Facebook Glitch Let Spammer Post to Walls Earlier this week in what was described by Facebook as a clever spammer, exploited a bug in the code and went on a wall posting spree. To say Facebook has had its share of bugs and glitches this year would be a mild understatement.
Most of the messages promised "Free iPhones," a common spam message on Facebook these days. The free iPhone and iPad messages generally take users to websites where they are instructed to fill out marketing surveys or sign up for product subscriptions. Victims have reported having their phone numbers inundated with calls after filling out these surveys.
Comments
4chan Decides to Do Something Nice For a Change From a website that is not known for its philanthropic nature,this is in itself news. The back story is pretty amazing also, so we send Kudos to 4chan for having a heart. We would like to join in wishing WWII vet William J. Lashua a very happy and memorable 90th birthday.
Today, someone at 4chan decided that the Internet should get together and wish 90-year-old WWII veteran William J. Lashua a happy birthday, and by lunchtime, his local branch of the American Legion said that they had heard from people as far away as Sweden.
Comments
From Canada To Mexico On One Tank of Diesel A prototype car built by Craig Henderson in 1984 just broke its own Guinness World Record driving 1,478 miles using 12.4 gallons of diesel at 119.1 mpg. My weed eater burns more fuel
The Avion is a car Craig Henderson originally built with partner Bill Green way back in 1984 as a prototype for a high-mileage vehicle he hoped to sell. Commercial plans never came to fruition, but Henderson never abandoned the Avion. Over the years he's kept tinkering with it, improving its powertrain and aerodynamics along the way.
Comments
Google Announces a Don't Miss Press Conference Next Wednesday Google is having a press conference to share their latest technological innovation and evolution of Google search. The announcement comes without details, but with a 'don't miss this' tagline. Maybe they bought themselves a country
My guess is that this will be similar to the "Searchology" events that Google's held in 2007 and 2009. This is a general update on things Google's doing in search, usually peppered with a few product announcements, but nothing that dramatically huge. Last year, we got news of Google Squared, Rich Snippets and Google Sky, said Danny Sullivan.
Comments
Satellites Bump During Secret Maneuvers The Chinese have been conducting experiments with their satellites in space. China's SJ-12 satellite has been maneuvered at least 6 times, one resulting in 'bumping' another Chinese satellite. Speculation on the maneuvers ranges from space station preparation to military to purely scientific. A close encounter of the Chinese kind.
Such close encounters could allow China to practice rendezvous procedures between its future space station and other spacecraft, as well as learn about satellite formation flying, said Brian Weeden, a former U.S. Air Force orbital analyst and now technical adviser for the Secure World Foundation.
Comments
Flash Card Speeds to Triple by 2012 New standards for flash memory cards are being developed by the SD Card Association which will increase data transfer by close to 300%. The specs should be complete early 2011 and be in production early 2012.
Today's SD cards have data-transfer buses with a maximum speed of 104MB per second, though actual read and write speeds are somewhat slower. The new specification, just called SD 4.0 for now, will increase that to 300MB/sec, said Kevin Schader, the association's director of communications. The SD speeds are increased through the addition of a second row of electrical contacts on the bottom face of the card, though the association is still debating just how many new pins to add, Schader said
Comments
How Websites Make You Spill Your Secrets Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have discovered that internet surfers are more prone to giving up their private information on websites that appear to be less reputable than others. Darwin would be proud.
One site displayed an official-looking logo, formal fonts, and staid colors. Another site was designed to appear neutral. And the third used lurid colors, less professional-looking fonts, and a cartoonish devil icon. The researchers found that people were nearly twice as likely to admit to having engaged in "illicit" or "socially questionable" activities when presented with questions on the third site--the least reputable-looking one
Comments
AMD Bulldozer Octa-Core Slated for 2011 A new 32nm AMD 8 core CPU will mainly be aimed at the server market, but that will not deter hard core hobbyists on having the biggest and baddest in their boxen.
The new 32nm design promises to confuse the very notion of cores, however, with AMD referring to the chip's building blocks as modules. Each module will feature a pair of 128-bit floating point units and share L1 cache and other resources, essentially allowing a module to function as a dual-core unit while making the overall chip more efficient.
Comments
World of Warcraft Running On iPad-Streamed Back in May Steve wrote about the possibility of running World of Warcraft on an iPad. It is no longer just a possibility, but a beta reality. No thanks to Apple for this achievement.
aikai is a game streaming service currently in beta. It would allow you to play games using a Flash client on any desktop and, apparently, a native client on the iPad (or iPhone, I presume). In theory, an application like this would allow any kind of game to be played in the iPhone OS without going through the App Store payment system, something that is not going to make people in Cupertino happy.
Comments
German Court Rules Against YouTube Over Copyright The Hamburg State Court ruled uploaded videos on YouTube of performances by singer Sarah Brighton violate existing copyright laws, disregarding current directives of the European Union.
"This decision results in a substantial legal uncertainty for all providers of video platforms, opinion forums, social communities, blogs and many other Internet services in Germany," Haller said in a statement.
Comments
New Malware Spoofs Microsoft Security Essentials Webpage Beware of a new malware scam that looks incredibly similar to Microsoft Security. The Rogue:MSIL/Zeven malware automatically detects your browser and issues a fake warning page. The new twist here is the use of the user's trust in their browser integrity.
While the malware is a pretty good attempt, it's not perfect. The goal is to get the user to download and install something, shelling out some cash in the process, which neither of the three browser vendors would ever recommend.
Comments
Ubuntu 10.10 Beta Arrives with New Netbook UI Canonical has announced a new beta release of Linux Ubuntu distro codenamed Maverick Meerkat. Major improvements have been made in the Netbook area with its Unity user interface.
The Ubuntu Netbook Edition has seen particularly dramatic improvements during this development cycle due to Canonical's work on the new Unity user interface. Unity, which was initially introduced in May, has matured very rapidly. It has a global menubar that works surprisingly well.
Comments
Prison Cell Phones Take Flight A unidentified Brazilian teen gave new meaning to the term air waves recently when he air lifted contraband cell phones via bow and arrow into a prison. I guess you would have to consider these as dropped calls.
Authorities say the boy was caught after one of the arrows he launched struck a police officer on the back. The officer was not seriously injured because the cell phone was tied to the tip of the arrow and softened the impact.
Comments
Nigerian 'Prince' Gets 12 years for Scams We ran a story several days ago on the Top 7 Internet Scams and the Nigerian Lottery Scam was right up there at the top. If you still have business pending with the 'Prince' you may contact him via the Federal Prison System for the next 12 years. One down, hundreds of Nigerian Princes to go.
Diamreyan made more than US$1.3 million in a scam that suckered 67 victims between 2004 to 2009, prosecutors said. This type of fraud, called an advance-fee scam, was the number-one type of Internet fraud in 2009, according to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Last year, advance-fee fraud accounted for nearly 17 percent of the Internet fraud logged by the FBI.
Comments
Wagering on Warfare: Black Ops Multiplayer Revealed The long awaited next generation Call of Duty will be released in about a month with some important changes made to its multiplayer gameplay. Black Ops will have enhanced customization, bots, custom emblems, training modes, and several more new features that will make it a sure bet, while retaining the familiar feel of CoD.
Comments
SilverStone Strider ST1500 1500W Power Supply Review SilverStone raises its flagship Strider PSU to what is the near-limit of wattage you can pull out a normal North American wall plug. At 1500 watts continuous and 1600 watts peak this power supply will hopefully get the job done for you. Let's see how it holds up under full load.
ASUS EAH5870 V2 STALKER Edition Video Card Review ASUS is back making another play for your hard-earned upgrade money. This time, ASUS have brought out the EAH5870 V2 STALKER Edition, a Radeon HD 5870 with an improved cooling device. Does a bundled game and improved cooling device make up for its $100 price premium?
Thermalright HR-02 Passive Processor Heatsink Review Looking to cool a 130 watt processor with a passive heatsink? I am not sure many of us are, but if you are looking to silence a powerhouse enthusiast system, passive cooling is now a way you can go. We have a look at Thermalright's passive HR-02. And yes, you can put a "silent" fan on it as well if you wish.
ATI CrossFireX Application Profile 10.8a Performance CrossFireX gets a performance boost in two games thanks to a new CrossFireX Application Profile update. Performance in Aliens vs. Predators and Battlefield Bad Company 2 has been greatly improved, finally. CFX users will want to make sure to check this out. We will have the new CAP file hosted here locally for our readers.
GTX 480 SLI PCIe Bandwidth Perf. - x16/x16 vs. x4/x4 Previously we tested real world gaming with x16/x16, x16/x8, x8/x8 dual video card configurations and compared results. Some of our readers were very surprised with the data. This time we have scaled down to x4/x4 to see if that negatively impacts performance at all in a single display configuration.
GTX 480 SLI PCIe Bandwidth Perf. - x16/x16 vs. x8/x8 In our continuing coverage of Multi-GPU configurations with varying PCIe Bandwidth, we put x16/x16 and x8/x8 PCIe to the test. Does having less PCIe bandwidth make difference in gaming? We know that a "lesser" motherboard can save you money. Using GeForce GTX 480 SLI we show you the real-world differences.
AMDs Bulldozer and Bobcat Processors Preview AMD is starting to talk about its new Bulldozer and Bobcat processors. Today we have some notes on the new processors that will interest you as well as give you a peek under the heatspreader. Not a full blown look, but just a glimpse of what is to come, hopefully.
Astro A40 Gaming Headset and MixAmp Review Astro Studios is famous among console gamers even if you don't know why. It designed the XBOX 360, but can a bunch of design gurus put together a team to build a gaming headset that is worth $250? We have learned that looking cool and sounding great are two different things in our past reviews. Can Astro pull it off?
Gigabyte X58A-UD9 Extreme Motherboard Review The Gigabyte X58A-UD9 is not only massive, but its easily the most expensive board we've ever seen. In fact the cost of the X58A-UD9 exceeds the cost of most workstation motherboards and I find myself asking, the questions: Why? Who does Gigabyte intend to sell this board to? And...What can this board offer that a $450 board cannot?
GeForce GTX 460 SLI vs. Radeon HD 5870 CFX @ 5760 Last week we showed you that GTX 460 1GB SLI was a better performer than the much more expensive Radeon HD 5870 CrossFireX at 2560x1200 resolution. This week we look at 5760x1200, a super widescreen gaming resolution using both company's multi-display technologies; NV Surround and ATI Eyefinity.
SLI & CFX PCIe Bandwidth Perf. - x16/x16 vs. x16/x8 Have you wanted to space your SLI or CFX video cards farther apart on your motherboard to allow for better airflow? Do you have a motherboard that will not support a x16/x16 PCIe configuration? We put x16/x16 and x16/x8 PCIe SLI and CFX configurations head to head and show you what sacrifice there is to be made.
Intel Multi-Threaded Software Marketing Slides Have you spent a lot of money on an Intel multi-core processor computer system? Four cores with AMD or Intel is getting to be more and more of the norm now days, and we all know that multitasking on these systems is buttery smooth. But what software can really put your four or six core processor to work?
Seasonic X-Series: X-400FL Silent Power Supply Review Seasonic, long known for making excellent power supply units has gone silent. Not just quiet, silent. It's new 400 watt unit comes to the consumer complete with no fan. Now let's see if the new silent Seasonic is worth your hard earned cash.
MSI Big Bang XPower Motherboard Review The XPower is the newest member of the MSI Big Bang series of products, touting support for the latest generation of Intel processors as well as SATA 6G and USB 3.0 devices. With the amount of quality and features MSI poured in to this board, the XPower is almost assured to be a winner.
PC Power & Cooling Silencer MkII 950W PSU Review We test one of the latest PC Power & Cooling computer power supplies on the market. Does it strike a balance between server and enthusiast needs? We at least know one thing just by looking at the box, this one might actually live up to the "Silencer" branding for a change since the 80mm cooling fan is now gone.
