Comment Re:Best guess on "throaty" (Score 1) 56
"Damn you autocorrect!"
Comment Re:The mathematics avoids number throaty?? (Score 1) 56
Motormouthing?
Verbiage?
In any case, 'some strange usage of the word "throaty" that I wasn't previously aware of'.
Comment Re:Trick or treaters who visit... (Score 3, Funny) 437
What joke? bloodhawk is correct: geekoid didn't put a snarkmark at the end of his comment therefore he was serious.~
Comment Re:Carmel Colored Corn Syrup... (Score 1) 255
[spit-take]
Ouache. Kosse-ça, stie. Du crisse de sirop de poteau?
Why Are We So Rude Online? 341
kodiaktau writes "An article in the WSJ discusses why internet users are more rude online than they are in person. The story discusses some of the possible reasons. For example, a study found that browsing Facebook tends to lower people's self control. An MIT professor says people posting on the internet have lowered inhibitions because there is no formal social interaction. Another theory is that communicating through a phone or other device feels like communicating with a 'toy,' which dehumanizes the conversation. Of course, a rude conversation has never happened on Slashdot in the last 15 years."
Comment Copper? How quaint. (Score 2) 140
Shouldn't we pushing photons over glass by now. Fibre infrastructure has existed for decades now, isn't it time it was scaled down to individual computers and appliances?
Linux Forcibly Installed On Congressman's Computer In Act of Terrorism 343
fermion writes with news of Windows computers being forcefully liberated: "The campaign headquarters of Michael Grimm, a U.S. House of Representatives member from New York, were vandalized. What has not been reported everywhere is that Linux was installed on one of his computers, erasing data in the process. Is this a new attack on democracy by the open source radicals, or it is just a random occurrence?"
From the article: "'In fact, one officer said to me today they see this as a crime against the government, because I am a sitting United States congressman and they take it very seriously. You know, especially in light of what happened with Gabby Giffords, we're not in the world today where we can shrug things off,' Grimm said. ... [GNU/]Linux, an open-source operating system, was installed on Grimm's computers, erasing the hard drive contents, which included polling and voter identification data. But staff had backed up the hard drive contents hours beforehand. Grimm and his staffers said the vandalism — cement blocks were thrown through the office's windows — is a cover-up for the attacks on the computers."
Comment Track 0 rattle (Score 1) 204
I remember both Apple ][ and Commodore floppies would seek past the end of the rail to recalibrate track 0. The apple made a noise on power up but 1541s made a scary noise whenever formatting a new disk or trying to recover a read error.
After a while the rattle actually threw the head out of alignment as the pulley was slipping on the axle. I connected the read head to the microphone input of a tape recorder to listen to the signal strength as I adjusted the stepper motor alignment.
After a while the screw threads were worn and I had to tap&die them. Then I got tired of realigning the heads and drilled in a cotter pin to stop the pulley from slipping.
Good times.
Comment Favorite 'map' tools (Score 4, Informative) 34
The newest camera / smartphones have GPS chips to geotag pictures so they can be overlaid on maps. For GPS-less cameras:
Have a GPS device turned on and logging tracks, take pictures, use the tools to add geotags to pictures.
Comment A law? (Score 1) 306
Isn't there a law that mandates all official government written communications should be recorded?
Comment Melting currency (Score 1) 164
And by introducing self-destructing plastic currency we won't have a choice...
http://business.financialpost.com/2012/07/12/new-plastic-bills-reportedly-melting-in-summer-heat/
FishPi: Raspberry Pi Powered Autonomous Boat To Cross the Ocean 136
lukehopewell1 writes "The Raspberry Pi is a triumph in computing, and it's now set to become a triumph in robotics as one developer plans to build a model boat around it and sail it across the Atlantic Ocean, completely unmanned. It's codenamed FishPi and will see a model boat sail across the Atlantic all by itself save for a camera, GPS module, compass and solar panels."
The creator is posting updates on the build progress using a forum on his website.
Comment Re:Funny... (Score 2) 221
Nope. Contact-less is a US thing. Europe uses chip and PIN.
Comment Re:Had an idea like this for Phishers (Score 1) 142
I had an idea like this once for responding to phishing e-mails. A phishing URL would be submitted and a fake identity would be created using a database of first names, last names, street names, cities, states, zip codes, etc. A phoney (but real looking) SNN and date of birth would be created as well as any other information. The form would be submitted and the fake identity would be stored in the phisher's database. Repeat this a few thousand times and the database's value would drop. Get enough people using this program and submitting phishing URLs and phishing in general would get harder to do successfully.
Sadly, I never implemented this idea so it can't be claimed as prior art.
AA419 had similar programs (Muguito, Lad Vampire) to "flash mob" scam sites and DDOS them into exceeding their bandwidth quotas. There was also some tools to fake-fill web forms as you mentioned above.
MariaDB and MySQL Authentication Bypass Exploit 73
JohnBert writes "A security bug in MariaDB and MySQL has been revealed, allowing a known username and password to access the master user table of a MySQL server and dump it into a locally-stored file. By using a tool like John the Ripper, this file can be easily cracked to reveal text passwords that can provide further access. By committing a threaded brute-force module that abuses the authentication bypass flaw to automatically dump the password database, you can access the database using the cracked password hashes even if the authentication bypass vulnerability is fixed."
