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Submission + - Top 10 Tech product ads in vintage style

An anonymous reader writes: Newlaunches.com has compiled a list of Top 10 vintage styled ads for modern day tech products and companies. The Nintendo Wii gets the vintage treatment and Adobe Photoshop gets the 80's look.
Security

Submission + - Microsoft: Word 2007 flaws are features, not bugs

PetManimal writes: "Mati Aharoni's discovery of three flaws in Word using a fuzzer (screenshots) has been discounted by Microsoft, which claims that the crashes and malformed Word documents are a feature of Word, not a bug. Microsoft's Security Response Center is also refusing to classify the flaws as security problems. According to Microsoft developer David LeBlanc, crashes aren't necessarily DoS situations:

You may rightfully say that crashing is always bad, and having a server-class app background, I agree. Crashing means you made a mistake, bad programmer, no biscuit. However, crashing may be the lesser of the evils in many places. In the event that our apps crash, we have recovery mechanisms, ways to report the crash so we know what function had the problem, and so on. I really take issue with those who would characterize a client-side crash as a denial of service. If you can crash my app so that I can't restart it, or have to reboot my system, well, OK — that's a DoS. If you blew up my app, and I just don't load that document again, big deal. On the server side, all crashes are bad — though it is still better to drop the service than to give the attacker a command prompt.
Computerworld's Frank Hayes responds to LeBlanc and questions Microsoft's logic:

So can we expect to see that approach in other products that use Windows Embedded? Like maybe...a TV that, when the cable service goes pixellated, shorts out all the circuitry in your house? ("Users can reset circuit breakers to resume normal operations.") A car CD player that, when it's fed a scratched disc, disconnects the steering and brakes and disengages the clutch? ("Users who survive can restart the car to resume normal operations.")

If your application code is in control, it can gracefully reject bad input. If your app code ISN'T in control, you crash. You're already owned. This suicide-before-capture approach isn't "by-design" behavior. It's lack-of-design behavior.
"
Mars

Submission + - Closest Look Ever of the "Face of Mars"

Riding with Robots writes: "The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has returned the sharpest view ever of the famous "Face of Mars." The formation's reputation as an alien artifact stemmed from a 1970s Viking image. In recent years, different lighting conditions and much, much higher resolution views have dispelled the illusion of an ancient Martian monument, but the new pictures give modern Mars explorers additional clues about the water ice that may lie just below the surface. You can download the full-resolution version, which the circumspect MRO team has labeled simply, "Popular Landform in Cydonia Region." Meanwhile, NASA has just released a report explaining the likely fate of the Mars Global Surveyor, which went suddenly silent last year after a decade of service."
NASA

Submission + - Did NASA Accidentally "Nuke" Jupiter?

An anonymous reader writes: Title: Did NASA Accidentally "Nuke" Jupiter? Source: Enterprise URL Source: http://www.enterprisemission.com//NukingJupiter.ht ml Published: Apr 11, 2007 NASA's decision to finally terminate Galileo in September 2003 via a fiery plunge into Jupiter, was designed to prevent any possible biological contamination of Europa from a future random collision with the spacecraft, once its fuel was exhausted. An engineer named Jacco van der Worp claimed that, plunging into Jupiter's deep and increasingly dense atmosphere, the on-board Galileo electrical power supply — a set of 144 plutonium-238 fuel pellets — would ultimately "implode"; that the plutonium Galileo carried would ultimately collapse in upon itself under the enormous pressures of Jupiter's overwhelming atmosphere and go critical. Noone listened. One month later ... October 19, 2003 — an amateur astronomer in Belgium, Olivier Meeckers, secured a remarkable image, a dark black "splotch" showing up on the southern edge of Jupiter's well-known "North Equatorial Belt," trailing a fainter "tail" southwest (image center). Richard Hoagland http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?Art Num=183496 has now calculated that, given the slow fall through a highly pressurised atmosphere, it is possible that the splotch is the result of about 50lb of plutonium going critical 700 miles below. Way to go, NASA!

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