Chad's News

This is one of those cases where a picture is worth a thousand words.

Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/…
(via naacal)

Scrabulous, which originally debuted on the web and later gained popularity on Facebook, was a blatant ripoff of Scrabble^®. It became very popular, to the point where the folks at Scrabble noticed and took legal action. First Scrabulous was removed from Facebook and replaced by an official Scrabble app. Then scrabulous.com went under. But fear not, intrepid Scrabble-ites! It has resurfaced at a new site under the name of Lexulous. Note that when the scrabulous.com site went down, I was unable to find an official, free, online version of Scrabble other than the Facebook application. So back to Lexulous it is.

Link: http://www.lexulous.com/

With the expected price drop in HDTVs this holiday season, the linked article has some basic tips on what to look for when purchasing one.

Link: http://gizmodo.com/…
(via digg)

It wasn’t that long ago that scientists discovered how a Gecko is able to climb sheer walls. The neat thing about gecko adhesion is that it has a strong grip in one direction but can easily be peeled off. Several variations of gecko-inspired tape have already been created, and researchers have now duplicated the effect with sheets holding carbon nanotubes—resulting in a stronger bond than other materials. I think we may see it as a consumer product in the not-too-distant future.

Link: http://technology.newscientist.com/…
(via NAACL)

As of November 1st, Microsoft stopped issuing licenses for Windows 3.x. You might be wondering why Microsoft was selling a 15 year old operating system, but apparently it’s being used in embedded systems. Windows 3.11 was, in my opinion, the first version that was usable in a business environment. It had networking support and better memory management, and it was much more stable than previous versions.

Link #1: http://blogs.msdn.com/…

Link #2: http://news.bbc.co.uk/…

CNN’s election-night coverage had a new special effect that it called “holograms.” I had my doubts about this, and the linked article sets the record straight. The 3D “hologram” images were special effects added to the video feed and were not visible to the newscasters in the studio (even though they appeared to be).

Link: http://www.cbc.ca/…
(via digg)

Update: Here’s more information on how the system works.

This woman waited in a hospital emergency room, with a broken leg, for 19 hours before giving up and going home. But while the hospital couldn’t tend to her leg, their billing system was working perfectly.

Link: http://www.chron.com/…
(via digg)

Chad’s News has previously discussed the use of graphics cards to solve problems that can be broken into pieces and processed in parallel. Elcomsoft has jumped on this wagon and added GPU processing to its Distributed Password Recovery software, specifically for the WPA and WPA2 wireless formats (among others). According to this article, using two high-end graphics cards will decrease the computation time by a factor of 100. The linked article doesn’t give actual times for breaking encryption, but it does imply that brute force attacks can be successful—the web site says, “Recover the most complex passwords and strong encryption keys in realistic timeframes.”

Home users probably do not need to worry about people hacking into their wireless networks with this tool, because it should take significant resources to successfully break the encryption. I see it being used for things like industrial espionage, government spying, homeland security, crime forensics, etc.

The core lesson of this article is that it’s getting easier for a determined attacker to discover passwords and encryption keys. So beware.

Link: http://www.elcomsoft.com/…
(via Engadget)

Update: Ars Technica has specific information on the actual amount of time required to crack a password. For eight-character, lowercase, non-dictionary words, we’re looking at about a week.