Automatapoeia

We are officially unveiled!

I can't wait to write code with my favorite humans and make really weird stuff

What the program I wrote did was attempt to classify how similar every sentence in the corpus is to every other sentence. For this book I said: "Go through each sentence in Pride and Prejudice. Find the most similar sentence you know of that isn't from Pride and Prejudice itself. Print out that sentence." The result is a book sort of shaped like Austen's classic, yet not really that similar at all. It's surprisingly readable for something entirely unsupervised. Please try to enjoy.

Privacy advocates are warning federal authorities of a new threat that uses inaudible, high-frequency sounds to surreptitiously track a person's online behavior across a range of devices, including phones, TVs, tablets, and computers.

The ultrasonic pitches are embedded into TV commercials or are played when a user encounters an ad displayed in a computer browser. While the sound can't be heard by the human ear, nearby tablets and smartphones can detect it. When they do, browser cookies can now pair a single user to multiple devices and keep track of what TV commercials the person sees, how long the person watches the ads, and whether the person acts on the ads by doing a Web search or buying a product.

At 23:52 GMT last night (October 31, 2015) hackers succeeded in executing a spearphishing attack gaining access to a key email account. The attackers then immediately performed a password reset to hijack PageFair’s account on a Content Distribution Network (CDN) service that we use to serve our analytics javascript tag. They modified the CDN settings so that instead of serving PageFair’s javascript, it served malicious javascript. This intentionally harmful javascript prompted visitors to install a fake Adobe Flash update, which appears to be a botnet trojan that targets Windows (more information on it is now available here). Although many virus scanners will have prevented this file from executing, others may not have been able to correctly detect it.

We noticed the security breach within 5 minutes, but it took until 01:15 (83 minutes) to fully rectify the situation. After this time visitors were no longer affected.

If you had the free PageFair Analytics code installed on your website yesterday, it is possible that some visitors to your website will have downloaded the malicious executable file. We are directly notifying every publisher who had our code deployed during this time. If we do not reach out to you directly, it means that you were not affected.

Daring Fireball

"mirror lake" - procedural salt flats, mountains, forests