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Hack Your Brain – How to Hallucinate With Ping-Pong Balls and a Radio

DO YOU EVER want to change the way you see the world? Wouldn’t it be fun to hallucinate on your lunch break? Although we typically associate such phenomena with powerful drugs like LSD or mescaline, it’s easy to fling open the doors of perception without them: All it takes is a basic understanding of how the mind works.

The first thing to know is that the mind isn’t a mirror, or even a passive observer of reality. Much of what we think of as being out there actually comes from in here, and is a byproduct of how the brain processes sensation. In recent years scientists have come up with a number of simple tricks that expose the artifice of our senses, so that we end up perceiving what we know isn’t real – tweaking the cortex to produce something uncannily like hallucinations. Perhaps we hear the voice of someone who is no longer alive, or feel as if our nose is suddenly 3 feet long.

Link: Hack your brain -How to hallucinate with ping-pong balls and a radio.

Scientists Extract Images Directly From Brain

Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor, it was announced on December 11. According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep.

Link: Scientists extract images directly from brain.

Hackers Crack London Tubes Ticketing System

Dutch security researchers rode the London Underground free for a day after easily using an ordinary laptop to clone the “smartcards” commuters use to pay fares, a hack that highlights a serious security flaw because similar cards provide access to thousands of government offices, hospitals and schools.

There are more than 17 million of the transit cards, called Oyster Cards, in circulation. Transport for London says the breach poses no threat to passengers and “the most anyone could gain from a rogue card is one day’s travel.” But this is about more than stealing a free fare or even cribbing any personal information that might be on the cards.

Link: Hackers Crack London Tubes Ticketing Systema>

Casino Insider Tells (Almost) All About Security

Casinos are all about odds. If a player has shifted the odds into his favor, he can be asked to leave. But if a player simply wins a ton of money through sheer luck even though the odds are against him, the casino will do everything it can to lure the player back.

To Jonas, the example that may describe this phenomenon involves a private jet.

“There’s this one casino, one of their high rollers beat them for US$18 million,” Jonas said. “That’s actually going to show up on quarterly earnings. So they left with US$18 million. The casino sent a jet to their town and left a limo in front of their house on weekends and said ‘you know just in case you get the bug.’ And they got the bug and they took them up on it and they came back and lost something like US$22 million.”

Link: Casino insider tells (almost) all about security

The Harry Potter Hoax, or Manipulating the Mass Media for Fun and for Profit.

This is awesome , the people who generated fake news about the harry potter book being stolen reveal how they developed and implemented this social engineering / information hack.

Title : The Harry Potter Hoax

Class : Social Engineering / Denial Of Service

Severity : Critical

Solution Status : Unpatched

Vendor : The Media

Affected versions: The People

Link: The Harry Potter hoax, or manipulating the mass media for fun and for profit.