On Episode 109 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with Chief Innovation Officer Falk Wolsky, about innovation and inventing!
Tag: IT
Why Does the Hacker Hack?
On Episode 84 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with hacker and security expert, Adriel Desautels of Netragard, about why hackers hack!
Sections
Why Does the Hacker Hack?
Hackers: Making a Name For Themselves
What’s Interesting at DEF CON & Black Hat
Alternative Conventions to DEF CON and Black Hat
Hacker Conventions Today Versus In The Past
Recommended Places To Find Information On Hacking
Advice For The Budding Hacker
The Definition of Hacking
More Episodes
Show Notes
Why Does the Hacker Hack?
Why Does the Hacker Hack?
Paul: So, from your experience and from your experience and knowledge of other people you know, why does the hacker hack?
Adriel: It all depends on who they are and what they’re really, I guess, geographic location is, monetary position, you know. So the majority of bad guys that are hacking right now hack for financial gain. They steal information, and they’re able to sell it on the black market. Some information sells for more than others, and that is always changing.
Then, of course, you have nation states. They’re hacking because they want to know about their foe. They want to learn about their enemy.
And then you have the guys that hack on behalf of their country, but they’re not directly affiliated with their country. They go out, and they steal information. The Chinese are notorious for this. They have groups of people that will hack and steal information about aircraft and all kinds of interesting things, and then they sell it to the next highest bidder within their country. And so that’s sort of a way of trying to say, “Hey, we don’t do this stuff,” but they buy the information. So, they’re not hacking, but they’re funding it by buying the information.
Paul: Sure. Let’s peel that back a layer, though. It’s maybe a superficial view, but why does the person sit down and spend that time searching for these obscure ways to exploit systems. What drives that emotion? Because they’re not necessarily going to get paid. So, I’m not saying they’re evil. I’m not saying they’re bad. But why is it that I’m going to try and do everything I can to break into this house, and I’m not going to give up either.
Adriel: Right. So, for some of us, it’s just a puzzle. It’s just a challenge, and it’s fun. It just boils down to that. Why is my partner, Phillipe, why is he building a robot to take his trash and haul it down his driveway that’s a quarter mile long? I mean, he’s literally doing that. And he’s found a way to build this crazy robot that will take his trash out for him. He’s doing it because it’s fun, and it’s a challenge, and it’s exciting. It’s the same reason why we do a lot of the things that we end up doing too.
Hackers: Making a Name For Themselves
The other angle to that is notoriety. Sometimes hackers will hack something because they’re trying to make a name for themselves, and so they’ll perform research against a really challenging target, write up, a white paper or publish something on it. And that makes the press. And all of sudden, those hackers, they’re well known. I can think of some pretty good hacks that happen with DNS and other types of things that they really helped companies promote themselves. So there’s that kind of angle.
And then, you tie it back into the monetary angle when you get to the zero-day market and zero-day exploitation. Hackers will perform research against like your iPhone, for example. They find a single vulnerability in an iPhone. Today that sells from anywhere from four to six million dollars per vulnerability. So, the motivation there is a lot of money. For a single, maybe three months of work, you make $6 million. It’s not a bad payday.
Paul: So it sounds, it sounds sorta like panning for gold.
Adriel: Yeah, in some cases it really can be because you never know what you’re going to encounter. And if you get the big nuggets, you’d be very rich very quickly.
Paul: And it could be that the gold that you get is notoriety. It could be just the fun of doing it, or it could be that you get a big chunk of gold. Interesting. So, I agree. It is interesting to see, and it would be interesting to have the same conversations with executive, CEO levels of saying, “Why wouldn’t you disclose this?”
And I can imagine it’s like “Well, we don’t want to admit that we knew the bridge was going to fall down,” if they were being really honest. And it’s like “What I don’t know, I can’t be held accountable for.” There’s a lot of that, I think.
Adriel: Yeah, there is.
What’s Interesting at DEF CON & Black Hat
Paul: So, we were talking about Black Hat and DEF CON. And what else did you see there? We heard a lot. I heard a lot in the press because I was listening for it. But our listeners are pretty diverse. What’s new? What’s interesting?
Adriel: Not much.
Paul: Is it like all old news already? Or is it just…?
Adriel: Yeah. I remember we were actually staying at the Caesar’s Palace so we could watch the talks from our rooms for DEF CON. And we were watching the talks. And some of them sounded very exciting. We thought there were new methods of doing things. And, I’d say just about every single time, when we got excited, we were very disappointed because the method that people were talking about were methods that we had already known about for years. That had already been used for years.
Unfortunately, DEF CON and Black Hat, I think they’ve outgrown themselves in much of the same way that the RSA Conference has and things like that.
Paul: I was wondering about that.
Adriel: Yeah. They’ve become very politicized, and they’ve got these vendor booths where vendors are spending a lot of money to advertise their products. That’s not really all that appealing anymore, to hackers that are strictly interested in learning about hacking.
They are still the biggest hacking conferences, and hackers will still go there. I mean, we were hanging out with Kevin Mitnick, and a bunch of other people were out there. But those people go because it gives you the option to meet other people that are going. So, we went there. We ended up meeting with a lot of our friends. And these guys are really hardcore researchers and the hardcore security people. And we also met some of our clients and things like that. So it’s a good team building exercise. From the perspective of learning something new, though, unless you’re talking to somebody or you know people that are going to be doing new research, you’re probably not going to pick it up at Black Hat and DEF CON.
Alternative Conventions to DEF CON and Black Hat
Paul: So is there something else out there? Blacker Hat or DEFfer CON? Something that’s a little better?
Adriel: There should be. DerbyCon is a little bit better.
Paul: DerbyCon?
Adriel: Yeah, DerbyCon. It’s a little bit better. A lot of the people that we associate with will go to DerbyCon. They’re growing in size too, but their content seems to be more aggressive. I guess you could say newer than what you’re seeing at those. And then, of course, there’s BSides, which, unfortunately, I’ve never been to, and I always intend to, but I never make it. BSides, from what I’ve heard, has a pretty good reputation for being fairly serious. A lot of the higher end people — and when I say “higher end,” maybe more capable researchers, more experienced researchers that I know have talked about going to both DerbyCon and BSides.
Paul: Interesting.
Adriel: Yeah. And they seem to really like those. Then you have your obscure conventions in Europe and things like that. I know some of my researchers go to those. Some are really good. Some are not.
Hacker Conventions Today Versus In The Past
It’s a lot different than it was in the ’90s and early 2000s. I mean, in the ’90s and the early 2000s, hackers were driven by curiosity and driven by research, and they met up with each other because they had something to share and something to discuss and, and so on, so forth. These days, it’s become so mainstream that you literally have groupies. You have people that show up in bizarre clothes with purple hair and all kinds of things. And they’re trying to show up and trying to fit in just because they think it’s cool. But they have nothing to offer. And that kind of distills things. And that kind of makes things less interesting.
And when I went to DEF CON, just this past DEF CON, I remember walking through these crowds of people, and I’m looking at these people, and I’m thinking, wow, the majority of these people are probably people working in IT or in security for corporate America. Very few of these people are actually hackers. And it’s unfortunately true. Very few of them were really the kinds of people who would be the researcher, the curiosity-driven kind of person.
It’s not to say that the conferences are useless because people do get a wealth of benefit from them, especially with regard to the training and the courses. And especially for businesses, IT people — IT personnel and security personnel — will learn a lot about the new technologies, the way hackers think and so on and so forth. And they’ll get to meet people that really are the real deal. So it’s much more useful, I think, if you’re going to business purposes now as opposed to if you’re a hacker trying to share knowledge and learn new things and so on, unless, of course, you’re networking.
Recommended Places To Find Information On Hacking
Paul: So do you have any recommended websites or places that you frequent that give valuable cutting-edge hacker information?
Adriel: There used to be. I mean, now the majority of the information I get is going to be from Reddit and Twitter. There are interesting posts that happen once in a while and conversations that happen once in a while if you follow the right people. You can follow places like The Hacker News and all that stuff. But they tend to not really provide anything that would be underground, as they would say.
IRC still exists, but it doesn’t really live in the same capacity that it did before. Back in the day, you could hang out on IRC, and you could get all kinds of really interesting information about who was being breached and so on and so forth. But now it’s not really working that way. Now what we actually see a lot of is we see different hacking groups. They have their own silk servers or servers or their own Slack setups — whatever it might be. And they kind of chat in a closed group like that.
You know, back in the day, you could login to IRC and, if you do a list search for the word “hacking,” you’d have thousands of hacking posts. And you had people who were doing all kinds of interesting things, and you could engage people in private conversations and private messages and really learn interesting stuff. It’s not quite the same anymore. It’s all been, I guess, distilled or intended it at some level or another.
The way that we stay sharp is literally, we all have Twitter accounts, and we pay attention to what people talk about. People know us through reputation, and so if people who are doing really neat work approach us and they say, “Hey, let’s talk about this. We need some help in this area,” then we learn about something. So, we end up staying in the loop because we’re approached just because of our name, brand, and our names as individuals. People want us to be involved in that stuff.
But unless you’ve established that kind of credibility and unless you already have this networking capability, I couldn’t really point you in any direction for anything that would be particularly eye-opening, aside from pay attention to the new vulnerabilities that are released. Pay attention to the names of the researchers associated with those vulnerabilities. Follow them on Twitter.
Advice For The Budding Hacker
Paul: So, if somebody woke up and said, “Hey, I want to be a hacker.” A ten-year old kid says, “I want to grow up to be a hacker,” it’s not like it used to be. You sort of can’t get that initial set of information. So what would your advice be to the budding hacker?
Adriel: Yeah. So anybody that tells me that they want to be a hacker, they’re probably never going to be a hacker. If you want to be a hacker, it’s because you almost already are. You’re born with this innate sense of curiosity. You’re born with this drive, this hunger to learn and tear things apart and solve problems and fix things, and you just love it. And because you love it, it doesn’t matter what you do in life. You’re always hacking something. You could be building the trash robot like Philippe because that just seems like a fun idea. Or maybe, like Kevin Finisterre, you’re building drones and then finding out ways to knock them out of the sky because you’re curious. Or you’ve got some of my researchers that do research on iPhones and all that. And they do it because they think, “Wow, there’s going to be a way to bypass this, even though Apple says we can’t. Let’s do it.” So it’s a curiosity thing.
So anybody who comes to me and says, “Hey, how do I become a hacker?” My answer is, you don’t. You either do this stuff natively—
Paul: You either are or you’re not.
The Definition of Hacking
Adriel: Right. You have that drive and you fix things in obscure ways. And, really a definition of hacking is creating an effective and a simple solution to an overly complex problem. And so if you are a solution creator and if you are able to take a problem of some sort — and the word “problem” is defined very loosely — and you were able to solve that challenge using a creative and effective and fairly easy-to-use solution, then you’re a hacker.
And I would argue that there are a lot of hackers that don’t know they’re hackers. Look at these guys that live off the land in Alaska. They have no technology to speak of. But, some of the things they put together to get water and to hunt and to trap, they’re ingenious! They’re hacking. They have a problem. They’re creating an incredible solution to a problem, and a lot of times, that solution gets used by other people in the same community. So that’s really what the essence of hacking is. So yeah. You’re born with it. You’ve got that talent and a gift or you don’t.
Paul: So I guess that in the venerable words of Yoda, “There is no try. Just do.”
Adriel: Right. That’s right.
More Episodes:
This is Part 2 of our interview with Adriel Desautels.
Be sure to listen to Part 3, “Computer Security: Is the Sky Falling?,” here!
If you missed Part 1, “What’s New in the World of Cybersecurity,” you can listen to it here!
Show Notes:
- Watch This Episode of The Edge of Innovation on Our YouTube Channel Here!
- Netragard’s Website
- About Netragard
- Contact Netragard
- The Netragard Blog
- Find Netragard on Twitter
- Find Netragard on Facebook
- Find Netragard on LinkedIn
- Find Adriel Desautels on Twitter
- Find Adriel Desautels on LinkedIn
- “The Art of Hacking” – SaviorLabs Podcast interview with Adriel Desautels
- “Private Market Growing for Zero-Day Exploits and Vulnerabilities” from TechTarget
- About Kevin Mitnick
- DEF CON Hacking Conference
- Find DEF CON on YouTube
- Black Hat USA Conference – The world’s leading information security event
- Find Black Hat USA on YouTube
- DerbyCon Computer Security Conference
- BSides Information Security Events
- Link To Savior Labs Assessment
What’s IT Matter to Me?
Today on the Edge of Innovation, we are talking with Enza Lilley, a doula from “A Mommy’s Friend Doula Service” about her experiences as a Doula and small business owner on the North Shore of Boston.
Media Technology with Brian Gravel
Today on the Edge of Innovation, we are talking with Brian Gravel about Media Technology.
Show Notes
GraVoc’s Website
GraVoc Video Production and Design
How a Green Screen Works
What is 4K Video?
What is B-Roll?
How To Animate a Photo: The 2.5D Effect
Transcript
Paul: Today I’m meeting with Brian Gravel.
Brian: Hey, Paul. Thank you for having me here today.
“Media Technology with Brian Gravel”
Paul: Now you work at GraVoc?
Brian: Yes.
Paul: You’re one of the family members there from what I understand.
Brian: That’s true.
Paul: And it’s not like a mafia family, is it?
Brian: No. No, more of a technology family.
Paul: Alright. So GraVoc, you’re located in Peabody, Massachusetts. And you’re the vice president of creative tech. Now, what other vice presidents do you have, so we can just get a sort of holistic picture of what GraVoc is?
Brian: Yeah. So we’re a technology consulting company at heart. We have a traditional IT practice. We have the creative technology practice, which I head up. My brother heads up the information security practice, and then we have a software solutions practice, which is more like software customization, ERP system implementation, that type of thing. So it’s like a 360-degree technology approach to business consulting.
Paul: Okay. And, are all of those divisions the same age? Or are they different ages?
Brian: As far as when they started in the company? Yeah, so the creative technology group started in 2006 as a separate company that my business partner Matt and I founded. And in 2010, we merged into GraVoc.
Paul: Oh, okay. Cool.
Brian: So we’re the baby on the block as far as the longevity of each practice. The company really started kind of as a hybrid of the software solutions and IT group, by my dad back in 1993. And then information security practice, that came around kind of during the y2k time and the hysteria that came with that.
Paul: Well you’re dating yourself here. You know, you’re saying… A lot of people listening won’t have been alive during y2k, so what’s the big deal, you know? It all worked? But it was a crisis, unprecedented crisis of potential. There was all these doom and gloom stories. You know, New Year’s Day wasn’t going to happen.
Brian: That’s right. That’s right.
Paul: So you started the creative technology back in 2006?
Brian: Yeah. Correct.
Paul: Wow. So 11 years into this. This is pretty cool.
Brian: Yeah, the foundation of the company at that time, which was called Diverging Soul Media Production was film and music. And we quickly found out that there was a lot of film and music companies out there, and we really needed to expand our services. So we did. We were trying to do innovative things at the time. So we did stuff with digital signage and a whole slew of, of video-related technology products, and that eventually lead us into web development and Matt, my business partner, really took the reigns of that side of things. And then we saw the synergy, with YouTube budding and around that time as well, with video and, and web, and how we could kind of use that as a niche. And then our services have just really evolved from there.
Paul: Okay. So we’re here to talk with you about drones, but I love getting this backstory and sort of the context of what you brought you to drones. And we’ll get more into that. So, you guys must have done ColdFusion. Were you a ColdFusion shop or were you just HTML? Or what did you do? MicroSoft shop?
Brian: I’ll tell you our dirty secret. At first, it was iWeb. I don’t know if you remember that. Yeah. And then just HTML and to Dreamweaver. And then eventually, custom builds, WordPress development and all that stuff.
Paul: So that’s what you’re doing now is…? For the web segment of the creative, is it mostly WordPress stuff or custom or…?
Brian: It really depends on the situation, you know. We do have a lot of WordPress clients, great content management system, in my opinion. But we also do a lot of custom builds, depending on the situation. So Matt specifically likes to describe them as progressive web applications and products that are functioning like web, websites but really are applications as a whole.
Paul: Oh, cool. Excellent. Yeah, we’ve seen a lot of growth in that area, and you know, people wanting more functionality than just a blog, really. You know, our brochureware. And that’s really cool see.
Uh, okay. You know, I noticed at the North Shore Chamber of Commerce — so we’re here in Massachusetts, and we’re on the North Shore, north of Boston — We went to the business expo. And you guys offered to do videos of everybody, so you were going around. So that seems like that’s right in your wheelhouse, is going out and making corporate videos and all the creative that goes with that. Is that one of the things that people would call you for?
Brian: Yeah. We do a real, real mix with our video production. We do a lot of training videos, a lot of corporate video. We’ve done a lot with nonprofits in regards to kind of profile pieces and things like that. Once in a while, we get fun, kind of, Comcast 30-second spots where we’ve done some stuff with animation and just try to, when we get those opportunities, do stuff that’s a little bit outside the box.
Paul: Cool. So now can you give — I’m not asking for specifics — but can you give us an example of a project that you’ve done and how that worked out, what the client was trying to do and how you solved it? So that, you know, as people are listening, they can get an idea of both what you do and how to apply video, because everybody says video is critical for the web right now. I tend to agree with that. But I’d love to hear what you have to think.
Brian: Yeah, I mean, a lot of times when we have a customer come to us, they have a vision in mind, and we’re more on the execution side. So, but you’re right. Most of the stuff is going to web, and it’s really… It could be a delivery mechanism for their message and branding. It could be for training purposes. A significant part of what we do is we’ve essentially built a training portal for a large company on the North Shore and then are producing the videos that go alongside that.
Paul: Okay. Is this for employee training or customer training?
Brian: Yeah. It’s for insurance, safety training essentially.
Paul: Oh, okay. Yeah, that’s critical because it’s compliance.
Brian: So it’s for, for policyholders of theirs. So they’ve built kind of this conduit for people to login train. Eventually they’re bringing it to an e-learning level but really just a resource library of, of safety-style videos. Yeah.
Paul: Cool. That’s cool. And then do you track like who’s completed what and they get some benefit for having done that?
Brian: Yeah. There are components of that built into the system for sure. Yeah. So that’s a good example of kind of how we hit all sides of the project. You know, we built the portal. We built the brochureware, if you will. We built in the content.
Paul: Oh, that’s awesome. So a one-stop shop in a lot of ways.
Brian: Yeah. A lot of times. And, our services kind of talk to one another, and so there’s legacy database systems that know need frontend. So, you know, our software solutions team, which may handle and maintain that legacy system, helps us write API calls to talk to a web frontend.
Paul: Very cool. Yeah, it’s hard to find people that can take all pieces of it, or all facets of something. It’s, so that might, must be nice because you can’t point the finger at anybody. And that’s a benefit to the customer is that there’s no finger pointing. “Well, it was their fault.” “Well, yeah. That’s you.” So…
Brian: No, and it’s good because we… There’s a deep understanding of the different components of it. I think what we’ve run into a lot of times and where we, we see how the value of our company shines through is that you may get someone who is heavily into one side or the other, and they don’t understand how those pieces connect. And you know, based on various projects and hurdles, we don’t work with one particular market segment either. So, you know, the challenge of a manufacturer could be applied to the challenge of an insurance company in some weird way that you would never think. But, you know, we run into these situations where it’s like, “Oh, yeah, we did that on this, and you know, we can connect the dots here.” And so, that’s the part that, for me, that’s fun. And I think that also encapsulates the company as a whole.
Paul: Cool. Now you, as far as the creative side, I think you guys have a studio. Don’t you?
Brian: We do.
Paul: So, now like these training videos, were they done in studio or were they done on location or a mix?
Brian: You know, a lot of have been done on location. A lot of OSHA style, so you need the warehouse or a, or a ladder or something along those lines. But we do have a green screen room where we do a lot of our kind of talking-head profile pieces. The stuff that the studio space, what we moved into a new space in October. And that space, ultimately, gave us the opportunity to bring clients in at lower cost for a project, more or less because we had the space for it, which was all pre-rigged, ready to go versus dragging all the gear out, location to location, you know. So, for, for us, it’s been one of those things where we’re trying to take advantage of giving customers a little bit more flexibility on their budget to get a quality, studio-quality piece.
Paul: So now, just for our listeners who may not know, a green screen is basically a wall that’s painted with a bright lime-green almost?
Brian: Yeah, it’s like it’s…
Paul: It’s an unnatural green.
Brian: That’s right. That’s a good way to describe it. Yeah.
Paul: And what you do is you, you stand in front of it, and you shoot a camera with that and, uh, so you take a video of it. It’s like, what? If you watched the weather on the news, it’s the same way. And afterwards, you can use something called Chroma Key to put a new picture behind that. And you know, it’s not always perfect. It’s getting better and better. But you can see it when maybe somebody moves and you’ll notice that they don’t wear anything green. But that allows you to, you know, effectively have somebody standing on the shore of the Atlantic without having to be at the Atlantic. And so that’s cool. So you’ve got one that’s actually built out and lit. See, the biggest things with green screen is you have to uniformally — uniformally, is that a word?
Brian: I don’t know, but it sounded right.
Paul: You have to uniformally light the green because it has to be the same color all the way throughout.
Brian: Yeah. Shadows are the biggest trip-up in that process. And then when you get to more advanced stages of it, you know, like you look at like maybe an ESPN piece where they do like the 30 for 30s or something along those lines where they have that, really like one side of the face is dark and the other is lit. Uh, that’s where, you know, skillsets really shine through is that, if you know what you’re doing or not. And yeah, that’s the tough part.
And with the studio, for us, it gives us a lot more variables over— a lot more control over those variables. Yeah, so we’ve got a lot of lighting pre-rigged, and then we have flexible lighting on the floor that we can move around and kind of get the look and feel that we want.
Paul: And this is all, you know, you, our listeners… Having been a professional photographer myself, all of these things sound like labor and laborious and like, “Oh, man, that’s, that’s such a hassle.” But it makes the difference between things looking okay and things looking fantastic. Good lighting, good cameras, angles, lenses, all of these stuff adds up to just, you know, knock your socks off. And that’s why you can tell… This is why you go to the movies and you pay all this money — you know, $15 to sit in a sit and watch a movies — because they took all of this into account.
So, what kind of cameras do you guys use?
Brian: We use an array of cameras. I mean, I like to call them small form factor cameras. But it depends on the situation. But I’m, we’re shooting entirely 4k now, so…
Paul: Okay. All 4k. So high, high resolution. That’s four times the normal HiDef of Blue-ray. So that’s a lot of data. So, okay. So…
Brian: So I mean, the trick for us has been to find, 4k cameras that shoot at a bit rate and compress the video enough to where we’re not losing the quality but we’re not having these massive file sizes, because as a photography professional, you probably know, you get into those raw files, and all of a sudden, you know, it became…
Paul: Where do you store them?
Brian: Yeah. Exactly. Where do you store them? How do you back them up and, and that whole process? So yeah. I mean, we’ve been very cautious of that and selective in our decision making when it comes to purchases as far as new technology is concerned. And we also have to work quickly with a lot of files. You know, most of the time, we don’t have a cinematic film-like timeline and budget where you have, you can have these media bays and things like that. And you know, you have to make sure that a project size, the files are, are easy enough to work with quickly and turn out a final product.
And a lot of times, you know, we’re shooting high quality, but eventually, it’s getting down res-ed too, something that’s going to be able to play smoothly on a, on a website. So…
Paul: So you, but you still… So, I mean, that’s a great point. So you’re shooting hundreds of times better quality then is going to be rendered on the web.
Brian: Most likely.
Paul: But you’re doing it. And, and so if you were… Somebody were to come in and say, “Gee, I want a project done — X, Y, and Z,” just on average, how long does it take, start to finish? So, you know, I come in and I say, “This is what I want. I want a talking head video for my company so people can get to know me.” Is that a week? Is that 10 weeks. I know it varies by how busy you are, but let’s say you didn’t have anything else to do. Come in. How much does that take?
Brian: Yeah. No, I mean, it’s a good question. It depends, really, on a number of factors. Obviously like what’s involved with the shooting, how their location shoots… Is it in studio? How much editing is involved. If it’s a quick talking head, those can get knocked out pretty quick, but if you have a lot of B-roll that has to go along with it, the project might be staggered out, depending on when you’re doing pickups or aggregating media.
Paul: Let me interrupt you. What’s B-roll. I mean, let’s educate some of the people. So, is it rolls of bees?
Brian: Yeah, so if someone was filming our conversation right now and we were talking about cameras for example, they might show a picture of the cameras we were talking about.
Paul:: Cut away to that.
Brian: Yeah. Exactly. That cutaway footage and that footage on top of your main dialog or interview is what’s called B-roll.
Paul: Okay. And so you have to shoot that.
Brian: Shoot that, acquire it. You can purchase stock clips. You can use motion kind of effects on pictures sometimes works. We use 2.5D effect a lot of time, which I don’t know if you’re familiar with.
Paul: Well, tell me.
Brian: It kind of looks like you take a still photo and you isolate layers of it and kind of to make it… A lot of PBS-like.
Paul: Yeah. Ken Burns — did he do any of that?
Brian: It’s a little— it’s almost like Ken Burns on steroids a little bit. So it’s that motion of the Ken Burns effect of it panning into a picture or zooming into a picture. But you’re isolating different layers of, of the photo in Photoshop so you have more depth to it.
Paul: I see. So that must be a picture that you’re creating. You couldn’t take that from a…
Brian: Yeah. I mean, sometimes, sometimes media is, you know, only available in picture format, you know. Or a customer may not have a budget to go out and shoot specific things. So with that being said, I mean, every project’s a little different. And I think there’s also a degree of, you know, how much the client knows they want upfront versus, you know, how much are they involved in the creative process, and that, that can draw out a timeline too.
Paul: Cool. Well, I just want to tell our listeners, we, in the show notes, we’ll have some links to examples of the 2.5D effect. Hopefully you can give us one and, and show us that. And links to all the things we talk about as we’re going through this. And, and of course, to GraVoc.
Also published on Medium.
Hyper-V and the Cloneable Domain Controller
In-Depth Hyper-V and the Cloneable Domain Controller Is the new feature an IT game changer or an unnecessary headache? By Rick Vanover 09/19/2014 Sounds funny, but believe it or not, it’s real. Since its release in Windows Server 2012, Hyper-V supports cloning of Domain Controller VMs. Cloning may seem an incredibly naughty task for a domain controller! In fact, I grew up with my Active Directory practice of preferring to address all situations through dcpromo. This includes removing a failed domain controller, moving roles around and transferring to new hardware or a new virtual machine. Windows Server 2012 has a new option that you may want to consider with Hyper-V … Or should you stick to how you’ve been doing Active Directory? Domain controller cloning in Windows …
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