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Comment "A lengthy and emotional feature..." (Score 2) 22

"...on Wired-" Lost me there. Hackneyed attacks on what is probably among the most hated of tech magazines pretending to be more independent than they are aside, this is certainly a good idea, but what's to stop people searching for people whom they have nothing to do with? The information on the site, from what I could ascertain from the article, doesn't appear to be meaningfully secured and is open to abuse.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 56

IRC's usually on an obvious port and has a discrete protocol of its own. There's no mistaking IRC. With Twitter everything's through HTTP, so people involved have some small level of deniability, and people are far more likely to notice an odd connection appearing on an abnormal port and look into it than they are to pay any heed to the din of HTTP.
NASA

Submission + - Transparency: The Future of NASA (ispyce.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Have a look on NASA new missions to start in near future. The space agency just announced that the last shuttle mission would be in June. For more information check out the picture above.
Security

Submission + - Bomb Detecting Plants to Root Out Terrorists

An anonymous reader writes: The Denver Post Reports that June Medford, a biologist at Colorado State University, has re-engineered plants so that they can detect explosives, air pollution and toxic chemicals, signalling the presence of potentially deadly vapors by turning from green to white. "If you take something into Denver International Airport, like an explosive for a plane, my plants are going to turn white," says Medford. "That's going to get the security guys on you." Military and Homeland Security research directors say they envision wide applications for the genetically modified plants positioned in buildings, war zones and cities where terrorists could set up covert bombmaking factories and add that strategic placement of the plants could help reach a goal of deploying a decentralized, nationwide system for detecting explosives. "Our hope is if these plants could be located ubiquitously, we might be able to detect explosives at the point they are being assembled," says Doug Bauer, the Homeland Security explosives research program manager. "You would have a much greater opportunity for first-responders to interdict and disrupt that activity."

Comment Nothing new (Score 2) 123

Many phones with touchscreen keyboards have an emoticon keyboard along with the phone-style keypad and qwerty. Many simply with buttons have emoticons on autocomplete or under symbols options. This is simply an upscale. I can't find the source (TFA gives barely any details) but if this is a student project, I like. It would actually sell well. If this is a commercial product, oh god no. Yes, it will sell well, yes.

Comment Re:Hackercup 2011 (Score 1) 158

I take it that they're referring to "hacker" as in Y Combinator's "Hacker News", as in "programmer in general", rather than the more classic meanings of "one who accesses systems without authorisation by means of exploiting vulnerable code, etc" or "skilled programmer with tendencies to the questionably legal".

Comment "Hacked"? (Score 1) 158

It's clear that none of Facebook's code was compromised, otherwise other high-profile pages would be being defaced. What's more likely here is that, through some human flaw of easy security questions or simple passwords (I can't see the Zuck or his immediate staff using unsecured wifi), the account was compromised. Ergo, not a hack. That pedantry aside, I'm very much pleased to see Facebook knocked down a peg or two, especially in the area of security.

Comment I see nothing wrong with this. (Score 1) 116

Were this a market and were the government enforcing similar, or were this an industry and a regulator enforcing similar, or were this the internet and an ISP enforcing similar, I'd complain as you are. But this is Facebook's platform. Yes, it's unnecessarily grasping, or so one would think if Facebook are really as profitable as they're telling us. Yes, this will panic the stock monkeys. But this is not an entire market, this is not an entire industry, this is not an entire content platform, this is one service. Besides, perhaps this will even out competition with the minor developer exodus it'll probably end up causing.

Comment Inception and TSN, perhaps. (Score 1) 201

But I heavily doubt that anyone could state TS3 worthy of an Oscar were it not for the drought of good "mainstream" cinema. The rest of the nominees are mostly above average, I'd say, but in no way is TS3 deserving of an Oscar. This is, though, an undeniable step up from last year's glut of cheap action movies and thrillers.

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