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Technology

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Wrist Watch for the Modern Tech Minded 1

NNUfergs writes: Sure my Smart Phone can deliver just about any piece of information I could want in under 30 Seconds, but I miss being able to just look at my wrist to get the time, date etc. I’ve been shopping around for a while and haven’t come across anything particularly inspiring. There are loads of various features that have been incorporated into watches but you usually only see a small specialized set in a given watch. Budget is always a concern but I am willing to invest in a quality time piece. In sort I’m not looking for a piece of jewelry, I’m looking for a gadget, for my wrist. Are there any neat, fun or just plain cool watches out there for techies? What do you have?
Idle

Submission + - Beijing Air Quality Is 'Crazy Bad' (npr.org)

digitaldc writes: Pollution in Beijing was so bad Friday the U.S. Embassy, which has been independently monitoring air quality, ran out of conventional adjectives to describe it, at one point saying it was "crazy bad."

The embassy later deleted the phrase, saying it was an "incorrect" description and it would revise the language to use when the air quality index goes above 500, its highest point and a level considered hazardous for all people by U.S. standards.

The hazardous haze has forced schools to stop outdoor exercises, and health experts asked residents, especially those with respiratory problems, the elderly and children, to stay indoors.

Security

Submission + - Shocker - Press Make Up China Internet Hijack (arbornetworks.com)

sturgeon writes: Yesterday, Slashdot and most of the world's major media outlets reported on China's April 2010 hijack of "15% of Internet traffic," including sensitive US government and defense sites. The alarm came following a US Government report on China / US economic and security relations released on Tuesday.

Unfortunately, no one much bother with fact checking or actually reading the report. The actual study never makes any estimate of Internet traffic diverted during the hijack — it only cites a blog post to suggest large volumes of traffic were involved. And curiously, the cited blog at the heart of the report never mentions traffic at all — only routes. You have to go to an interview with a third-party security researcher in a minor trade magazine to first come up with the 15% number (and this article never explains where the number came from).

In an amazing review of real data and actual facts, Arbor Nework's Craig Labovitz has a blog post looking at the traffic volumes involved in the incident (only a couple of Gigabits per second or a "statistically insignificant" percentage of Internet traffic).

Science

Submission + - Life found in deepest layer of Earth's crust (newscientist.com)

michaelmarshall writes: For the first time life has been found in the gabbroic layer of the crust. The new biosphere is all bacteria, as you might expect, but they are different to the bacteria in the layers above: they mostly feed on hydrocarbons that are produced by abiotic reactions deep in the crust. It could mean that similar microbes are living even deeper, perhaps even in the mantle.
Crime

Submission + - Scalpers bought tix with CAPTCHA-busting botnet (networkworld.com)

alphadogg writes: Three California men have pleaded guilty charges they built a network of CAPTCHA-solving computers that flooded online ticket vendors and snatched up the very best seats for Bruce Springsteen concerts, Broadway productions and even TV tapings of Dancing with the Stars.

The men ran a company called Wiseguy Tickets, and for years they had an inside track on some of the best seats in the house at many events. They scored about 1.5 million tickets after hiring Bulgarian programmers to build "a nationwide network of computers that impersonated individual visitors" on websites such as Ticketmaster, MLB.com and LiveNation, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said Thursday in a press release. The network would "flood vendors computers at the exact moment that event tickets went on sale," the DoJ said.

They had to create shell corporations, register hundreds of fake Internet domains (one was stupidcellphone.com) and sign up for thousands of bogus e-mail addresses to make the scam work. Wiseguy Tickets then resold the tickets to brokers, at a profit.

"These defendants made money by combining age-old fraud with new-age computer hacking," the DoJ said in its press release.

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