"the GEEK corner on the web"
Interior designer Tony Alleyne spent over $150,000 converting his house into the USS Enterprise from Star Trek. It took him over 6 years of tedious construction to convert every wall, floor and appliance to the 24th century spaceship.
Are you prepared for the Zombie Apocalypse? Well netter am I but this little beauty could absolutely help me make quick work of the undead.
Source: Gizmodo
There’s a solar Coronal Mass Ejection travelling towards us at 1,400 miles per second, the largest solar storm since 2005. It will hit Earth around 9am Eastern Time, causing fluctuations on the power grid and disruptions to the Global Positioning System.
Don’t worry, you won’t die.
But there’s something else, a strong proton storm—ranking S3 on a 5-level scale—which is in full rage now and gradually increasing. While CMEs are normal—about 2,000 every 11-year solar cycle—proton storms are very rare. Only a couple of dozen happen per solar cycle. And this one can be dangerous.
The storm has already affected aircraft traffic and may affect satellites’ computers. On a telephone interview, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center physicist Doug Biesecker told me that, fortunately, there are measures to avoid most dangers.
“Many airliners have been avoiding the North Pole routes because they are more exposed to the proton storm, which disrupts High Frequency radio communications,” he said on a telephone interview. HF datalinks are crucial to modern airflight, as they keep aircraft connected to Air Traffic Control. Due to the structure of the magnetic field that surrounds Earth, the polar cusps have very little protection against outbursts of solar radiation, so any airplane crossing that area could be exposed to this mayhem.
Did you know that Microsoft sells more Windows 7 then every Mac, iOS and Android all put together? Say what you will about other operating systems but Microsoft is still going strong with an impressive number of Windows 7 licenses are sold to the tune of 525 million copies.
Since…October, 2009, Apple has likely sold about 35 million Macs, possibly 250 million iOS devices, and Google has seen almost 250 million Android activations.
Source: Gizmodo
Here is another great post from Gizmodo.com. Here is where our freedoms get taken away when the power of money can buy you. I really could not put the words together better…
It’s an old cliché in politics to “follow the money.” Unfortunately, it’s almost always true when it comes to the support of controversial bills. In fact, all you need is $100k per senator to buy support for PIPA, the Senates version of SOPA.
It’s a small price to pay for controlling how the Internet works in the United States. If you’re still unsure what exactly SOPA is, check out our comprehensive article on the bill. Above are the senators that received in excess in $100,000 in campaign contributions from the Movie, Music, and TV industry. Oh hey, they all support PIPA. These numbers were compiled by ProPubilca.
If you live in the states governed by these public servants, be sure to give them a call and tell them that SOPA/PIPA will destroy the Internet. Mat’s right, we really do need an Internet Lobbyist. [ProPublica]
The protest continues and sides are being chosen. Gizmodo.com has a great post that breaks it down pretty good.
Source: Gizmodo
If you hadn’t heard of SOPA before, you probably have by now: Some of the internet’s most influential sites—Reddit and Wikipedia among them—are going dark to protest the much-maligned anti-piracy bill. But other than being a very bad thing, what is SOPA? And what will it mean for you if it passes?More »
Source: CNET
The hackers, who call themselves “Yama Tough” and employ the “Anonymous” mask in its Twitter avatar, said in a tweet Saturday it would release the 1.7GB source code on Tuesday, along with the message “the rest will follow…”
Several reports surfaced earlier this month that hackers had managed to access the source code for certain Symantec products. Symantec identified the products as Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) 11.0 and Symantec Antivirus 10.2 but said the attack did not affect any current Norton consumer products.
The hackers said they found the code after breaking into servers run by Indian military intelligence. The code was apparently left on there by mistake after Indian authorities inspected the sourced code to ensure it was secure, which is where the hackers found the code.
The group said in a Pastebin post that it had the “source codes of dozens of companies” and contained documentation describing the API procedures for Symantec’s virus definition generation service. The group’s post on the Pastebin site has since been removed, though a Google cached version still exists.
Symantec said in a statement to CNET sister site ZDNet that code posted to Pastebin was related to a 2006 version and is “no longer sold or supported.”
“The current version of Norton Utilities has been completely rebuilt and shares no common code with Norton Utilities 2006. The code that has been posted for the 2006 version poses no security threat to users of the current version of Norton Utilities,” the company said in a statement.
Rob Rachwald, director of security strategy at Imperva, told CNET’s Lance Whitney that the incident was “embarrassing on Symantec’s part” but not likely to “keep the Symantec folks awake too late at night, and certainly not their customers.”
If the source code had been recent and the hackers were able to poke enough holes in it, then exploiting the software could be possible, noted Rachwald. But there’s not much they can learn from old code.
Score one for the Internet. One of SOPA’s most controversial provisions—DNS blocking—will be removed, for now at least, according to one of the act’s staunchest supporters, Representative Lamar Smith.
The domain name blocking provision, as set forth in SOPA, would effectively censor foreign websites found hosting any amount of pirated content by requiring American ISP’s to block access to them. In addition, the provision reportedly could have interfered with the DNSSEC, which helps protect the DNS system from attack.
Rep. Smith stated that the provision would remain tabled until the Congressional Judiciary Committee has had an opportunity to “further examine the issues.” The Senate removed similar language from its competing Protect IP Act yesterday.
Opponents of both bills were unimpressed by the amendments, however. “These bills need to be killed altogether,” Corynne McSherry, Director of IP for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told CNet. “Our view all along has been they are not fixable.”
CNet via Electronista
It is just amazing how feature rich Ubuntu has become. Up next it’s Ubuntu TV. I can’t wait for this one.
Source: Engadget