Month: November 2015

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Here are 10 deleted Star Wars scenes that you probably never saw before

Here are 10 deleted Star Wars scenes that you probably never saw before

Some of these scenes were rightfully axed. Like Luke and Leia about to share a creepy intimate kiss before C-3P0 saves the day by interrupting them. Other scenes should have never been cut. Like the scene showing the Emperor demanding that the second Death Star be fired up to blow up the moon that Han and Leia were on. And other scenes are just fun like Han being Han.

Watch these 10 deleted Star Wars scenes from ScreenRant below.

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via Gizmodo
Here are 10 deleted Star Wars scenes that you probably never saw before

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Watch A Tickle Me Elmo Get Absolutely Blasted With A Jet Engine Just For Fun

Watch A Tickle Me Elmo Get Absolutely Blasted With A Jet Engine Just For Fun

If you had a jet engine strapped to a truck, the first thing you should want to do should be obvious – that’s right, you’d strap a Tickle Me Elmo to a post and shoot it with screaming hot fire.

This is well and truly what the Internet was created for, friends.

There has never been a better use for 2,500 horsepower than this. Even if he does call Elmo by the name “Elmer” a couple of times.

Contact the author at ballaban@jalopnik.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: 0D03 F37B 4C96 021E 4292 7B12 E080 0D0B 5968 F14E

via Gizmodo
Watch A Tickle Me Elmo Get Absolutely Blasted With A Jet Engine Just For Fun

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How champagne is made

How champagne is made

Champagne is really hard to make. There are rules and regulations and specific grapes and soil requirements and is completely region specific and more that goes into each bottle that it’s impressive that even one bottle gets popped. In this video from the Science Channel, we get to see how Bollinger makes its champagne. It marries the old fashioned methods formed over hundreds of years of bubbly creation with impressive modern machinery. Delicious!

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via Gizmodo
How champagne is made

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Our Founding Fathers Used Encryption… And So Should You

While the FBI has apparently given up on trying to get a law passed to backdoor encryption, the ridiculous debate over "going dark" continues. Thankfully, at least some more knowledgeable folks in the government have been speaking up more loudly over the past few months. Just last week, the government’s Chief Information Officer, Tony Scott, came out against backdooring encryption:

On this debate, CIO Scott is clear: “I think in the long run we are probably not well served by backdoors to encryption and in general we end up benefiting as a society by having very strong non-hackable encryption,” he said. “And I say that knowing that it will present some challenges for law enforcement and investigative agencies.”

And, now Seth Schoen and Jamie Williams, over at EFF, have put together a nice bit of history, showing how the US’s founding fathers frequently used encryption themselves. Obviously it was a much earlier version of it, but it seems rather clear that the founding fathers would likely be big supporters of encryption if they were alive today.

  • James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights and the country’s fourth president, was a big user of enciphered communications—and numerous examples from his correspondence demonstrate that. The text of one letter from Madison to Joseph Jones, a member of the Continental Congress from Virginia, dated May 2, 1782, was almost completely encrypted via cipher. And on May 27, 1789, Madison sent a partially encrypted letter to Thomas Jefferson describing his plan to introduce a Bill of Rights.
  • Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and the country’s third president, is known to be one of the most prolific users of secret communications methods. He even invented his own cipher system—the “wheel cypher” as named by Jefferson or the “Jefferson disk” as it is now commonly referred. He also presented a special cipher to Meriwether Lewis for use in the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
  • Benjamin Franklin invented ciphers used by the Continental Congress and in 1748, years before the American Revolution, published a book on encryption written by George Fisher, The American Instructor.
  • George Washington, the first president of the United States, frequently dealt with encryption and espionage issues as the commander of the Continental Army. He is known to have given his intelligence officers detailed instructions on methods for maintaining the secrecy of messages and for using decryption to uncover British spies.
  • John Adams, the second U.S. president, used a cipher provided by James Lovell—a member of the Continental Congress Committee on Foreign Affairs and an early advocate of cipher systems—for correspondence with his wife, Abigail Adams, while traveling.
  • John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, used ciphers for all diplomatic correspondence made while outside the United States. And John Jay’s brother, Sir James Jay, invited a special invisible ink, also known as sympathetic ink, and sent a supply from London to both his brother and then-General Washington.

If it was good enough for them… it’s pretty ridiculous that we’re still having this debate now. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’ve heard from a few different folks who have insisted that there are bills sitting in drawers ready to go to "ban encryption" (not just backdoor it), and that’s so ridiculous in a world where encryption is used all the time and is a key driver of how we all live. But it’s even more ridiculous when you understand how often it’s been used throughout history.

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via Techdirt.
Our Founding Fathers Used Encryption… And So Should You