Bits & Pieces: Penny Arcades

Never knew about the precursor to videogames til now. Game|Life’s latest video features the Musee Mecanique, a place with a large collection of mechanically operated games and thingamabobs:

The Black Sunday kill

Here’s a fascinating article about piracy with satellite television networks, with the networks and pirates playing a game of cat and mouse in updating the hardware’s firmware and then hackers finding ways around them minutes later. DirecTV got smart though and pulled off an ingenuous move :

Four months ago, however, DirecTV began sending several updates at a time, breaking their pattern. While the hacking community was able to bypass these batches, they did not understand the reasoning behind them. Never before had DirecTV sent 4 and 5 updates at a time, yet alone send these batches every week. Many postulated they were simply trying to annoy the community into submission. The updates contained useless pieces of computer code that were then required to be present on the card in order to receive the transmission. The hacking community accommodated this in their software, applying these updates in their hacking software. Not until the final batch of updates were sent through the stream did the hacking community understand DirecTV. Like a final piece of a puzzle allowing the entire picture, the final updates made all the useless bits of computer code join into a dynamic program, existing on the card itself.

Check it here, and here’s Wired’s article on the guy behind the Black Sunday hack.

Calvin’s Dad

Calvin & Hobbes is classic comedy gold, a lot of the strips I remember often involved Calvin’s dad giving ridiculous yet somehow logical answers to Calvin’s questions :

Evolution of Technology

Q. How come old photographs are always black and white? Didn’t they have color film back then?

A. Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs are in color. It’s just that the world was black and white then. The world didn’t turn color until sometime in the 1930s, and it was pretty grainy color for a while, too.

Q. But then why are old paintings in color?! If the world was black and white, wouldn’t artists have painted it that way?

A. Not necessarily. A lot of great artists were insane.

Q. But… But how could they have painted in color anyway? Wouldn’t their paints have been shades of gray back then?

A. Of course, but they turned colors like everything else did in the ’30s.

Q. So why didn’t old black and white photos turn color too?

A. Because they were color pictures of black and white, remember?

More here, and here are the comic strips