Raymond M. Reskusich

Hackers' posts on epilepsy forum cause migraines, seizures


In one of the first computing hacks seemingly intended to physically harm victims, attackers saturated the web forums of the Epilepsy Foundation with strobing images allegedly calculated to trigger seizures in visitors to the site. In addition to reminding everyone of Snow Crash, this seems like a disturbing escalation in the hacker culture. Obviously this attack is only applicable to those with certain types of epilepsy. Hopefully no more general-purpose attack can be devised. Any brain-meat specialists in the house who can comment on this possibility?

Today's learning experience:

Adobe RGB != sRGB (for web publishing)

I knew this abstractly before, but encoding in Adobe RGB did a really bad job on some shots I took at the Garden of the Gods in Colorado. I am finally convinced. I will pay attention to color spaces from now on.

I have not been posting enough recently, so I'll forgo having any real theme today and just post on what I've been doing recently.

Thursday night I went to see 30 Days of Night, which I will probably post a review on before too long. To summarize, it was better than the other vampire films of recent years.

Saturday, Mel and I went hiking in Cougar Mountain Regional Wildland Park. We hiked up to Anti-Aircraft Peak which, as the name suggests, was a site for anti-aircraft guns back in WWII. Later on it became a Nike missile base. The park is quite different from most of those that we have visited in the Seattle area. The trees are much younger, with a much smaller proportion of evergreens. I suspect it was logged our entirely at some point. We saw some gorgeous woodpeckers from the trail.

Saturday night, we went out to Blue C for some sushi. Later, we met our friends Sze Lyn and Mark at a wine bar in Capitol Hill where we conversed, drank wine, and watched the costumes go by.

Sunday I did a lot of tinkering with video-editing software. I recently rebuilt my desktop computer with all new internals. One of the reasons for this was to have a machine I could use for video editing, using Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects. The old box would do decently with these, but performance issues were a productivity drain. Sunday I set up these software packages and checked out how well they worked with the new hardware, playing with some old footage that I had lying around. I did have one fairly irritating disappointment. The old version of Premiere Pro that I have will not capture footage properly from a DV camera under Vista. I was forced to install it under XP on an alternate boot partition (I suppose I could also have shelled out $200 to upgrade to the new version of Premiere).

I have never really dug into video software for Linux, but if anyone has any suggestions for good tools, I would like to hear them.