Archive for December, 2010

Gawker Media Sites’ Passwords Hacked

Monday, December 13th, 2010

Computer SecurityToday I received two random emails telling me that my password credentials had been hacked for the Gawker Media sites, including lifehacker.com, a primary source for Chad’s News articles, as well as gawker.com, gizmodo.com, io9.com, jalopnik.com, jezebel.com, kotaku.com, deadspin.com, and fleshbot.com. At first I though this was a rather obvious spam/hack attempt, but after some quick research I learned that the Gawker Media database had indeed been hacked, and that my login credentials (username, email address, and password) have been posted to the web. Since this is a password I use extensively for non-critical logins, I’m going to have to change it for something nearing a hundred web sites. Note that the compromised passwords were encrypted, but that the encryption scheme is fairly easy to break.

Link #1: http://news.softpedia.com/…

Link #2: http://lifehacker.com/…

Posted in | No Comments

Bumblebees Can Solve a Difficult Math Problem

Thursday, December 2nd, 2010

BeeThe travelling salesman problem is a famous optimization problem where you attempt to find the shortest path in a network that touches every node exactly once. The name comes from the idea of a travelling salesman who has a list of cities to visit—ideally he wants the shortest overall trip that hits each city once. This problem is fairly trivial to solve for a small number of cities, but it quickly becomes unsolvable as the number grows larger.

Quite surprisingly, however, recent research shows that bumblebees instinctively solve this problem (the “cities” are actually flower patches in this case). The experiment was only done with four flower patches, but it’s still pretty impressive that a brain the size of a grass seed can do this at any level. The hope is that further investigation will make it possible to create better computer algorithms to handle these sorts of problems.

Link #1: http://www.qmul.ac.uk/…
(via Slashdot)

Link #2: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/…

Posted in | No Comments

Can Piracy Actually Boost Sales?

Wednesday, December 1st, 2010

BooksAuthor Steve Lieber discovered that bootleg copies of his graphic novel, Underground, caused a huge boost in sales of the print version.

Link: http://torrentfreak.com/…
(via Lifehacker)

Posted in , | 1 Comment