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Submission + - Ars Technica writer plagiarizes space history posts

Submitted by Greg Lindahl
Greg Lindahl writes: Last May, I really enjoyed reading an Ars Tecnica post “The secret laser-toting Soviet satellite that almost was” [down, see mirror at archive.org.] It turns out that most of the details were taken from an article titled Soviet Star Wars published in the Smithsonian Air & Space Magazine in 2010. Here are the details of the plagiarism, including some other space history articles with similar copying by the same author. Ars Technica's response? Unhistory! They've removed the posting, but haven't published a retraction or explanation.

Submission + - GIMP Abandons SourceForge. Distributes via FTP Instead (gimp.org)

Submitted by Dangerous_Minds
Dangerous_Minds writes: GIMP, a free and open source altenernative to image manipulation software like Photoshop, recently announced that it will no longer be distributing their program through SourceForge. Citing some of the ads as reasons, they say that the tipping point was "the introduction of their own SourceForge Installer software, which bundles third-party offers with Free Software packages. We do not want to support this kind of behavior, and have thus decided to abandon SourceForge." The policy changes were reported back in August by Gluster. GIMP is now distributing their software via their own FTP page instead. Is Sourceforge becoming the next CNET?

Submission + - What Apple Does and Doesn't Know About You (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: Tucked inside Apple's first-ever transparency report, published yesterday, was a not-so-subtle dig at the tech giant's competitors. "Our business does not depend on collecting personal data," Apple wrote. "We have no interest in amassing personal information about our customers." It's no secret that for social web companies like Google or Facebook, collecting, storing, and analyzing data about every aspect of your life translates into cold, hard cash—the more sensitive and personal, the better. But in the emerging post-NSA new world order, the unwritten privacy-for-cool services agreement that drives the internet ecosystem is making netizens increasingly uneasy.

Submission + - Chelyabinsk-sized asteroid impacts may be more common than we thought

Submitted by The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: Using data from the Feb. 15, 2013 asteroid impact over Russia, scientists have determined that we may be hit by objects in this size range (10 — 50 meters across) more often than we previously thought, something like once every 20 years. They also found the Chelyabinsk asteroid was likely a single rock about 19 meters (60 feet) across, had a mass of 12,000 tons, and was criss-crossed with internal fractures which aided in its breakup as it rammed through the Earth's atmosphere.

Submission + - Privacy, Search Engines, and Government Monitoring

Submitted by Greg Lindahl
Greg Lindahl writes: The current kerfluffle about US Government logging information about US citizens not accused of any crime has mainly focused on communications and communications metadata, but that's not the only sort of records retention that might be bothersome. The record of web searches you've made and results you've clicked on could be even more revealing than your phone calls and texts:

Even if you are not a criminal, you probably make searches that you don’t want your minister, boss, or spouse to know about. You don’t expect your doctor to keep a record of every question you ask at a checkup, but your search engine probably remembers every medical search you’ve ever made. And even if you’ve been careful to log out and clear your cookies, those searches are probably associated with your real name.

Read more about this issue: Privacy, Search Engines, and Government Monitoring

Submission + - Top WordPress Plugins Contain Serious Security Vulnerabilities (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: According to recent analysis of the top 50 most downloaded plugins for the WordPress platform, 18 were vulnerable and could be exploited to infect Websites and distribute malware. Out of the top 10 most popular e-commerce plugins, seven contained serious security flaws. Two were directly from the WordPress team and affected BuddyPress, and several dealt with online payments or interacted with Facebook and other social networks, according to Maty Siman of security firm Checkmarx.

Many of the popular add-ons could be exploited by a number of common attacks, such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting, Checkmarx found, meaning that attackers can easily use an automated exploit kit and point it to a WordPress site and compromise it.

This problem isn't unique to WordPress. While the survey looked at only WordPress plugins because of the platform's popularity, other content management platforms and other Web software suffer similar problems.

Submission + - AMD's low-powered 64-bit ARM chips (networkworld.com)

Submitted by corando
corando writes: AMD on Tuesday shared initial details on its 64-bit ARM chips, code-named Seattle, which will have up to 16 CPU cores. The chips will be up to four times faster and more power efficient than the quad-core Opteron X-series chips, which draw up to 11 watts of power and are based on the x86 architecture.

While these are targeted for servers, one has to wonder if phones and tablets are next?

Submission + - blekko donates search data to Comomn Crawl (blekko.com)

Submitted by Greg Lindahl
Greg Lindahl writes: blekko is donating search engine ranking data for 140 million domains and 22 billion urls to the Common Crawl Foundation. Common Crawl is a non-profit dedicated to making the greatest (yet messiest) dataset of our time, the web, available to everyone, including tinkerers, hackers, activists, and new companies. blekko's ranking data will initially be used to improve the quality of Common Crawl's 8 billion webpage public crawl of the web, and eventually will be directly available to the public.

Submission + - END FOX News: The answer. The solution. (livejournal.com) 4

Submitted by Web Goddess
Web Goddess writes: FOX NEWS. The answer. The solution.
I was born without muscles to open my eyes! Blepharophimosis ptosis is extremely rare. "Full medical treatment" = a muscle graft that allows the forehead to elevate the eyelids. To blink, the eyelids just drift downwards, not fully shut. So my eyes learned to automatically roll upwards, each time I blink and when I sleep.

Eyelid movement is so important that, all my life, my body has (wow!) been re-purposing the lower facial muscles, neck muscles, even part of the tongue and lungs, to open and close the eyelids. TRUE STORY! Today I can squint, and move my eyelids a remarkable amount! When did this happen?! It is not documented. I believe I am revealing, for the first time ever, the true story of Blepharophimosis ptosis.

NOBODY NOTICES. Not consciously. But my expressions are often backwards, or complicated, or unusual. This is like having a speech impediment that someone stops noticing in five minutes, or a few weeks. But it is different. My expressions can only be properly mapped in a one-on-one conversation, where the observer's expressions learn what my matching expressions look like. (*) On film, my expressions appear to be a spectacle of facial grimaces when viewed by a stranger.

CUT TO THE CHASE:

My expressions and microexpressions (especially the ones involving blinks which include involuntary eye rolls) have caused the following lifelong problems:

* A single innocent glance can immediately turn a stranger or even a friend into a person with a permanent blood feud against me, who will NOT listen to reason, invents evidence to support the hatred, and transmits the senseless hate to others. "You sniffed my boyfriend's crotch!" Invented memes become gospel.

* I am completely unable to convey sincerity. Those muscles just don't...exist. Therefore, authority (police, teachers, parents, anyone with a skeptical opinion) never,ever,ever believe me. The mismatch between my words and my subliminally-perceived aspect inevitably lead to escalating suspicion and anger. Even when I am reporting serious crime, or serious personal abuse, the police begin to interrogate ME and things go downhill rapidly. My complaints about this abuse, frustratingly, evoke laughter in my friends, time and time again.

I see in FOX news, er, similar symptoms:

* Dittoheads are furious about insane things that fly in the face of reason, and infect others by the strength of their convictions.

* Commentators say the most outrageous things with seeming sincerity.

Yes, I am contacting facial expression analysis experts, Good Lord, I need a medical note to prevent a routine traffic stop from turning into an absolute nightmare. But do we have time for all that?

YOU are the solution. Microexpressions? Blepharophmosis ptosis people know that a single microexpression can induce permanent, infectious feud over nothing. Find the answer. The evidence is out there.

If you wish to analyze my facial expressions (how embarrassing I apparently look pretty odd, at times) you can contact me, or check out this video, where I was trying to carefully control my expressions for a large audience.

(especially camera angle beginning around 35 minutes in.)
http://fora.tv/2009/03/10/The_Darwin_Awards_Wendy_Northcutt

Thanks for your help! I am 47 years old. A lifetime of sad encounters, culminating in a miracle. The dittohead microexpression that induces hate? It's in my loving face.

Comment Re:Java has its uses (Score 1) 187

by Greg Lindahl (#36131700) Attached to: Perl 5.14 Released

Perl has some nifty frameworks that can make you as productive as PHP for small web projects, and it also does large projects well.

But hey, if you're comfortable with PHP and Java, and want to pay to have your app completely rewritten, then more power to you.

Comment Re:Perl - the COBOL of scripting languages (Score 1) 187

by Greg Lindahl (#36131550) Attached to: Perl 5.14 Released

New startups using perl, courtesy of Quora:

blekko
nabbr
selectablemedia.com
goba.mobi
socialflow.com
duckduckgo

Big companies writing lots of new perl, also courtesy of Quora:

Lokku (makers of Nestoria), BBC, LJ, IMDB, Salon.com, Typepad, Zappos, Craigslist, FriendFinder, Ticketmaster, Slashdot

I think you're really confused about the role Larry plays in the community. He's slowly creating a new language, which has little to do with perl 5. Perl 5 is actively maintained and has a large community of users.

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