hacks
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A Netflix hack lets you feel the action in a scene by vibrating your phone
Netflix Hack Day, the company’s internal hackathon, has a habit of producing some amazing gems — like a brain-controlled interface, a Fitbit hack that shuts off Netflix when you fall asleep, a Netflix app for the original NES and a way to navigate the Netflix app with Face ID and ARKit, to name a few. At this year’s Netflix Hack Day, employees ventured into areas like voice technology and haptics — the latter, so your phone could vibrate right along with the on-screen action, among other things.
Project Rumble Pack, as the hack that used haptics was called, takes inspiration from mobile gaming. Some games vibrate, which allows players to feel the action — like a bouncing ball, a car on a race track, an object getting hit or destroyed and so on.
Similarly, Project Rumble lets you feel the action in a scene from a show or movie — like a fight, battle or big explosion. (Imagine a Michael Bay movie with Rumble Pack turned on!) The team behind the hack, Hans van de Bruggen and Ed Barker, demoed haptics in an episode of Voltron where a huge explosion makes the phone shake in your hands.
The hack was created by syncing Netflix content with haptic effects using Immersion Corporation technology.
Another hack, called The Voice of Netflix, taught Netflix to speak using the voice of Netflix’s favorite characters. The team trained a neural net to find words in Netflix’s content, which could then be used to create new sentences on demand.
A third favorite was TerraVision — a practical hack that sounds like a business opportunity.
The hack lets filmmakers drop into an interface a photo of a look they like for a film location, then get back the closest results from a library of location photos. The hack used a computer vision model trained to recognize places for its reverse-image search functionality.
The final highlight was a silly hack that plays “walk-out music” — like the music that kicks in when Oscar speeches go too long — when someone overstays their allotted time in a booked conference room.
Sadly, many of Netflix’s hacks don’t tend to escape the confines of the hackathon itself. But they can inspire real-world projects in other ways, and help to keep the creativity flowing.
An overview of this year’s Netflix Hack Day, which focused on Netflix’s studio efforts, is below.
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An Overwatch hacker in South Korea just got sentenced to a year in prison
A 28-year-old man in South Korea faces a year in prison for hacking Overwatch . The sentence, reported by South Korea’s SBS News and Dot Esports, handed the hacker one year in prison and two years of probation for illicit activity related to the hit online multiplayer game. The particularly steep sentence is a result of both the ongoing nature of the activity and the fact that the individual generated 200 million Korean won (almost $180,000 USD) from Overwatch-related hacks.
The hacker’s charges stem from the violation of two Korean laws: the Game Industry Promotion Act and the Information and Communication Technology Protection Law. In the last year, Overwatch developer Blizzard Entertainment has worked with the Seoul National Police Agency’s cybersecurity department to crack down on hacks that compromise the integrity of the high-profile game, particularly due to its prominence in the esports world.
“Cheating on the Asian Overwatch server is endemic and widespread,” Kotaku reported in a story on Overwatch hacking last year. “On the Battle.net forums and Reddit, complaints about hacking South Korean players’ too-accurate headshots, immediate gun-downs and even DDOS attacks against winners in competitive mode are widespread.”
Hacks for a game like Overwatch can take many forms, including scripts that enable perfect aim, match-fixing and a rank manipulation practice known as boosting.
“Doing anything to manipulate your internal MMR or Skill Rating (i.e. Boosting or Throwing) is not fine,” Overwatch Creative Director Jeff Kaplan wrote in a forum post last year. “Penalties for boosting and throwing are about to increase dramatically.”
The new sentence isn’t the first to be handed down by the Korean government for game-related hacking, but given the fact that sentencing usually results in large fines, it is notably harsh. Laws meant to deter gaming hacks went into effect in the country last year and stipulate that violators may face up to $43,000 in fines and up to five years in prison.
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‘Elderly Alexa’ helps families care for their remote loved ones via voice
Last night on Saturday Night Live, a spoof advertisement for an “Alexa Silver” poked gentle fun at how an Alexa speaker could be used with the elderly to do things like listen to their long, rambling stories (and respond with “uh-huh”), as well as answer questions even when addressed as “Alaina,” “Allegra,” “Aretha,” or other names.… Read More
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Dropbox employee’s password reuse led to theft of 60M+ user credentials
Dropbox disclosed earlier this week that a large chunk of its users’ credentials obtained in 2012 was floating around on the dark web. But that number may have been much higher than we originally thought.
Credentials for more than 60 million accounts were taken, as first reported by Motherboard and confirmed by TechCrunch sources. The revelation of a password breach at Dropbox is an… Read More
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Researchers find a way to snoop on you through your phone’s vibration motor
Cover up your webcam, disable microphone access, and put on your tinfoil hat — but it won’t make any difference, because the Illuminati can get at you through your phone’s vibration motor now. Well, kind of, anyway. Your best defense? Talk in a high voice. Waze downplays exploit that let researchers track users
Waze has responded to security concerns raised yesterday in a Fusion report documenting an exploit found by UC Santa Barbara researchers. In short: it’s legit, but not as dire as it’s made out to be. The exploit leverages the Waze feature that shows you nearby users, showing that the data you’re seeing is live and giving you options should you need help. The researchers… Read More
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New ATM “Shimmer” Fits Invisibly Inside The Card Slot
The wily ATM hackers are at it again with a new form of card data gathering system, a “shimmer.” These super-thin card readers slide right into the card slot and are technically invisible unless you go poking around inside the ATM. This shimmer was found in Mexico and it is unclear if it was connected to a PIN pad camera or other hardware. What’s special about this unit is… Read More
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The Cloud Could Be Your Best Security Bet
In fact, if a cloud service has proper controls, it could be safer than running your own datacenter. Amazon, Google, Salesforce and Box to a company have much more at stake when it comes to security. A breach could prove devastating to their businesses. That could be why it’s hard to come up with a major security snafu involving a cloud provider. Other than the Jennifer Lawrence… Read More
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TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon Developers Learn To Simplify Under Pressure
Under the pressure that is the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, one team found itself stuck. The product was too complex to complete on time. The team members were tired and depressed and ready to give up until one member of the team, software engineer Alessandro Diogo Bruckheimer came up with an idea to simplify their goal and the app Should I Ride My Bike? was born. Read More
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