Music
Security Alerts
- TA13-141A: Washington, DC Radio Station Web Site Compromises
- TA13-134A: Microsoft Updates for Multiple Vulnerabilities
- TA13-107A: Oracle Has Released Multiple Updates for Java SE
- TA13-100A: Microsoft Updates for Multiple Vulnerabilities
- TA13-088A: DNS Amplification Attacks
- TA13-071A: Microsoft Updates for Multiple Vulnerabilities
- TA13-064A: Oracle Java Contains Multiple Vulnerabilities
- TA13-051A: Oracle Java Multiple Vulnerabilities
- TA13-043B: Microsoft Updates for Multiple Vulnerabilities
- TA13-043A: Adobe Updates for Multiple Vulnerabilities
Security Tips
- ST06-001: Understanding Hidden Threats: Rootkits and Botnets
- ST06-005: Dealing with Cyberbullies
- ST06-004: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Online Trading
- ST04-009: Identifying Hoaxes and Urban Legends
- ST06-006: Understanding Hidden Threats: Corrupted Software Files
- ST10-001: Recognizing Fake Antiviruses
- ST04-016: Recognizing and Avoiding Spyware
- ST04-015: Understanding Denial-of-Service Attacks
- ST04-014: Avoiding Social Engineering and Phishing Attacks
- ST05-019: Preventing and Responding to Identity Theft
New 3D imagery for Google Earth for mobile
Since 2006, we’ve had textured 3D buildings in Google Earth, and we’re excited to announce that we’ll begin adding 3D models to entire metropolitan areas to Google Earth on mobile devices in the near future.
Thanks to new imagery rendering techniques and computer vision, we’re able to create 3D cityscapes, complete with buildings, terrain and even landscaping, from 45-degree aerial imagery.
By the end of the year, we aim to have 3D coverage for metropolitan areas with a combined population of 300 million people.
Meet a “real-life Barbie”
A 21-year-old girl, who has become an internet sensation in her home country of Russia, claims on her blog to be the most famed woman on the Russian-language internet.
Valeria Lukyanova’s doll-like features, long blonde hair and ‘perfect’ body make her look like a real life Barbie.
In fact, with her tiny waist and large breasts, she bears such a resemblance to the famed plastic doll that cynical web users have been speculating about whether or not she is real.
In a spoof video posted on YouTube, an animated version of the model undergoes surgery to enhance her already prominent assets.
The girl checks into a plastic surgeons office. As she lies on an operating table, the ‘surgeon’ uses a hand-held pump to enlarge her breasts, before giving her a face-lift using putty and a chainsaw.
BlackBerry 10 Camera Features
Apple will release 2 years after BlackBerry does, and all the Apple fanboys will think it’s the most genius thing they have ever seen.
The Decline and Fall of “Draw Something”
Just six weeks ago, Draw Something was the hottest mobile game in the world, but today its popularity has collapsed and Zynga may be left holding the bag.
Online game company OMGPOP launched Draw Something on February 6 of this year and watched it soar to 35 million downloads in just seven weeks. Not since the runaway sensation Angry Birds, had a game became the favorite pastime of iPhone addicts so quickly. That’s when Zynga, the mobile game company that’s intimately linked with Facebook, pounced. They quickly snatched up OMGPOP and its 40 or so employees for $200 million, rescuing a struggling company that had burned through $17 million in funding in six years and was on the verge of bankruptcy before stumbling upon the Pictionary clone that made everyone rich.
“Tron: Uprising” new trailer
Can Tron do for Disney XD what Star Wars did for Cartoon Network?
Here’s the new trailer for Tron: Uprising, the new animated series debuting on Disney XD in June. Like Cartoon Net’s acclaimed The Clone Wars, this is a sophisticated-looking animated series that’s set at a moment in time that takes place between two feature films (in this case, 1982?s Tron and 2010?s Tron Legacy — thus preserving the future of the Tron story, as well as its origin, for any films that Disney might want to make later down the road). Voice talent on the show is pretty impressive… Elijah Wood, Mandy Moore, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Lance Henriksen, Paul Reubens and, from the films, Bruce Boxleitner… and is that some music from the awesome Daft Punk soundtrack I hear?
The University of Pittsburgh Bomb Threats
This spring, the University of Pittsburgh has received fifty-seven bomb threats. The targets have varied greatly both in respect to their occupancy and their function. Most recently, Panther Central (the Student’s front desk. It handles housing and things like that.), Heinz Chapel (some kind of secular repository for stained glass), and the University Club (which is a banquet hall, housing for UPMC patient families, faculty gym, and a small somewhat “spaish” facility) have been threatened, evacuated, and searched for the bombs that everyone is reasonably sure don’t exist. 
Pitt’s endowment is in the billions of dollars and its community is in the tens of thousands, yet it has been rendered impotent by threatening notes scrawled on bathroom stalls and untraceable emails warning of imminent disaster.
Pitt’s coping strategy is a clear application of the national disposition to fear: every threat no matter how small must be heeded lest we repeat the national tragedy of 9/11. This strategy is proving to be untenable on various fronts and I think that its shortcomings provide an interesting lens through which the point of this site might be explored. What does it mean to be a good man (for that matter, a good person)? What does a person do in these situations such that their response can be said to reflect goodness?
Facebook Buys Instagram For $1 Billion
Facebook just bought Instagram for $1 billion in cash and stock.
Instagram is a mobile-only photo-sharing app. It grew from 1 million users in January 2011 to 15 million in December 2011. It has 30 million users now.
What’s great about it is that it is very fast… especially compared to Facebook.
With the Facebook iPhone app, there are 6 screens a user has to go through before a user can actually take a picture. With Instagram, there is one.
Mark Zuckerberg just announced the news on Facebook…
“Dumb And Dumber 2″ confirmed by Peter Farrelly
Dumb And Dumber 2 has been confirmed to shoot in September.
Co-director Peter Farrelly has revealed plans for a follow-up to the hit 1994 comedy about the cross-country adventures of two intellectually-challenged friends. But he insisted that the new film will be the first true sequel.
He told ComingSoon.net: “We’re getting set to shoot Dumb And Dumber 2 in September. It’s the first sequel we’ve ever done and we’ve got Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels back.”
2003 saw the release of prequel Dumb And Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd, but it did not feature the original stars. Farrelly emphasised: “We did not do Dumb And Dumberer. That was a studio thing.
“So we’ve always wanted to do a sequel and Jim called up. Jeff always wanted to do it. We always wanted to do it. Jim was busy, but he called and said, ‘We’ve got to do this thing again’. He had just watched Dumb And Dumber and he said, ‘This is the perfect sequel. Let’s do it.”
Farrelly will once again direct with his brother Bob, and Sean Anders and John Morris will write the screenplay.
Why Groupon is poised for collapse
The author has great points. Why the company is not transparent is obvious – the refunds they issue hurt the growth. I personally have about $500 in “Groupon Dollars” in my account. Deals I couldn’t or didn’t use, that because I’m in the State of California they cannot expire. So they don’t refund my credit card, but issue me funds to use on other deals.
I believe this company has a business model designed for disaster. Need to use my Groupon Dollars soon! (BTW, Author is also right on the inability to track refunds – a couple of times they refunded my account twice for the same purchase)
So what’s happening at the coupon company?
Well, for starters, it’s not a coupon company nor a marketing company. At its core, Groupon’s U.S. business is a receivables factoring business, as I wrote last year. They give loans to small businesses at a very steep rate (the price of the discount plus Groupon’s commission). They get the money to fund these loans from credit card companies such as Chase Paymentech. Groupon is essentially a sub-prime lender that does zero risk assessment. And as word continues to spread about what a terrible deal running a Groupon is for many categories of businesses, the ones that will choose to run Groupons are the ones that are the most desperate. For U.S. based businesses, the only time I can definitely recommend running a Groupon is if it is otherwise going to go out of business.
Draw Something bought by Zynga
The party was in celebration of Zynga’s purchase of Omgpop, a New York-based game maker founded by Mr. Forman, and it was extravagant to an extent that Omgpop’s employees could only have dreamed of until recently.
Omgpop had been limping along until Draw Something, a smartphone game it introduced just seven weeks ago, became a breakout hit. That drew the attention of Zynga, the maker of FarmVille and the current king of social games, which last week bought Omgpop for $180 million.
Draw Something transformed Omgpop from a little-known, nearly broke start-up into a must-have for an industry giant. The Zynga deal shows how companies are moving at Internet speed to stay on top of online trends, generating quick reversals of fortune.
HOWTO: Cheat Against Your Friends On Draw Something
Draw Something is one of the hottest apps on the App Store right now, but it looks like there are still a few kinks to work out.
When you challenge a friend, you have to pick from three words which you are going to draw. If you don’t like any of them, you can pay to get new ones.
Or, you can force-quit the app and re-open it, and you’ll get new ones.
Here’s the problem for Draw Something: the “bombs” which get you new words are one of the main sources of revenue for the game.
If you get a list of words you don’t like, you can force quit Draw Something by returning to your home screen. Then double tap your iPhone or iPad’s home button to pull up the tray of running apps. Tap and hold the Draw Something icon until it starts to wiggle. Tap the red circle to close the app. Then relaunch it and you’ll get a new set of words.
HOWTO: Be A Dick To Your Wife At 80 MPH
Not everyone is great at math. But this woman trying to explain how many miles you can travel in an hour when driving 80 MPH takes math skills to a new low. Since it’s a little sad, it has, predictably, blown up on Facebook overnight. But the mathematically-challenged passenger is not actually the one who sucks here. Nor is she the idiot in this video.
It’s her jerk of a husband.
AIM is (unofficially) dead
For anyone inside the generation for which AOL was synonymous with the internet, and AIM was prerequisite to any social life at all, some pretty sad news: AOL just sacked its IM team. The old king of chat is paraplegic.
The NYT’s Nick Bilton reports the mass canning:
The AOL Instant Messenger group took the deepest cut so far. A former AOL employee said the group was “eviscerated and now only consists of support staff.” This person, who asked not to be named because they were not allowed to speak publicly about the company, added that “nearly all of the West Coast tech team has been killed.”
Support staff only means no more developers. No more developers means no more new software. No more new software means AIM stops growing and changing forever, frozen on the decline—we’ll never know if the new client could have been great. AOL still somehow hopes to milk “$25 million a year” from tranquilized AIM, but put their business fantasies aside: the staff execution only makes formal what was happening anyway.
Google is globally switching its search to HTTPS by default
Google has announced on its Inside Search blog that it is enabling SSL encryptionby default on its global search pages. 
The US site google.com has been switching users to the secured HTTPS protocol since last year and now, to improve security and privacy for all its users, the company is rolling the behavior out to its international properties such as google.co.uk.
As is the case on the US site, this only affects users who are signed into their Google account when visiting the site. The company expects to roll out this feature to the different local Google search pages “over the next few weeks”. Google hopes that this move will encourage other companies to adopt SSL more broadly across their web sites as well.
U.S. Warns Apple and Publishers
“The publishers have denied acting jointly to raise prices. They have told investigators that the shift to agency pricing enhanced competition in the industry by allowing more electronic booksellers to thrive.” Jesus… I don’t care what you might have to say about “competition in the industry.” We don’t need any more freaking middle men.
The Justice Department has warned Apple Inc. and five of the biggest U.S. publishers that it plans to sue them for allegedly colluding to raise the price of electronic books, according to people familiar with the matter.
Several of the parties have held talks to settle the antitrust case and head off a potentially damaging court battle, these people said. If successful, such a settlement could have wide-ranging repercussions for the industry, potentially leading to cheaper e-books for consumers. However, not every publisher is in settlement discussions.
Your New Zombie Hammer!
Kinda looks like an update on the old $2 flea market multi-tool little ashamed to admit, i have owned for like 20 years.
The Maybach From the “Otis” Video Up for Auction in NYC
Need something to take to the Hamptons this summer? The 2004 Maybach 57 from Kanye West and Jay-Z’s “Otis” will be up for auction at Phillips de Pury & Company in New York on the evening of March 8th, with all proceeds going to Save the Children. Estimates say the chopped and screwed ride should be selling in the $100-150k range, which is a pretty decent deal seeing as a “whole” one goes for double that. Wait… that’s what was in LeBron’s “man-purse.” Ladies and gents, your winner. I’ll make other plans on Thursday. Damn.
Latest Topics
US CERT RSS Feed
- Security Updates Available for Adobe Flash Player
- Microsoft Releases June 2013 Security Bulletin
- Apple Releases OS X 10.8.4 and Security Update 2013-002
- Apple Releases Security Update for Safari on OS X
- Google Releases Google Chrome 27.0.1453.110
- Apple Releases Security Updates for Apple QuickTime 7.7.4
- Google Releases Google Chrome 27.0.1453.93
- Adobe Releases Security Updates for Adobe Flash Player
- Security Updates Available for Adobe Reader and Acrobat
- Mozilla Releases Multiple Updates
