BeautyandBoost.com
4:59pm
Music
Archive for October, 2009
Shady Microsoft Plugin Pokes “Critical” Hole In Firefox Security
Microsoft has acknowledged that they slipped the .NET Framework Assistant plugin into Firefox via Windows Update this past February, and that it has poked a "critical" hole in the browser's security (effectively bringing Firefox down to IE's level). Microsoft has deemed the hole to be a "critical" security threat, as it gives webmasters the [...]
Why “cutting people off” online because a record exec says they’re file-sharers is dumb
The British ISP TalkTalk has produced a compelling case against the government's plans to disconnect whole households from the Internet if the copyright industry accuses them -- without proving anything in court -- of three acts of infringement. TalkTalk picked a random street in North London and showed that 23 of the households in that road were [...]
Vegas uses computers to bust card counters
As if Vegas casinos don't already rake in enough money from suckers, now they are developing technology to automatically detect people who count cards. The anti-card-counter system uses cameras to watch players and keep track of the actual "count" of the cards, the same way a player would. It also measures how much each player is betting on each [...]
Applause For Finland: First Country To Make Broadband Access A Legal Right
Kudos to the Finnish government, which has just introduced laws guaranteeing broadband access to every person living in Finland (5.5 million people, give or take). This is reportedly a first worldwide. Starting July 2010, every person in Finland will have the right to a one-megabit broadband connection as an intermediate step, says the [...]
“Happy Splasher” could face charges for driving through puddle to drench kids
A followup from yesterday's post... A 29-year-old British woman may face charges for driving into a puddle and splashing kids waiting for a bus. She says the kids asked her to splash them. Callard has claimed the children asked to be splashed and would not have done it otherwise.She told the Daily Mail: "The fun factor is mostly gone from life [...]
Repository of Freedom of Information Act docs
Government Attic is a searchable repository of government docs released through Freedom of Information Act requests... governmentattic.org provides electronic copies of hundreds of interesting Federal Government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Fascinating historical documents, reports on items in the news, oddities and [...]
Wow!
There are people accusing him of driving in the oncoming traffic lane in the comments, hilarious!
What’s wrong with Search Engine Optimization
From Derek Powazek, a scorching indictment of the Search Engine Optimization industry, who offer a mix of obvious advice and sleazy tricks that break the web. Derek's SEO advice? "Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again." Look under the hood of any SEO plan and you'll find advice like this: make sure to use keywords in the [...]
Hulu Desktop Brings Remote-Controlled Streaming to Linux
Hulu has taken their designed-for-widescreen, remote-friendly Desktop viewer and released it for Linux-powered systems, giving anyone with an open-source media center or Linux laptop an easier way to watch streaming video clips and movies on their much bigger screen. From the looks of it, the Linux version looks and acts exactly like its Mac [...]
HOWTO: Crack a Master Combination Padlock
Designer Mark Campos has turned the tried-and-true "Masterlock hack" instructions into an easier-to-follow visual guide. The instructions are pretty self-explanatory, and while there's no secret sauce that'll instantly crack the combination for you without a little bit of tedious trial and error, this method will crack that [...]
Chinese Company Buys Hummer from GM
The workers can keep their jobs until 2011 ??? After that? What has GM done with Government money (taxpayer's money)? Selling out for $150m. Even though Twitter is valued several times more, the company is refusing to sell itself out. GM should have kept the company and those jobs for the American people.... but that's not how global capitalism [...]
Wife bans FBI head from online banking
SAN FRANCISCO--No one is immune from cyberthreats, not even the head of the FBI. FBI Director Robert Mueller was banned by his wife from doing online banking after he nearly fell for a phishing scam, he said on Wednesday during a talk at the Commonwealth Club of California. He received an e-mail purporting to be from his bank that looked [...]
SSL Still Mostly Misunderstood
Most users ensure their Web sessions are using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) before entering their credit card information, but less than half do so when typing their passwords onto a Web page, according to a new survey. Just what SSL does and doesn't do isn't clear to many users, and the way Websites implement it doesn't help: "The biggest issue [...]
BlackBerry BBM 5.0 is now in app world
We knew it was coming as we saw this email drop to some partners earlier in the week, so it was just a waiting game. A lot of you have been playing around with leaked versions of BBM5 and never wanted to see a standard BBM version again - well now you don't have to! BlackBerry Messenger 5.0 is now officially available in BlackBerry App World for [...]
USA is stuck in the past with credit card technology, much to the detriment of Americans traveling abroad
This always sounds like something out of Mad Libs: "USA is stuck in the past with ( noun ), much to the detriment of Americans ( verb ) ( noun )_. The couple’s cards, which rely on magnetic-stripe technology for transactions, lacked an embedded microprocessor chip, which stores and processes data and is now commonly used in Europe. Such [...]
HDTV and the placebo effect
New research from the Netherlands explores a placebo effect around high-definition TV. Of course, HD does look sharper, but the mind apparently can easily be tricked into thinking that regular TV is HD. From New Scientist... Sixty people in turn were shown the same video clip on the same television. Half were told to expect clearer, sharper [...]
