Calvin and Hobbes: The Movie
Saturday, April 27th, 2013
Some Calvin and Hobbes fans have made a fake trailer for a movie where Calvin is now an adult and his imagination is even more powerful—but it’s turning darker. And all I can say is “Wow.”
Archive for April, 2013
What Happens When You Wring Out a Washcloth in Zero Gravity
Saturday, April 20th, 2013
ISS Commander Chris Hadfield was asked by high school students to demonstrate what happens when you wring out a washcloth in zero gravity. The result is pretty cool and is all about surface tension!
Link: http://io9.com/…
(via I F***ing Love Science)
Only in America: eBay Seller Sues Over Negative Feedback
Wednesday, April 17th, 2013
So you’re an eBay seller and have received negative feedback from a customer. You do what you can to resolve the problem, but the buyer refuses to remove the feedback. What can you do? Well, if you’re in the United States then you file a lawsuit. The seller, Med Express, is suing the the buyer, Amy Nicholls, for slander.
I’m on the buyer’s side, although I probably would have only given a “neutral” rating. Having to make a trip to the post office to pay postage due is a always a pain.
Link: http://arstechnica.com/…
Update (2013-04-19): Because of all the publicity, the lawsuit is being dropped. But research shows that Med Express has a history of doing this.
Uninstall Windows 7 Update #2823324
Monday, April 15th, 2013
If you use Windows 7 and did last Tuesday’s Windows Update, there’s one particular update that’s causing some computers to not boot. So it needs to be uninstalled, even if it hasn’t caused any issues on your machine. Microsoft has published instructions on how to do that.
Link: http://arstechnica.com/…
An Astounding Number of Vulnerable Internet Devices
Saturday, April 6th, 2013
A computer researcher wanted to map all 3.6 billion of the Internet’s usable IPV4 IP addresses, to see which ones are actually being used and to determine where the devices are physically located. This would be quite a task for a single computer, so he created a botnet with 420,000 zombie devices to do the task for him. What I find most interesting, however, is how he managed to compromise those devices. He simply tried to connect to each one with the following four username/password combinations:
- admin/admin
- root/root
- admin/(blank)
- root/(blank)
No kidding. That’s all it took.
For the more technically minded, the paper says that “the vast majority of all unprotected devices are consumer routers or set-top boxes.” So just for kicks, I telneted to my router and found that the admin/admin combination worked. Fortunately it’s configured such that remote telnet is disabled—so I was not part of this experiment. The paper goes on to say that the 420,000 number is for the devices they turned into zombies, and that the actual number of vulnerable machines is about four times that many.
Link #1: http://www.techrepublic.com/…
Link #2 (research paper): http://internetcensus2012.bitbucket.org/…
Making Fuel From Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere
Saturday, April 6th, 2013
Researchers at the University of Georgia have created genetically-modified bacteria that take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to make carbohydrate chemicals. (Note that hydrogen gas was added for the experiment.) From the article: “We can take carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and turn it into useful products like fuels and chemicals without having to go through the inefficient process of growing plants and extracting sugars from biomass.”
I am a firm believer that technology can solve many of our problems. And this, should it prove to be economically viable in large scales, is a good example of just that.
Link: http://phys.org/news/…
Bitcoin Explained
Thursday, April 4th, 2013
Here at Chad’s News we’ve previously discussed the bitcoin virtual currency. But the linked article is a good non-technical look at the currency, its history, and its current status.
Link: http://www.newyorker.com/…
(via Kim Komando)
