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Submission + - 81 Year Old Commodore Amiga Artist/Programmer - Samia Halaby (youtube.com)

Submitted by erickhill
erickhill writes: Short (9 minute) video documentary of Samia Halaby.

Samia Halaby is a world renowned painter who purchased a Commodore Amiga 1000 in 1985 at the tender age of 50 years old. She taught herself the BASIC and C programming languages to create "kinetic paintings" with the Amiga and has been using the Amiga ever since. Samia has exhibited in prestigious venues such as The Guggenheim Museum, The British Museum, Lincoln Center, The Chicago Institute of Art, Arab World Institute, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Sakakini Art Center, and Ayyam Gallery just to name a few.

Submission + - Disposable VPN-Tor gateways with EC2 Free Tiers (dreamcats.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Lahana is my little side project to help people access the Internet and Tor via Amazon EC2 free tier-based VPNs. It's a couple of scripts that sets up a new VPN in a couple of minutes that automatically tunnels everything through Tor. It's easy to share credentials with groups of people and for most people is free to set up and use. I built it with Turkey in mind, but it no doubt has other uses.
Android

Submission + - Spanish Firm Wins Tablet Case Against Apple (blogspot.com)

Submitted by pmontra
pmontra writes: A Spanish company has won a legal case against Apple and will be able to sell an Android tablet that Apple had claimed infringes on the iPad patent. It is now seeking damages from Apple for a temporary seizure of its products by Spanish customs. Furthermore they are pursuing an antitrust complaint against Apple, alleging abusive anticompetitive behavior.
Apple

Submission + - Apple Lawyers Threaten Luxembourg Bistro (itworld.com)

Submitted by
itwbennett
itwbennett writes: "In today's edition of David v. Goliath, Apple lawyers have sent cease and desist letters to a tiny health food restaurant in Luxembourg named AppleADay. For their part, the owners of AppleADay, with help from a lawerly friend, have promised that they would continue to sell only food, not computers. Of course, Apple knows as well as anyone that promises are made to be broken, having famously promised Apple Corps, the Beatles' production company, they would never get into the music business."
News

Submission + - The Queen sets a code-breaking challenge (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Queen Elizabeth II has made her first ever visit to Bletchley Park, the home of the UK's World War II code-breaking efforts and now a museum. To mark the occasion The Queen has issued a code cracking challenge of her own "The Agent X Code Book Challenge" aimed at getting children interested in cryptography. Perhaps a royal programming or general technology challenge is next....

Submission + - Cheap GPUs Rendering Strong Passwords Useless (zdnet.com) 1

Submitted by StrongGlad
StrongGlad writes: Think that your eight-character password consisting of lowercase characters, uppercase characters and a sprinkling of numbers is strong enough to protect you from a brute force attack? Think again! The modern GPU can be leveraged as a powerful tool against passwords once considered safe from bruteforce attack.

Take a cheap GPU (like the Radeon HD 5770) and the free GPU-powered password busting tool called 'ighashgpu' and you have yourself a lean, mean password busting machine. How lean and mean? Working against NTLM login passwords, a password of "fjR8n" can be broken on the CPU in 24 seconds, at a rate of 9.8 million password guesses per second. On the GPU, it takes less than a second at a rate of 3.3 billion passwords per second. Increase the password to 6 characters (pYDbL6), and the CPU takes 1 hour 30 minutes versus only four seconds on the GPU. Go further to 7 characters (fh0GH5h), and the CPU would grind along for 4 days, versus a frankly worrying 17 minutes 30 seconds for the GPU.
Microsoft

Submission + - Pranksters Post Giant Windows Logo on Apple Store 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Working calmly in broad daylight and filming their efforts for YouTube posterity, a fake construction crew attached a large Microsoft Windows logo to the black facade of a soon-to-open Hamburg Apple Store. Neat hack in the MIT vein, but next time the crew might want to take along a pic of the Windows logo — with the adrenaline flowing, some of the colors got rearranged and were hung upside down.
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - Amazon Servers Used in Sony Playstation Hack (yahoo.com)

Submitted by
the simurgh
the simurgh writes: "Amazon servers may have been used to carry out the massive Playstation hack that compromised the personal information of more than 100 million Playstation Network users. According to a report from Bloomberg, sources close to the ongoing investigation say the attack was mounted from Amazon Web Service's cloud computing platform."
Earth

Submission + - Geologists Say California May Be Next

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Newsweek reports that first there was a violent magnitude-8.8 event in Chile in 2010, then a horrifically destructive Pacific earthquake in New Zealand on February 22, and now the recent earthquake in Japan. All three phenomena involved more or less the same family of circum-Pacific fault lines and plate boundaries—and though there is still no hard scientific evidence to explain why, there is little doubt now that earthquakes do tend to occur in clusters: a significant event on one side of a major tectonic plate is often—not invariably, but often enough to be noticeable—followed some weeks or months later by another on the plate’s far side. "It is as though the earth becomes like a great brass bell, which when struck by an enormous hammer blow on one side sets to vibrating and ringing from all over. Now there have been catastrophic events at three corners of the Pacific Plate—one in the northwest, on Friday; one in the southwest, last month; one in the southeast, last year." That leaves just one corner unaffected—the northeast. And the fault line in the northeast of the Pacific Plate is the San Andreas Fault, underpinning the city of San Francisco. All know that the San Andreas Fault is due to rupture one day—it last did so in 1906, and strains have built beneath it to a barely tolerable level. Although geologists believe a 9.0 quake is virtually impossible along the San Andreas, a network of "strike-slip" faults smaller and more fragmented than the great chasm that exists where two continent-sized plates of the Earth's crust meet along the Japanese islands, USGS studies put the probability of California being hit by a quake measuring 7.5 or more in the next 30 years at 46 percent, and the likelihood of a 6.7 quake, comparable in size to the temblors that rocked San Francisco in 1989 and Los Angeles in 1994, at 99 percent statewide."
Government

Submission + - Utah to Teach USA is a Republic, not a Democracy (sltrib.com) 1

Submitted by 0ryan0
0ryan0 writes: The Salt Lake Tribune reports here that Utah lawmakers passed a bill today to force public school teachers to teach that the USA is a republic, not a democracy.

. . . because a Democracy would have Democrats in it.
Censorship

Submission + - Egyptian 'Net Killed By Intimidation, Not A Switch (itworld.com)

Submitted by
jfruhlinger
jfruhlinger writes: "In the wake of the Egyptian revolution of the past weeks, much tech buzz has focused on the "kill switch" that Mubarak's government used to try to stop Internet-based networking. The New York Times gives the details; as blogger Kevin Fogarty points out, the process involved less high-tech derring do and more intimidation of tech workers by regime thugs."
Censorship

Submission + - The French government can now censor the internet (google.com)

Submitted by Psychophrenes
Psychophrenes writes: A new episode in french internet legislation.
French ministers have passed a bill (original in french) allowing the government to add any website to a black list, which access providers will have to enforce. This black list will be defined by the government only, without requiring the intervention of the legal system.
Although originally intended against pedo-pornographic websites, this bill is already outdated, as was hadopi in its time, and instead paves the way for a global censorship of the "french internet".
Science

Pumpkin Pie increases Male Sex Drive 173

Posted by samzenpus from the we're-going-to-need-more-whipped-cream dept.
Dr. Alan Hirsch, Director of Chicago's Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Center, says the key to a man's heart, and other parts, is pumpkin pie. Out of the 40 odors tested in Hirsch's study, a mixture of lavender and pumpkin pie got the biggest rise out of men ages 18 to 64. That particular fragrance was found to increase penile blood flow by an average of 40%. "Maybe the odors acted to reduce anxiety. By reducing anxiety, it acted to remove inhibitions," said Hirsch.
Books

Submission + - Bibliophiles Arbitrage Used Books with a PDA

Submitted by
Pickens
Pickens writes: "In a good example of how the internet and informationally efficient markets can create new niche opportunities for the self employed, Michael Savitz writes at Salon how he makes a living armed with an a laser bar-code scanner fitted to a Dell PDA. Savitz haunts thrift stores and library book sales to scan hundreds of used books a day and instantly identify those that will get a good price on Amazon Marketplace. "My PDA shows the range of prices that other Amazon sellers are asking for the book in question," writes Savitz. "Those listings offer me guidance on what price to set when I post the book myself and how much I'm likely to earn when the sale goes through." Savitz writes that on average, only one book in 30 will have a resale value that makes it a "BUY" but that he goes through enough books to average about 30 books sold per day and earn about $1,000 a week in profit. "If I can tell from a book's Amazon sales rank that I'll be able to sell it in one day, I might accept a projected profit of as little as a dollar. The more difficult a book will be to sell, the more money the sale needs to promise." Savitz writes that people scanning books sometimes get kicked out of thrift stores and retail shops and that libraries are beginning to advertise that no electronic devices are allowed at their sales. "If it's possible to make a decent living selling books online, then why does it feel so shameful to do this work?" concludes Savitz. "The bibliophile bookseller, and the various other species of pickers and flippers of secondhand merchandise, would never be reproached like this and could never be made to feel bad in this way.""

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