Author: Christopher Parsons

Policy wonk. Torontonian. Photographer. Not necessarily in that order.

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VR Needs to Be Pleasurable for Women Before VR Porn Can Be

VR Needs to Be Pleasurable for Women Before VR Porn Can Be:

The study measured body movement, with participants playing a Rift game for 15 minutes and researchers recording the time it took for someone to feel nauseous. Of the 35 percent of subjects who felt unwell within ten minutes, 70 percent were women. It’s a major design flaw, says Stoffregen.

“Engineers, the people who design VR systems, tend to think about motion sickness in terms of the technology—resolution, frame rate, things like that—and in terms of the sensory systems that the technology was designed to stimulate, usually the eyes,” he told me. “That’s the origin of the impetus to focus on things like visual field size. But there’s no science behind it.”

Instead, Stoffregen believes that “susceptibility is related to the degree to which people can stabilise their own bodies.” In other words, on the whole, men are able to stabilise their bodies better than women because they have higher centres of gravity, larger feet, and are heavier. This, Stoffregen says, is why men are also less susceptible to more traditional forms of motion sickness like seasickness.

“It’s not surprising that men and women respond differently in a postural sense to unfamiliar motion situations,” he said. “A person using VR must control and stabilize their own body. The more compelling the VR, the more likely it is that the person will try to stabilize the body relative to the virtual world. But that is a mistake; the body is not in the virtual world, and we need to stabilize it relative to the physical world, gravity etc.”

…

Other researchers have also found gender differences in the VR experience. A study from Microsoft’s danah boyd (who chooses not to capitalize her name) also found that there’s a difference in how men and women experience the various methods VR producers use to suggest distance. Motion parallax, which uses perspective to suggest distance, is processed far better by men than women; shape-from-shading, which uses light to alter the way you perceive objects, is processed better by women. Most systems use motion parallax—mostly because it’s easier to program—despite the fact it can make the VR experience far less pleasurable or immersive for women.

Setting aside Vice’s focus on pornography, I found the suggested rationales for why VR’s unpleasant effects are unequally experienced along gender lines fascinating. Developers should be striving to increase equality in their development studios, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because not doing so could inhibit the adoption of VR applications as a result of insufficiently diverse testing groups.

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Good cooks are quitting the kitchen, and that’s bad news for your favourite restaurant

Good cooks are quitting the kitchen, and that’s bad news for your favourite restaurant:

For those making $14 an hour, we’re not even talking about fresh-out-of-school, no-experience, paying-their-dues cooks, who often swing $125 for a 12-hour shift that works out to less than Ontario’s legal minimum wage of $11.25 per hour. No, we’re talking about people who’ve spent years honing their skills, demonstrating their loyalty and work ethic in an industry where “passion” is used as a marker of dedication, and the perceived lack of it as a tool for dismissing any cook who complains about conditions or compensation. One chef I spoke with referred to this as a “crime of passion.”

I have a family member in the food industry, and it staggers me whenever I learn how much he takes home in a year after working 60 hour weeks, 51 weeks a year.

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Toronto company is hiring a Pokemon Go expert

We truly live in the end of days: Toronto company is hiring a Pokemon Go expert.

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This Man Is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America

This Man Is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America:

Breitbart’s genius was that he grasped better than anyone else what the early 20th century press barons understood—that most readers don’t approach the news as a clinical exercise in absorbing facts, but experience it viscerally as an ongoing drama, with distinct story lines, heroes, and villains. Breitbart excelled at creating these narratives, an editorial approach that’s lived on. “When we do an editorial call, I don’t even bring anything I feel like is only a one-off story, even if it’d be the best story on the site,” says Alex Marlow, the site’s editor in chief. “Our whole mindset is looking for these rolling narratives.” He rattles off the most popular ones, which Breitbart News covers intensively from a posture of aggrieved persecution. “The big ones won’t surprise you,” he says. “Immigration, ISIS, race riots, and what we call ‘the collapse of traditional values.’ But I’d say Hillary Clinton is tops.”

…

GAI is set up more like a Hollywood movie studio than a think tank. The creative mind through which all its research flows and is disseminated belongs to a beaming young Floridian named Wynton Hall, a celebrity ghostwriter who’s penned 18 books, six of them New York Times best-sellers, including Trump’s Time to Get Tough. Hall’s job is to transform dry think-tank research into vivid, viral-ready political dramas that can be unleashed on a set schedule, like summer blockbusters. “We work very long and hard to build a narrative, storyboarding it out months in advance,” he says. “I’m big on this: We’re not going public until we have something so tantalizing that any editor at a serious publication would be an idiot to pass it up and give a competitor the scoop. ”

To this end, Hall peppers his colleagues with slogans so familiar around the office that they’re known by their abbreviations. “ABBN — always be breaking news,” he says. Another slogan is “depth beats speed.” Time-strapped reporters squeezed for copy will gratefully accept original, fact-based research because most of what they’re inundated with is garbage. “The modern economics of the newsroom don’t support big investigative reporting staffs,” says Bannon. “You wouldn’t get a Watergate, a Pentagon Papers today, because nobody can afford to let a reporter spend seven months on a story. We can. We’re working as a support function.”

Given that the CEO of Breitbart is going to be the new CEO of Donald Trump’s campaign, it seems appropriate to read and reflect on how Bannon has successfully positioned both his news organization – Breitbart – and the thinktank – GAI – such that their news and investigations pervade the media.

The core takeaway is that Bannon understands the media in a more systematic (and arguably deeper) way than Trump. The question, however, is whether that understanding be sufficient to re-invigorate Trump’s campaign amongst traditional conservatives and undecided voters.

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Vacation shaming our politicians – Policy Options

Vacation shaming our politicians – Policy Options :

The great irony of the criticism around Trudeau’s family vacation is that politicians keep talking about work-life balance, and specifically about how to attract more women to Parliament and to high-placed corporate jobs and boards. Jurisdictions around the world have changed the sitting hours of their legislatures to align with the school calendar and to eliminate night sittings.

One wonders what message women interested in federal politics drew from the coverage of the Trudeau family vacation: maybe “Don’t even think about taking time off with your kids.”

The message isn’t just sent to women interested in politics, but to workers more generally: you can have whatever work-life balance you’d like, so long as that balance doesn’t upset productivity (or your manager) in any way.

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BlackBerry DTEK50 Review: Secure, reasonably priced but light on battery life

BlackBerry DTEK50 Review: Secure, reasonably priced but light on battery life:

But the software on the DTEK50 is the same as the Priv’s – hardened Android 6.0.1 (Marshmallow), FIPS 140-2 compliant full disk encryption, hardware root of trust, and BlackBerry Integrity Detection that monitors for compromises, with BlackBerry extras like the Hub (a unified inbox for all communications), calendar, contacts, password keeper, device search, launcher, and the DTEK security app for which the phone was named. Once you’ve used the BlackBerry software, most other offerings seem severely wanting. DTEK deserves special mention. It evaluates the device’s security posture, recommends changes, and allows you to see exactly what rights each app is using, and how often. You can also revoke individual privileges for an app if, for example, you see no reason why a flashlight app should have access to your contacts.

On what possible grounds can the reviewer – or the editor, who presumably assigned the title to this article – assert that the new Blackberry device is ‘secure’? We know that Blackberry’s consumer-grade options do not encrypt messaging data. We know that other implementations of Android, such as CopperheadOS, actually contribute code to the Android Open Source Project that is meant to reduce vulnerabilities.

We also know that Blackberry refuses to disclose how often they receive, and respond to, government requests for assistance. And we don’t know which countries Blackberry provides assistance to, under what specific terms, or the types of data that the company discloses. But all of this speaks to Blackberry being able to access consumers’ data…which is the definition of a service being insecure insofar as non-authorized actors can read or copy the data in question.

Before journalists or editors make assertions regarding security of mobile devices (or any other product for that matter) they should be obligated to contact experts in the field of mobile security. And preferably they’d actually contact people who actively test the security of mobile devices. Or, you know, at the very least they’d read the news and realize that the security afforded by Blackberry to its retail customers if more like propoganda than based in reality.

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Linux bug leaves 1.4 billion Android users vulnerable to hijacking attacks

Linux bug leaves 1.4 billion Android users vulnerable to hijacking attacks:

“The tl;dr is for Android users to ensure they are encrypting their communications by using VPNs, [or] ensuring the sites they go to are encrypted,” Lookout researcher Andrew Blaich told Ars. “If there’s somewhere they’re going to that they don’t want tracked, always ensure they’re encrypted.”

The vulnerability makes it possible for anyone with an Internet connection to determine whether any two parties are communicating over a long-lived transport control protocol connection, such as those that serve Web mail, news feeds, or direct messages. In the event the connections aren’t encrypted, attackers can then inject malicious code or content into the traffic. Even when the connection is encrypted, the attacker may still be able to determine a channel exists and terminate it. The vulnerability is classified as CVE-2016-5696.

One of the more likely ways exploits might target Android users is for them to insert JavaScript into otherwise legitimate Internet traffic that isn’t protected by the HTTPS cryptographic scheme. The JavaScript could display a message that falsely claims the user has been logged out of her account and instruct her to re-enter her user name and password. The login credentials would then be sent to the attacker. Similar injection attacks might also attempt to exploit unpatched vulnerabilities in the browser or e-mail or chat app the targeted Android user is using.

Another day, and another massive vulnerability disclosed about Android.

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Edmonton Police Say They Didn’t Mean It When They Said They Own a Stingray

Edmonton Police Say They Didn’t Mean It When They Said They Own a Stingray:

“Earlier this week, Media Relations Unit received an inquiry from Motherboard (VICE) asking if the [Edmonton Police Service] owns a Stingray device, or has ever used one from the RCMP. There was some miscommunication/misunderstanding internally surrounding the information obtained on whether the EPS owns a Stingray , and in fact, the EPS does not own a Stingray device. Police agencies do not comment on equipment used in electronic surveillance or on investigative techniques, therefore the EPS cannot provide any further information on this topic.”

Edmonton police are walking back their assertion that they did have, and use, an IMSI Catcher. Money says that the walk back is correct (it’s likely the RCMP that owns the device that EPS has used or had access to) while also misleading (because EPS would be working with the RCMP to investigate whatever the crim happens to be, while using the IMSI Catcher).

Police do not engender trust when they dogmatically try to stop the public from knowing what kinds of surveillance tools they use. Or the numbers of innocent people affected by such surveillance. Sadly, the logics of policing seem to run counter to developing this kind of generalized trust.

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How to market Justin Trudeau

How to market Justin Trudeau:

In academic terms, the coziness built by these efforts is called parasocial interaction—it’s the one-sided attachment people develop for media figures, and the reason why, when we meet a celebrity, we feel like we already know them. The big problem with this in a political context is the bread-and-circuses effect, where citizens get distracted by a personality they like and stop paying attention to issues and policies. But Marland and Goodyear-Grant both point out, with resigned ruefulness, that reams of research in their shared discipline suggests very few people think about those things anyway. Citizens generally form broad impressions of their political leaders, decide whether they like and trust them, and then leave them to handle the details if they do. “Most people are just not paying attention to this stuff. They just don’t care,” Marland says. “So it gives them probably a sense of pride that their Prime Minister seems to be well respected on the international stage.”

The entire article is excellent: Shannon Proudfoot has masterfully accounted for how the Trudeau campaign (and Prime Minister’s Office) has branded and marketed him. But the part that I quoted from the article is something that more people need to appreciate and understand, especially those who are involved in politics. Canadians generally are removed from politics and simply don’t care about them. This isn’t to say that political parties’ positions and actions don’t matter. But few people are actually paying attention to the minutia or day-to-day of federal, provincial, or municipal politics.

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Almost every Volkswagen sold since 1995 can be unlocked with an Arduino

Almost every Volkswagen sold since 1995 can be unlocked with an Arduino:

… security researchers have discovered how to use software defined radio (SDR) to remotely unlock hundreds of millions of cars. The findings are to be presented at a security conference later this week, and detail two different vulnerabilities.

The first affects almost every car Volkswagen has sold since 1995, with only the latest Golf-based models in the clear. Led by Flavio Garcia at the University of Birmingham in the UK, the group of hackers reverse-engineered an undisclosed Volkswagen component to extract a cryptographic key value that is common to many of the company’s vehicles.

Alone, the value won’t do anything, but when combined with the unique value encoded on an individual vehicle’s remote key fob—obtained with a little electronic eavesdropping, say—you have a functional clone that will lock or unlock that car.

Just implement the research by dropping some Raspberry Pi’s in a mid- to high-income condo parking garage and you’ve got an easy way to profit pretty handsomely from Volkswagen’s security FUBAR.