Author Archive
Twitter Hacked
Posted by Dylan in General Ramblings on December 18th, 2009
A funny thing happened to me tonight.
I tried to log into Twitter, and got no response…
I tried a few minutes later and got this:
Then I tried a few minutes later and got this:
Did a litlte digging and it seems like at 01:26am EDT the DNS records were changed. New DNS servers are pointing the requests at a hosting provider with that page on it. So Twitter’s servers themselves don’t seem to have been attacked, but if the hackers are clever they could easily be capturing and recording attempts to login via Twitter plaintext API (used by most third-party applications and therefore potentially millions of users) – I haven’t tested to see if this is the case
Downconversion in Media Composer
Posted by Dylan in Avid, High Definition, Video/TV on December 6th, 2009
Updated: I’ve done a little research on image evaluation, and decided that SSIM presents the best option to evaluate the the perceptual quality. SSIM results are now included below.
In a recent thread on the Avid Community Forums there was some discussion of the quality of Avid’s downconversion from HD to SD. I have used various downconvert methods from within Media Composer in the past and have never had any serious problems with any of the results, but I figured I might be able to conduct some vaguely reasonable tests. Read the rest of this entry »
Kiwiright and Copyright
Posted by Dylan in General Ramblings, Video/TV on November 14th, 2009
Some University of Auckland students have recently created a short documentary about copyright called © Kiwiright which has been fairly popular in NZ internet circles. The documentary includes interviews with geek-about-town Juha and CFF founder Bronwyn, but in addition to this it also features a whole lot of Disney characters and a reasonably identifying commercial music track – I think this detracts from the message of the video overall (which I otherwise support and appreciate). Read the rest of this entry »
The DVR Battle – TiVO vs MySky
Posted by Dylan in General Ramblings, Video/TV on November 9th, 2009
This isn’t a review – I don’t have a TiVo and I haven’t used one. This is my assessment of TiVo (and the other predominant DVR system available in NZ, MySky HDi).
When TiVo was announced I was fairly dubious – without access to Sky’s channels it seemed hard to see a product like TiVo really having enough to offer. However not long after it was announced that TiVo would support on-demand content delivered by broadband. Read the rest of this entry »
The Smacking Debate
Posted by Dylan in General Ramblings on August 2nd, 2009
There is currently a referendum in progress in New Zealand, it is in relation to a fairly recent law change that modified the Crimes Act with regard to smacking, basically. The referendum question posed is “Should a smack, as part of good parental correction, be a criminal offense in New Zealand” which myself and many others feel is an absurd question. Read the rest of this entry »