physical buttons

Deviant Ollam, head of a physical penetration testing team, presents tactics for getting into buildings, from bypassing door levers with a wire to defeating bank doors. He argues that physical security is often surprisingly weak.

Microsoft's Tony Chen explains how the Xbox One was designed to resist physical attacks, including secure boot, encrypted memory, a security processor and a hypervisor. The goal was to make any hardware attack cost more than the price of many games.

The first of Richard Feynman's 1964 Cornell Messenger Lectures, The Character of Physical Law, focusing on the law of gravitation. Feynman builds up from planetary motion to the nature of physical laws.

Tony Chen of Microsoft explains at BlueHat Seattle 2019 how the Xbox One was designed to resist physical attacks. He covers the security design and hypervisor-based OS architecture that kept the console uncracked for years.

Part 2 of Richard Feynman's Messenger Lectures at Cornell, The Character of Physical Law, on the relation of mathematics to physics. He explains why understanding nature requires mathematics.

The first of Richard Feynman's 1964 Messenger Lectures at Cornell, 'The Character of Physical Law', covering the law of gravitation. Feynman traces the history from Kepler and Newton to the universality of the inverse-square law. The recording is an older one with weak audio.

Jason Cammisa reviews the 2022 Volkswagen Mk8 GTI and explains why he thinks it is worse than the Mk7. He criticizes aspects such as the capacitive touch controls and the interface.

Locksport historian Schuyler Towne's RVASec 2012 talk on why people lock their doors, tracing the history of locks and the assumptions about security behind them.

Deviant Ollam shows that most physical attacks on doors bypass the lock, with photo and video examples of how doors, frames and hardware get defeated. It is a physical security talk from Shakacon.

A HOPE conference talk by Howard Payne and Deviant Ollam on common keys, such as elevator and fire service keys, that open many buildings. It covers physical security weaknesses from shared key standards.

Jayson E. Street's DEF CON 19 talk shows photos from real security engagements where he was already inside client facilities, illustrating how social engineering and physical intrusion can cause huge losses. For each attack he also explains what defenses would have stopped him.

Zoz's DEF CON 23 talk explores practical, often explosive ways to destroy data and hard drives quickly. It tests methods such as thermite and other physical techniques for rapid destruction.

A long Huberman Lab episode laying out science-based daily tools for focus, sleep, exercise and mental and physical health, organized around a 24-hour day.

LockPickingLawyer shows a Sentry fire safe being cut in half with a saw in a few minutes. It is a short demonstration that these safes offer little protection against a determined thief.

The Academy's 2014 Sci-Tech Awards segment honoring Matt Pharr, Greg Humphreys and Pat Hanrahan for their physically based rendering work and book. The authors give a short acceptance speech that thanks Donald Knuth for literate programming.

A video showing a virtual camera built in Blender that simulates lenses and film layers using path tracing, to make physically modeled photographs.

Deviant Ollam and Howard Payne give an in-depth DEF CON 22 explanation of how elevators work, from the pit to the penthouse. It covers their control modes and how pen testers use elevators to bypass building security.

A Foresight Institute workshop video with two talks: Shawn Douglas on nanoscale instruments for visualizing small proteins, and Bret Victor on Dynamicland. Victor's part shows biomolecular design built in his Realtalk system with physical objects.

A DEF CON 19 talk by datagram introducing tamper-evident devices. It reviews how seals and similar products are designed and shows that they are often easily defeated, drawing on the DEF CON tamper-evident contest.

Lieutenant General Mark Hertling gives a TEDx talk arguing that obesity and poor youth fitness are a national security problem because too few young Americans can meet military physical requirements.

A short WIRED demo from CES 2013 of Tactus Technology's haptic touchscreen, whose panel raises physical bumps to form a keyboard.

A short clip of Richard Feynman on the difference between merely knowing how to reason mathematically and understanding why physical theories work. He discusses holding multiple equivalent ideas and guessing new laws.

Deviant Ollam's two-hour conference talk explains how elevators work, from the pit and buffers to the car top, controller logic and access-control features. It shows how this knowledge can be used for optimization and for bypassing building security.

A HOPE X talk giving an in-depth explanation of how elevators work, from their history in hacker culture to using their control systems to bypass building security. It covers features and abilities of elevators that most people never see.

Lock-picking YouTuber Bill Johnson (BosnianBill) explains how to choose a high-security lock and why, showing examples and comparing designs. It covers what makes some padlocks more pick-resistant than others.

A critique of the HD remaster of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, walking through cropping, color and effects problems that damaged the original look. It also advises which versions to buy.

ITS Tactical demonstrates how a ballpoint pen can open a zippered suitcase without leaving a trace, bypassing its lock, and suggests countermeasures.

LockPickingLawyer examines a challenge involving a tamper-sealed Abus lock and shows how the tamper seal can be defeated.

A ten-minute clip of Richard Feynman describing how mathematicians and physicists differ in their interests and customs. He argues physics rests on visualizing and applying math rather than pure abstraction.

A clip of Richard Feynman contrasting the Greek and Babylonian traditions of mathematical reasoning. It compares the axiomatic approach of mathematicians with how physicists use mathematics.

CGP Grey's video "Humans Need Not Apply" argues that automation will make a large part of the workforce economically obsolete, much as engines did for horses. It surveys robots and software replacing both physical and mental labor.

R. Stanley Williams of HP Labs gives a keynote on the memristor, covering the physics, crossbar computation, and potential for memory and new computer architectures.

Joe Armstrong, co-inventor of Erlang, gives a funny and opinionated Strange Loop talk on the tangled state of software: build tools, package managers, entropy and the physical limits of computation. He argues for ideas like naming things by content hash and throwing away your first version.

Robert Sapolsky's lecture on how the body's stress response, evolved for short-term physical emergencies, harms long-term health when triggered by psychological stressors. It was given as the inaugural Fenton-Rhodes Lecture.

Nina Paley's one-minute animated free culture anthem with vocals by Connie Champagne, arguing that copying is not theft.

Jean-Marc Jancovici lectures at ENS Paris on whether energy use, jobs and growth can all be preserved. He argues for a physical approach to economics, since resource depletion and climate limits make perpetual GDP growth unrealistic.

Admiral Grace Hopper holds up a length of wire to show how far light travels in a nanosecond, about 11.8 inches. She explains how she made the idea concrete to people who could not picture a billionth of a second.

A 1936 Chevrolet-sponsored film that explains how a car transmission works by treating gears as spinning levers. It uses physical models to make the mechanism clear.

Veritasium explains the effort to redefine the kilogram, which was still defined by a physical artifact, and how a near-perfect silicon sphere from the Avogadro project helps. It also covers the history of the unit's odd naming.

A clip from the 2011 film Margin Call in which a firm's CEO, played by Jeremy Irons, tells a senior executive about the cycles of financial crashes. Kevin Spacey's character says he wants out, and the scene ends on the line that it is just money.