile. How many parameters can change in what time span? Well, fonts probably won't get deinstalled, only new ones installed. With new applications for example. A little hard, but achievable.

Now if some site had those info and your real life adress and name - like eBay or some online shop for example - it goes wild. No privacy no more, mister zombie man!

What can you do against it? Pretty much nothing. Changing your browser, plugins and so on every once in a while is not very feasible. Of course you can browse via proxies like Tor to mask your IP, but that can be rather slow and then they could log your traffic or passwords. A few ISPs don't give region handles with their DNS servers, but you have to look a bit to find one. You can deactivate Javascript and every other extension, but that would harshly hinder your internet experience. 

In the end, the digizombie of today has to take that risk. Just think about it the next time you enter something on a website.

Post-Apocalyptic War Wizard Zombies

The time I would have usually spent with writing up something nice for you peepz, I spent with a movie today. And since it fits the topic I present to you:

Wizards

This 1977 animated movie features an apocalypse brought by technology and mindless mutants [read: zombies] coming from it. What a nice fit to our topic here!

Besides the sometimes rather goofy animation and funky 70's soundtrack, this fairly unknown piece of entertainment features violence, war, swearing, partial nudity and Nazis, so I definitely wouldn't recommend it for children or the easily impressed. You have to look over some weird jumps in the storytelling and a bunch of loose ends, too. But in the end, this movie is great for its symbolism, metaphors and allegories. The theme of technology is big in this cult masterpiece and although it might seem that it is being demonized here, its moral neutrality can be seen if you watch the full movie.

Ralph Bakshi directed Wizards and wanted to call it War Wizards, but since it came out the same year as Star Wars, the title was changed after George Lucas asked him to.

So if you have an hour to spare and would like to spend it with clever adult-oriented animation. Go and see Wizards.