One of the better, understandable, but still technical, explanations of why the encrypted password list of 38 million users being out in the open is such a disaster.
Anatomy of a password disaster – Adobe’s giant-sized cryptographic blunder | Naked Security.
This biological microcomputer sprang from the mind of Drew Endy, PhD, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford. In three scientific papers released over a 13-month span in 2012 and 2013, Endy and a team of researchers from his lab showed how they used ordinary genetic engineering techniques to turn the bacterium E. coli — that stalwart of the Petri dish — into a machine capable of the basic functions of a computer: logic, data storage and data transmission. They also showed that their techniques will work in any type of living cell, not just bacteria.
And while others have accomplished similar feats, Endy’s system has the singular advantage of being able to amplify the information flow.
“Amplification is what makes this system the best,” says Endy. “It’s the equivalent of the transistor in an electronic device. It’s what makes our computer really useful.”
[…]
An advocate of open-source technology (which, as with open-source software, makes its discoveries and technologies free to the public), he has made the instructions available free online. A video primer is also on YouTube (http://stan.md/15u6OtC); it’s been viewed nearly 30,000 times.
A Melbourne security professional has sent ear-piercing ‘garbage’ tunes to the top of online music charts by spoofing track plays.
Despite that Peter Filimore (@typhoonfilsy) has never played an instrument, in a month he accrued hundreds of thousands of plays for his tunes hosted in online music charts, trumping artists like P!nk, Nicki Minaj, Flume and chart topper album The Heist and making $1000 in royalties in the process.
Not only that, but he’s thought of a way to use his technique to bump rival artists off the services entirely as a DDoS.
So does the British Phonography Industry
RIAA Uses Pirated Code on Its Website Because of Course It Does.
Of the 150,000 stars in our Milky Way galaxy snapped by the NASA probe in the past three years, more than 3,000 planets have been identified. Scientists then focused on the stars similar to our Sun and tried to find planets between one and two times the size of Earth in those stars’ Goldilocks orbital zones.
Their findings suggest that 22 per cent of those stars had planets about the size of Earth that could harbor liquid water – a basic building block for life as we know it. The team said the actual total could be much higher given the difficulty involved in finding them. Kepler relies on seeing planets pass directly in front of the target star on the same orbital plane as the telescope.
Galaxy is CRAMMED with EARTHLIKE WORLDS – plus, possibly ALIENS • The Register.
In 2012 I bought an apartment specifically to rent out on airbnb. I’ve been managing it remotely for the past year. This post includes everything I learned as well as some revenue numbers