On Tuesday, "Duke Nukem Forever" publisher 2K Games fired its PR agency for threatening to blacklist journalists who gave the game a negative review. "2K Games does not endorse the comments made by Jim Redner and we can confirm that The Redner Group no longer represents our products," 2K Games spokesman Charlie Sinhaseni said in an email. "We have always maintained a mutually respectful working relationship with the press and do not condone his actions in any way."

The bad guys have wasted no time. Hours after Apple released this update and the initial set of definitions, a new variation of Mac Defender is in the wild. This one has a new name, Mdinstall.pkg, and it has been specifically formulated to skate past Apple’s malware-blocking code.

Earthquake prediction can be a grave, and faulty science, and in the case of Italian seismologists who are being tried for the manslaughter of the people who died in the 2009 L'Aquila quake, it can have legal consequences. The group of seven, including six seismologists and a government official, reportedly didn't alert the public ahead of time of the risk of the L'Aquila earthquake, which occurred on April 6 of that year, killing around 300 people, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The attack exploits a vulnerability in the IE security zones feature that allows users to segregate trustworthy websites from those they don't know or don't ever want to access. By embedding a special iframe tag in a malicious website, an attacker can circumvent this cross zone interaction and cause the browser to expose cookies stored on the victim's computer.

From Reuters:

To exploit the flaw, the hacker must persuade the victim to drag and drop an object across the PC's screen before the cookie can be hijacked. That sounds like a difficult task, but Valotta said he was able to do it fairly easily. He built a puzzle that he put up on Facebook in which users are challenged to "undress" a photo of an attractive woman. "I published this game online on FaceBook and in less than three days, more than 80 cookies were sent to my server," he said. "And I've only got 150 friends." Microsoft said there is little risk a hacker could succeed in a real-world cookiejacking scam.

The 17-year-old former Oak Park and River Forest High School student, who police and school officials are not identifying because he is a minor, was arrested at his Oak Park home Monday night and was charged with misdemeanor disorderly conduct. The charges were levied with cooperation from the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office and Oak Park police said there will not be any additional charges.

In good news for nerds everywhere, what makes people unpopular in the hallways of high school, mainly an unwillingness to conform, tends to translate into success as an adult. Robbins lists several companies—including Yahoo!—that prioritize hiring quirky individuals who shun conventional thinking. She also name-checks historical and current celebrities, including director Steven Spielberg (who was taunted for being Jewish in high school) and Lady Gaga (a self-described former theater "freak"), whose weirdness led to later fame. (Other now-validated former outsiders she touts: Steve Jobs, Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen and Angelina Jolie.)