Sir Codelot writes "A hacker who calls himself Kirllos has obtained and is now offering to sell 1.5 million Facebook IDs at astonishingly low prices — $25 per 1,000 IDs for users with fewer than 10 friends and $45 per 1,000 IDs for users with more than 10 friends. Looking at the numbers, Kirllos has stolen the IDs of one out of every 300 Facebook users. Quoting: 'VeriSign director of cyber intelligence Rick Howard told the New York Times that it appeared close to 700,000 had already been sold. Kirllos would have earned at least $25,000 from the scam. Howard told the newspaper that it was not apparent whether the accounts and passwords were legitimate, but a Russian underground hacking magazine reported it had tested some of Kirllos' previous samples and managed to get into people's accounts.'"

therufus writes "A few days after the release of Assassin's Creed 2, naughty piracy sites were announcing they had cracked Ubisoft's Online Services Platform. Turns out, that wasn't entirely true. While it was possible to load into the game, players were unable to advance past a certain memory block. But now, it seems Ubisoft will need to draft a new response. A new crack has begun circulating that removes the DRM entirely."

An anonymous reader sends along this excerpt from MIT's Technology Review: "Personalization is a key part of Internet search, providing more relevant results and gaining loyal customers in the process. But new research highlights the privacy risks that this kind of personalization can bring. A team of European researchers, working with a researcher from the University of California, Irvine, found that they were able to hijack Google's personalized search suggestions to reconstruct users' Web search histories (PDF). Google has plugged most of the holes identified in the research, but the researchers say that other personalized services are likely to have similar vulnerabilities."

Megaport writes "Promoting his new series on the Discovery channel, Stephen Hawking has given an interview to the Times in which 'he has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all that it can to avoid any contact.' He says, 'I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach. ... If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans.' Personally, I've always thought that the indigenous people of the world really had no chance to avoid contact here on such a small planet, but is hiding under our collective bed an option for humanity in the wider galaxy?"

JoshuaInNippon writes "In a brief press release buried within Sony Japan's website, the company announced that it would be ending sales of the classic 3.5-inch diskette in the country in March 2011. Sony introduced the size to the world in 1981, and it saw its heyday in the 1990s. Sony has been one of the last major manufacturers to continue shipments of the disk type it helped develop, but had ended most worldwide sales in March of this year. The company's production of the 3.5-inch floppy ceased in 2009. Sony noted demand, or lack thereof, as the reason. The company's withdrawal is one of the final acts in the slow death of the floppy era."

workie writes "Using data derived from website infections, RescueTheWeb.org has found several interesting link-spam architectures. One architecture is where concentric layers of hijacked websites are used to increase the page rank and breadth of reach (within search engine search results) of scam sites. The outer layers link to the inner layers, eventually linking to a site that redirects the user to the scam site. Another architecture involves hijacked sites that redirect the user to fake copies of Google, having the appearance that the visitor is still within Google, but in reality they are on a Google lookalike that contains only nefarious links."

jtrust27 writes "Slow or non-existent Internet connections have meant that the people of Uganda have not been able to harness the many advantages of the online economy. This social and economic exclusion of the poorest of the poor was further accentuated by the impossibility for a Ugandan to obtain a credit card or make PayPal payments — a simple requirement to be able to pay for goods and services online. Most merchants and payment gateway providers automatically block all credit cards from Africa, and it is not possible to get a verified PayPal account in many African nations." Now, a Ugandan company called EasyPayUganda is helping people sidestep these restrictions, by allowing customers to make online payments by proxy in order to pay for services and goods. EasyPayUganda is also providing a logistics solution, forwarding customers' shipments to Uganda, as most online merchants will not ship to Africa.

HaymarketRiot writes "Richard Branson has claimed that the flight ban, due to the eruption of the volcano Eyjafjallajokull, was an overreaction on the part of the authorities. Britain's government has even called for the airlines to be compensated. This does look like a perfect excuse for already greedy airlines to try and get more money ... any experts care to comment on the effect of volcanic ash on planes?"

bgweber writes "Last year, the IEEE conference on Computational Intelligence and Games hosted a competition to determine who could write the best AI for playing Mario levels (YouTube video). This year, the conference has expanded the competition to include a track on level generation as well, where the goal is to generate new levels online procedurally. Submitting an entry is as easy as implementing a Java interface that performs procedural content generation. The implications of this competition are techniques for greatly increasing the replayability of games, since each gameplay session could present new levels to the player."

jeremyz writes "With the inclusion of 802.11n in more and more Wi-Fi devices, the WRT54GL is losing its usefulness, even though it's still the de-facto standard for open source, Linux-running wireless routers. I've been looking around for a 802.11n router to replace the WRT54GL, but haven't really found anything besides the Netgear's WNR3500L. At first look, the WNR3500L looked great, but after some further investigation, I found that Netgear hasn't released all of the source, as they should have to comply with the GPL. Are there any good 802.11n routers to replace my aging WRT54GL?"

martiniturbide writes "After a long delay, eComStation 2.0 GA will finally become reality. It will be released in time to be presented at the Warpstock Europe 2010 event which will be held in Trier, Germany, from May 14 to 16. We consider eComStation 2.0 to be the biggest overhaul of OS/2 so far. Together with a team of both hired and volunteer developers, we have extended the functionality, removed limitations, updated hardware support as far as possible, and resolved close to 1000 issues that had been reported since the release of eComStation 1.2R. The new eComStation 2.0 GA is the result of several years of combined efforts and investments."

An anonymous reader writes "The Department of Defense has just released a long restricted report (PDF) by the JASON group entitled Radical Computing. This 1984 study outlines a number of alternate computing methods that could 'result in a radical improvement in computing.' The study attempts to explain the paradox of how the Russian lag in developing VLSI chips curiously did not critically hinder their accomplishments in space missions, ICBMs and chess computation. The authors speculate that the Russians might have achieved breakthroughs in alternative computing methods such as residue arithmetic and symbolic computing. (More cynical types assume the Russians bought or stole US chips from the French or other too-helpful go-betweens.)"

vikingpower writes "LOFAR, the LOw Frequency ARray radio telescope, under construction in the north of the Netherlands, saw its first pulsars (English translation of Dutch original) — through coupling it with radio telescopes in Germany and France. LOFAR is sensitive to wavelengths as long as seven meters, and will be inaugurated on June 12 of this year."

darthcamaro writes 'We all know that IPv4 address space is almost all gone — but how will we know when the exact date is? And what will happen that day? In a new report, ARIN's CIO explains exactly what will happen on that last day of IPv4 address availability: '"We will run out of IPv4 address space and the real difficult part is that there is no flag date. It's a real moving date based on demand and the amount of address space we can reclaim from organizations," Jimmerson told InternetNews.com. "If things continue they way they have, ARIN will for the very first time, sometime between the middle and end of next year, receive a request for IPv4 address space that is justified and meets the policy. However, ARIN won't have the address space. So we'll have to say no for the very first time."'

JonathansCorner.com writes "Even if Ajax was backronymed to 'Asynchronous JavaScript and XML,' it works with JSON substituted for XML. Here's a proof of concept that JavaScript/VBScript are not strictly necessary either. The technique, besides being used standalone, may be useful to provide a better 'graceful degradation' for Ajax applications used by clients with scripting turned off."