King Of Flan - Slashdot User

Fallout From the Fall of CAPTCHAs 413

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday July 15, 2008 @05:05PM from the script-kiddie-fodder dept.

An anonymous reader recommends Computerworld's look at the rise and fall of CAPTCHAs, and at some of the ways bad guys are leveraging broken CAPTCHAs to ply their evil trade. "CAPTCHA used to be an easy and useful way for Web administrators to authenticate users. Now it's an easy and useful way for malware authors and spammers to do their dirty work. By January 2008, Yahoo Mail's CAPTCHA had been cracked. Gmail was ripped open soon thereafter. Hotmail's top got popped in April. And then things got bad. There are now programs available online (no, we will not tell you where) that automate CAPTCHA attacks. You don't need to have any cracking skills. All you need is a desire to spread spam, make anonymous online attacks against your enemies, propagate malware or, in general, be an online jerk. And it's not just free e-mail sites that can be made to suffer..."

Comment Re:what next? (Score 2, Interesting) 160

by King Of Flan on Sunday July 13, 2008 @01:20PM (#24173549) Attached to: Flagship Studios Going Under

I doubt there is anything the customers can do because there is a single player element to the game, which is exactly the same as multiplayer. They will say that you still have all the game content.

Scientists Find Solar System Like Ours 173

Posted by Zonk on Thursday February 14, 2008 @06:55PM from the hello-up-there dept.

mlimber writes "The NYTimes has up a story about the discovery of a solar system that is analogous to ours. Of the 250 or so exoplanets found thus far, 'few of them are in systems that even faintly resemble our own. In many cases, giant Jupiter-like planets are whizzing around inside the orbit of Mercury,' whereas in this new system, 'a planet about two-thirds of the mass of Jupiter and another about 90 percent of the mass of Saturn are orbiting a reddish star about half the mass of the Sun, at about half the distances that Jupiter and Saturn circle our own Sun.' The researchers used gravitational microlensing to detect the planets, and two of the lead authors of the paper to be published in Science are amateur astronomers, one of whom describes herself as 'an ordinary New Zealand mother.'"

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