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Bill Gates Is More Admired Than the Pope 470

Posted by CmdrTaco from the he-can-afford-more-hats dept.
walterbyrd writes "Americans admire Bill Gates more than the Pope, the Dalai Lama and even Glenn Beck. The Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist was named the fifth most admired man of 2010, according to the latest USA Today/Gallup poll."
Software

Drupal 6: Panels Cookbook 55

Posted by samzenpus from the read-all-about-it dept.
J. Ayen Green writes "When the request came for me to review Drupal 6: Panels Cookbook by Bhavin (Vin) Patel, I was excited. I've been a software developer forever, a Web developer for as long as there's been a Web, and a Drupal developer since D6 was imminent. I have two Drupal books myself, and am working on one about D7 Views, but with all that, one glaring hole in my self-education has been Panels; it would be my first chance to use it." Keep reading for the rest of J. Ayen Green's review.
Bug

PHP Floating Point Bug Crashes Servers 213

Posted by timothy from the inexactly-wrong dept.
angry tapir writes "A newly unearthed bug in certain versions of the PHP scripting language could crash servers when the software is given the task of converting a large floating point number, raising the possibility that the glitch could be exploited by hackers. The bug will cause the PHP processing software to enter an infinite loop when it tries to convert the series of digits "2.2250738585072011e-308" from the string format into the floating point format. The bug only seems to affect version 5.2 and 5.3 of the language." Adds reader alphadogg: "Computer scientist Rick Regan first reported the bug on Monday, and the PHP development team issued patches the following day."
Google

Google Ready To Rule NFC-Based Mobile Payments? 87

Posted by samzenpus from the one-payment-method-to-rule-them-all dept.
itwbennett writes "Google may seem like an odd pioneer for mobile payments, says blogger Ryan Faas, but according to recent reports, the company is developing its own NFC payment solution. Here's why Faas thinks Google has a leg up in this emerging market: 'Google does have a lot of clout when it comes to NFC because the recent launch of the Nexus S and Gingerbread (the most recent Android release) offer the first truly widespread smartphone/NFC integration. That could give Google significant bargaining power. It also makes a certain sense to expect Google to try to lead in this area when you consider that the company is hyping mobile search and recommendation features.'"
Crime

FBI Defend Raids On Texas Datacenter 115

Posted by timothy from the we're-from-the-govt-and-we're-here-to-help dept.
Aryden writes "Wired Reports: 'The FBI on Tuesday defended its raids on at least two data centers in Texas, in which agents carted out equipment and disrupted service to hundreds of businesses. The raids were part of an investigation prompted by complaints from AT&T and Verizon about unpaid bills allegedly owed by some data center customers, according to court records. One data center owner charges that the telecoms are using the FBI to collect debts that should be resolved in civil court. But on Tuesday, an FBI spokesman disputed that charge.'"
Image

Thief Posts His Photo To Facebook Victim's Account Screenshot-sm 222

Posted by samzenpus from the criminal-status-update dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Washington Post reporter Marc Fisher discovered his house had been burgled; money, a winter coat, an iPod and his son's laptop were stolen. Imagine his surprise when Facebook friends of his 15-year-old son reported that a photo of the apparent thief, wearing Fisher's coat and holding a wad of notes, had been uploaded to his son's Facebook account. How addicted do you have to be to a social network to post a status update and upload your photo *while* you're burgling someone's house?"
Google

NSS Labs Browser Report Says IE Is the Best, Google Disagrees 205

Posted by samzenpus from the stacking-the-deck dept.
adeelarshad82 writes "Independent testing company NSS Labs recently published a report on the ability of popular browsers to block socially engineered malware attack URLs. The test, funded by Microsoft, reported a 99 percent detection rate by Internet Explorer 9 beta, 90 percent by Internet Explorer 8, and 3 percent by Google Chrome. However, Google doesn't entirely approve of this report's focus and conclusions. According to Google not only didn't the report use Chrome 6 for the tests, the current version is Chrome 8; it also focused just on socially engineered malware, while excluding vulnerabilities in plug-ins or browsers themselves. Google defended its browser by claiming that it was built with security in mind and emphasized protection of users from drive-by downloads and plug-in vulnerabilities."
Bug

When Computers Go Wrong 250

Posted by samzenpus from the best-of-intentions dept.
Barence writes "PC Pro's Stewart Mitchell has charted the world's ten most calamitous computer cock-ups. They include the Russians' stealing software that resulted in their gas pipeline exploding, the Mars Orbiter that went missing because the programmers got their imperial and metric measurements mixed up, the Soviet early-warning system that confused the sun for a missile and almost triggered World War III, plus the Windows anti-piracy measure that resulted in millions of legitimate customers being branded software thieves."

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