Chad's News

Google is known for the unusual questions it asks job applicants, the most famous of which is “Why are manhole covers round?” The linked articles answer 15 of the actual questions, from a list of 140 collected by a professional interview coach. I was flying high when I knew the answer to “Explain the significance of ‘dead beef’?”, but felt pretty stupid for not getting “How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?”

Link #1 (questions): http://www.businessinsider.com/…
(via Lifehacker)

Link #2 (answers): http://www.businessinsider.com/…

Link #3 (main article): http://www.businessinsider.com/…

From the article: “[P]sychologists have long been known that the more psychopathic a person is, the more easily they can identify potential victims. Indeed, they can do so just by watching the way a person moves. In one study, test subjects watched videos of twelve individuals walking, shot from behind, and rated how easily they could be mugged. As it happened, some of the people in the videotapes really had been mugged—and the most psychopathic of the subjects were able to tell which was which.”

Link: http://www.psychologytoday.com/…
(via Lifehacker)

The authors at Ksplice are pretty good at digging into the low-level guts of modern computer systems—it’s not too unusual to see them posting assembler code to illustrate a point. In the linked article, they demonstrate how to use a PCI expansion card to hijack a computer in a manner that’s quite hard to detect, and which defies standard methods to recover a compromised system. The malicious hardware gets control of the system at boot time and intercepts the BIOS call that loads the operating system. This gives it the ability to then modify the OS to include an exploit.

For the normal computer user, this is a non-issue. But for those who deal with ultra-classified national security issues, you can never be too careful (maybe that peripheral manufactured in China is not as trustworthy as you think…). The example given in the Ksplice article is more of a proof of concept, because it only works on a single, specific release of the Linux kernel, but it wouldn’t be too difficult to come up with something more versatile.

The linked article is quite technical in nature, so you’ve been warned.

Link: http://blog.ksplice.com/…
(via Slashdot)

Today 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/…

The 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/…

Author 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)

Adobe has released a new major version of its free Adobe Reader, the program that allows you to view PDF files. A significant new security feature is sandboxing. For those not familiar with the concept, the main program interacts with the outside world (i.e., the operating system) through a second, supervisor program. The supervisor typically just echoes the requests straight to the operating system, but it also ensures that any unauthorized or unsafe requests are denied. So even if a vulnerability is discovered and successfully exploited, the sandbox mechanism will prevent it from doing anything. Note that using the regular Adobe Reader update function will not get you version X—you’ll need to go to the download page and manually start the installation.

Link: http://www.eweek.com/…
(via Kim Komando)

During World War II, it was important for the allies to be able to estimate German tank production. The Germans made this task easier by using a simple range of serial numbers that began with “1” and were incremented by one for each new tank. Thus the allies could read the numbers off captured/destroyed tanks and use statistics to estimate the total number of tanks produced. After the war, when the production records were available to the allies, they found that the predicted number was nearly identical to the actual value, and that the estimate from traditional intelligence sources was off by a factor of five.

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/…
(via Neatorama)

One of Google’s stated reasons for releasing Chrome into an already crowded field was to force other browsers to speed up their JavaScript processing. With JavaScript being used heavily by many of today’s most popular websites, this is a commendable goal. And here at the Chad’s News network command center the only reason we installed Chrome was to access Facebook—the site was way too slow with Firefox (which is still our favorite browser despite that). Well, it appears that Google has succeeded. The development version of Firefox 4 has a faster JavaScript engine than Chrome on certain systems. All I can say to Google is “well done and thank you!”

Link: http://www.conceivablytech.com/…
(via Slashdot)

Setting the BIOS password on your laptop may seem like a smart idea, but it turns out that you can easily reverse engineer the password from information displayed by the laptop. The linked article has scripts that will do this for a variety of manufacturers and models. Of course, it’s not that difficult to reset the BIOS password using other methods—my motherboard, for instance, has a jumper that will reset the BIOS settings to their defaults.

Link: http://dogber1.blogspot.com/…
(via Lifehacker)

Netflix is known for sending movies through the mail, but now more and more of its business is done via online streaming. From the linked article: “Three years ago we [Netflix] were a DVD-by-mail company that offered some streaming. We are very proud to announce that by every measure we are now a streaming company, which also offers DVD-by-mail.” To get a grasp on just how big this is, a recent study by Sandvine found that Netflix is responsible for 20% of downstream internet traffic during certain peak periods. And the folks at Netflix, being no dummies and seeing the future for what it is, have made it easier to access content from game consoles.

Link (PDF): http://ir.netflix.com/…
(via The Consumerist)

3D televisions were all the rage at last January’s Consumer Electronics Show, but the reality is that (1) they require inconvenient 3D glasses, and (2) the glasses are expensive. So demand is not very high. Fortunately there are alternatives on the horizon. Toshiba, for example, will be releasing some glasses-free screens next month. They’re small and very expensive, and you have to to sit in specific locations relative to the screen, but I expect it won’t be too long before the size goes up and the price goes down.

Link: http://www.networkworld.com/…
(via Kim Komando)