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Wireless Networking

Submission + - Wi-Fi routers are vulnerable to viruses (newscientist.com) 3

Submitted by Harry Coal
Harry Coal writes: The viral infection that began in Cambridge, Massachusetts, somewhere between MIT and Harvard University, failed to cross the Charles River into Boston; in California, the San Francisco Bay stymied a similar attack. This was not a biological infection, but the first simulation of an airborne computer virus. It spread by hopping between wireless routers, which are more susceptible to viruses than computers, says Steven Myers of Indiana University in Bloomington. "We forget that routers are mini-computers. They have memory, they are networked and they are programmable." And since they aren't scanned for viruses, or protected by existing firewalls, they are easy targets. Myers knows of no actual router viruses, but says such a virus could steal credit-card numbers, make the router send out spam and block incoming security patches. Routers close enough together to communicate — less than 100 metres apart — could act as a vast network for viruses. Although routers don't usually communicate with each other, it would be easy enough for malicious hackers to use a virus to switch on that capability if the router's encryption system were weak, Myers says.
The Internet

Submission + - Both Wikipedia and Citizendium under CC-by-sa? (citizendium.org)

Submitted by
Raindance
Raindance writes: "Citizendium, after more than a year of license ambiguity, has announced its content will be freely available under CC-by-sa. This comes a few weeks after Wikipedia announced the fairly likely possibility of relicensing all homegrown GFDL content under CC-by-sa (as made possible by the new Creative Commons compatibility framework). Good things are happening in the realm of free content."
It's funny. Laugh.

Smarter Teens Have Less Sex 1285

Posted by CmdrTaco from the still-no-excuse-for-you dept.
Tech.Luver writes "Gene Expression reports, "Tyler Cowen quotes from a new study testing the relationship between grades and delayed sexual activity. Last December I passed a paper along to Razib showing that high-school age adolescents with higher IQs and extremely low IQs were less likely to have had first intercourse than those with average to below average intelligence. (i.e. for males with IQs under 70, 63.3% were still virgins, for those with IQs between 70-90 only 50.2% were virgin, 58.6% were virgins with IQs between 90-110, and 70.3% with IQs over 110 were virgins) In fact, a more detailed study from 2000 is devoted strictly to this topic, and finds the same thing: Smart Teens Don't Have Sex (or Kiss Much Either). ""

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