Securing Web Sites Made Them Less Accessible

| August 22nd, 2018

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Eric Meyer: Securing Web Sites Made Them Less Accessible

In the middle of last month (July 2018), I found myself staring at a projector screen, waiting once again to see if Wikipedia would load. If I was lucky, the page started rendering 15-20 seconds after I sent the request.

This is good insight from Eric. I’m a firm believer in HTTPS everywhere, but it’s so easy to forget that HTTPS has many trade-offs… I forget the lack of caching all the time! I’ve been planning to set up a service worker to allow for a type of caching since this site went live, but I haven’t yet found the time to learn about them enough that I can implement something. But as my “still to-do” list for this site is getting short, I should hopefully get around to adding it soon.

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How God of War’s Opening Boss Battle was Designed

Chris M.

| August 17th, 2018

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The Playstation EU blog has a pretty fasciniating look at how the first boss battle in God of War, against “The Stranger,” was designed.

The first boss battle in a game often sets the tone for the player going forward, and The Stranger fight is one of my favourites. Between the narrative setup squeezed into the fight (Who is he? Why is he attacking Kratos? What are the answers he’s been sent to get? How do we stop him?), the mechanics designed to teach the player important lessons about the gameplay, and the spectacle of the set pieces, the whole sequence is so well done.

Even if you haven’t played God of War yet, it’s worth reading the post and watching the accompanying videos to get a sense of what goes into creating these integral moments of a modern game.

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New Data-Dump Powered Extortion Scams Popping Up

Chris M.

| August 14th, 2018

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Beware of a new extortion scam doing the rounds:

Over the past week, scammers are now utilizing a new extortion email campaign that claims the recipient’s phone was hacked, includes a partial phone number of the recipient, and further states that they created videos using the recipient’s webcam. It then demands $1,000 USD in bitcoins or the hacker will release the video and other information.

The most interesting thing about these scams (to me) is how are powered by data leaked through various data breaches. They use snippets of “private” data from these dumps to appear legitimate and scare a target into handing over the cash. This new one also leverages account recovery features to get the partial phone numbers.