Category: ‘Всякая Всячина’
Хоть и $275, не отказался бы.
A teenage boy who hacked into a Polish tram system used it like “a giant train set”, causing chaos and derailing four vehicles.
The 14-year-old, described by his teachers as a model pupil and an electronics “genius”, adapted a television remote control so it could change track points in the city of Lodz.
The boy, described as a ‘genius’and some of the equipment he used.
Twelve people were injured in one derailment, and the boy is suspected of having been involved in several similar incidents.
The teenager, who was not named by police, told them he had changed the points for a prank.
A police statement said he had trespassed at tram depots in the city to gather information and the equipment needed to build the infra-red device.
“Questioned by police in the presence of a psychologist, the teenager testified he switched tram tracks three times, once causing a tram to jump the tracks,” said the statement. A search at the boy’s home turned up the device he had used to switch tram tracks.
Miroslaw Micor, a spokesman for Lodz police, said: “He studied the trams and the tracks for a long time and then built a device that looked like a TV remote control and used it to manoeuvre the trams and the tracks.
“He had converted the television control into a device capable of controlling all the junctions on the line and wrote in the pages of a school exercise book where the best junctions were to move trams around and what signals to change.
“He treated it like any other schoolboy might a giant train set, but it was lucky nobody was killed. Four trams were derailed, and others had to make emergency stops that left passengers hurt. He clearly did not think about the consequences of his actions.”
The first sign of the chaos came on Tuesday afternoon, when a city tram driver tried to steer his vehicle to the right, but found himself helpless to stop it swerving to the left instead.
The rear wagon then swung off the rails and crashed into another passing tram, hurling screaming passengers to the floor.
Transport employees were reported as saying that they knew immediately that someone outside their staff had caused the accident.
The boy will face a special juvenile court on charges of endangering public safety, police said.
The incident is the latest in which “hackers” - many of them young computer experts - have broken into computer systems.
A 20-year-old was questioned in New Zealand last year suspected of writing programs for an internet “spyware” scam targeting several hundred thousand bank accounts.
In 1999, a group of hackers used home computers to break into the systems controlling Skynet, a British military satellite, and changed secure settings.
A report by the US Federal Aviation Administration this week raised concerns that a passenger aboard the new Boeing 787 “Dreamliner” aircraft might be able to hack into the aircraft’s systems via its internet connection.
A Polish security researcher who used the alias “porkythepig” spelled out a pair of vulnerabilities in an ActiveX control used by HP’s Software Update, the patch management program bundled with virtually every HP- and Compaq-branded laptop.
According to porkythepig’s post, the Software Update bugs let an attacker corrupt Windows’ kernel files, making the laptop unbootable, or with a little more effort, allow hacks that would result in a PC hijack or malware infection. In either case, a drive-by attack could be conducted by feeding users an e-mail message with a link to a malicious Web site.
“Every HP notebook machine containing the HP Software Updates application is vulnerable,” claimed porkythepig. “It is possible that the vulnerable machine model list disclosed by the vendor as a confirmation to the previous issue concerning HP laptops, [the] HP Info Center case, will be similar in this case.”
Last week, porkythepig disclosed multiple flaws in other software included with HP’s portables. When the company patched the vulnerabilities a day later, it listed 83 affected laptops.
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#1. No Wow, No How: Windows Vista
Five years in the making and this is the best Microsoft could do?
It’s not that Vista is awful. The integrated security and parental controls are nice, and the Aero interface is as whizzy as it gets. Searching and wireless networking are much faster and easier than under XP.
It’s just that Vista isn’t all that good. Many of the innovations the operating system was supposed to bring–like more efficient file and communications systems–got tossed overboard as Microsoft struggled to get the OS out the door, some three years after it was first promised. Despite its hefty hardware requirements, Vista is slower than XP.
When it debuted last January, incompatibilities were rampant - in part because hardware and software makers didn’t feel any urgency to revamp their products to work with the new OS. The user account controls that were supposed to make users feel safer just made them feel irritated. And at $399 ($299 upgrade) for Windows Ultimate, we couldn’t help feeling more than a little gouged.
No wonder so many users are clinging to XP like shipwrecked sailors to a life raft, while others who made the upgrade are switching back. And when the fastest Vista notebook PC World has ever tested is an Apple MacBook Pro, there’s something deeply wrong with the universe.
We have no doubt Vista will come to dominate the PC landscape, if only because it will become increasingly hard to buy a new machine that doesn’t have it pre-installed. And that’s disappointing in its own right.
Федеральное бюро расследований США и силы полиции из 10 других стран проводят операцию “Operation Site Down,” которая направлена на поиск и обезвреживание множества криминальных организаций, которые незаконно распространяют защищенные копирайтами программы, фильмы, музыку и игры посредством интернета. Operation Site Down является завершающим этапом трех независимых расследований, которые проводило ФБР. За последние 24 часа было проведено более 70 обысков в США и более 20 за их пределами. Арестованы четыре человека в Америке а также преступники в таких странах как Канада, Израиль, Франция, Бельгия, Дания, Голландия, Англия, Германия, Португалия и Австралия. По меньшей мере 8 крупных online-дистрибуторов было ликвидировано. Уже опознано более 120 членов пиратских организаций.
“Кражи интеллектуальной собственности подрывают американскую экономику,” сказал Louis M. Reigel, Ассистент директора ФБР. “Они лишают разработчиков из Америки и других стран права на оплату труда и получения благ за их тяжелый труд.”
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Помнится, когдя я еще сидел в IRC-е, встречались авторы irc-скриптов, которые любили включать в набор “текстовой графики” одну или две ASCII деффки… На сайте их 30 
+1 (485 x 1934) 
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Best
1. Johnny Depp
2. Matt Damon
3. George Clooney
4. Jack Nicholson
5. Rosario Dawson
6. John Travolta
7. Katherine Heigl
8. Jay Leno
9. Dakota Fanning
10. Russell Crowe
Worst
1. Will Ferrell
2. Tobey Maguire
3. Joaquin Phoenix
4. William Shatner
5. Renée Zellweger
6. John Malkovich
7. Julie Andrews
8. Bruce Willis
9. Teri Hatcher
10. Scarlett Johanssen
Advertising Agency: Grabarz & Partner, Hamburg, Germany
Creative Director: Ralf Heuel
Art Directors: Holger Paasch, Christoph Stricker
Copywriter: Holger Paasch
Photographer: Joris van Velzen
Посмотрел на днях. Понравилось лишь потому что Я давний фанат Футурамы и был очень рад посмотреть что-то новое из Футурамы, т.к. старые 5 сезонов пересмотрел по 100 раз каждый из эпизодов, и это наверно единственное, что остановило меня и я не удалил эту относительно среднюю серию, растянутую на полтора часа. Да, есть смешные моменты, но в основном все очень средне. Получилось эдакое повторное знакомство со всеми персонажами вперемешку с новыми приключениями засранца Бендера, придурка Фрая и придирчивой Лилы.
Simpsons Movie и то лучше было, хоть и тоже было похоже на очередной эпизод, растянутый на полтора часа. 
Пока искал пикчур и писал все это, пытался вспомнить чем же там все закончилось в Футураме. Помню, что хэппи энд, а что именно там и как… хмм…
Мздец, идиоты..
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SYDNEY (AFP) - Santas in Australia’s largest city have been told not to use Father Christmas’s traditional “ho ho ho” greeting because it may be offensive to women, it was reported Thursday.
Sydney’s Santa Clauses have instead been instructed to say “ha ha ha” instead, the Daily Telegraph reported.
One disgruntled Santa told the newspaper a recruitment firm warned him not to use “ho ho ho” because it could frighten children and was too close to “ho”, a US slang term for prostitute.
“Gimme a break,” said Julie Gale, who runs the campaign against sexualising children called Kids Free 2B Kids.
“We are talking about little kids who do not understand that “ho, ho, ho” has any other connotation and nor should they,” she told the Telegraph.
“Leave Santa alone.”
A local spokesman for the US-based Westaff recruitment firm said it was “misleading” to say the company had banned Santa’s traditional greeting and it was being left up to the discretion of the individual Santa himself.
