Busy, busy, busy!

Monday I was in Las Cruces all day seeing a new doctor, then helping my Dad with getting stuff out of his sister's trailer as he had sold said trailer. Then that evening, while shopping, I whacked my head in to a tree branch and lacerated my scalp in two places. Didn't bleed, hurt like hell. Went to a book store and got an iced drink and held it to my head for an hour.

Tuesday I cooked most of the day. We're having a fried chicken thing at the observatory tonight, so I made three salads: carrot/golden raisin, German potato, and corn/black bean, they all seem to have come out well though I made a couple of mistakes with the potato salad. I'm baking two batches of cornbread right now, the first batch will be done in a couple of minutes. Also made a batch of sour cream dip using some of my Pampered Chef dry rubs/spices. I'm using two mixes for the corn bread, a Trader Joe's and a Krusteaz, the latter I'm doing as mini-muffins.

So naturally I missed a couple of ingredients: I was short one onion and couldn't find any raisins. I'm fairly sure I have some, so we had to make a trip to Alamo last night to do a little more plundering, and not wanting to do just one thing when you're an hour round trip from town, we went to dinner and stopped at the bookstore to see if they had the new Charles Stross novel which released yesterday, naturally they did not.

And I didn't get my infusion in on Monday, so I did it at 1am this morning and was up until after 4am.

Whee!

If I recall correctly, we have an Apollo run tomorrow evening, then it'll be prepping and driving to Phoenix then on to Vegas for a fanfic/slash convention.

Such fun.

Very interesting security vulnerability: the front camera of your smart phone!

The German security site, Heise.de, published a report of a compromised cell phone being able to see the reflection of your entering your unlock codes and passwords FROM YOUR GLASSES. They also say that the back camera, being higher resolution, can actually read fingerprints, which will be a big threat for biometric security.

(translated via Google from German)
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Fsecurity%2F

http://www.heise.de/security/meldung/Smartphones-Passwoerter-und-Fingerabdruecke-mittels-eingebauter-Kamera-ausspioniert-2243715.html

The easy solution, if you're not in to taking selfies, would be to cover the front camera with tape. The case that I use covers the back camera unless I'm specifically taking photos, which is a rare thing, so that's useless if my phone were compromised.


There was a Mythbusters episode a few years ago where they were testing hi-tech security systems, including fingerprint readers. They lifted a fingerprint from a glass, using laser printer black toner to make the print visible. They scanned it, printed it on a hi-res laser, copied it on to a melted gummy bear fake finger, and it was rejected by the scanner. So they printed it again greatly enlarged, perhaps to an 8x10", then fixed disconnected lines with a black Sharpie pen. Scanned it again, reduced the size, repeated printing it, and it worked. It was amazing to see.

What was also cool was they got past an ultrasonic sensor, it might also have been infrared, I don't remember, by carrying a huge piece of shag carpeting in front of them. It absorbed the ultrasonics so they didn't reflect back, and they made it past that stage.

The new iPhone 5 fingerprint scanner is a different beast: it doesn't just read your fingerprint, it reads the capillary pattern beneath your skin. So it shouldn't be fooled by the Mythbusters trick. And I understand the newer generation of fingerprint scanners require a 98f heat source behind them, so you can't chop off someone's finger to get in. So the Mythbusers trick will hopefully have a short life.