Archive for the ‘Geek Fun’ Category

Do you remember the days when the most trouble you had with girls was at Daytona beach hotels during spring break? Now they’re trouble even when you’re in the computer lab too.

How did you find this story? Did you find it after Googling the name Jessica Biel? If so, it may be too late. Jessica Biel is the Internet’s most dangerous celebrity, and if she has her way, she will destroy your computer.

McAfee on Tuesday released its third annual “Riskiest Celebrities to Search on the Web” and Biel topped the list, beating out Brad Pitt, who came in first last year.

Who knows, it might not be too late.

Black Internet, the ISP that on Monday turned off the access to file-sharing site The Pirate Bay, says it has become the victim of sabotage. The damage is substantial, according to CEO Victor Möller.

Customers that get their Internet access from Black Internet were experiencing outages on Tuesday morning. The reason was sabotage against its infrastructure, according to the ISP.

Instead of spending their days attacking Balck Internet, these hacker types should be searching for the
best acne treatment so they could venture out of the basement once in a while. It always amazes me how the ISP’s are always the bad guys.

It’s always interesting to see who is converting to “electric” vehicles. Whether it’s bikes, cars, or what, it seems most people in other countries do so to avoid the high cost of gasoline or avoid traffic jams, while here in the U.S. people go electric to “save the planet”.

If we had traffic issues here like they have in China, I would shudder to think of how high insurance would be. Can you imagine what auto insurance quotes would look like if we had the number of people on the roads that they do each day?

It’s a simple pleasure, but Xu Beilu savors it daily: gliding past snarled traffic on her motorized bicycle, relaxed and sweat-free alongside the pedal-pushing masses. China, the world’s bicycle kingdom — one for every three inhabitants — is going electric.

Workers weary of crammed public transport or pedaling long distances to jobs are upgrading to battery-powered bikes and scooters. Even some who can afford cars are ditching them for electric two-wheelers to avoid traffic jams and expensive gasoline.

I wonder if they have enough electrical outlets to power all those new bicycles?

Do you remember the days when kids cared more about what clothes they were wearing and what shoes they were wearing? We’ve come a long way from designer jeans and Dansko shoes, haven’t we?

Young kids are getting online at a faster rate than their parents and older siblings.

A new study from Nielsen Online found that nearly 16 million U.S. children ages 2 to 11 were online in May. They made up about 9.5 percent of Internet users.

Okay, so the shoes are still a big deal, but not as much as cell phones I would imagine.

Thank God. If I get a wave of people following me again, I might scream. I can hardly wait for Twitter to get back to the way it was before Oprah sat on it.

More than 60 percent of Twitter users have stopped using the micro-blogging service a month after joining, according to Nielsen Online research released on Tuesday.

“Twitter has enjoyed a nice ride over the last few months, but it will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty,” said David Martin, Nielsen Online’s vice president for primary research.

I’ve had such a bad week online, I was searching for travel insurance online, you know, just in case I needed to get away from it all and let things settle down.

New rules at Facebook.

Facebook intends to adopt two new governing documents following a four-day vote on the documents that was open to all Facebook users. Preliminary results indicate that approximately 74.4 percent of Facebook users who voted support the new documents. More than 600,000 users voted on the new Facebook Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, according to a blog post by Ted Ullyot, Facebook’s general counsel.

Non-binding rules? Isn’t that like sugar-free sugar? Or buying a cheap imitation luggage instead of Samsonite luggage, which can stand up to the pounding of a gorilla?

I’m a gadget addict.

Leaks are always hardest when they hit at home. Now we know how Apple feels. The party responsible for the leak has been penalized severely (whipped with wet spaghetti), so believe us when we say this kind of thing won’t ever happen again. Anyway, so long as the cat’s out of the bag, we may as well give you a few more pics. What you see is a prototype, equipped with an Intel Atom processor and a 12″ capacitative touchscreen. Looks a little different than it did last time, doesn’t it?

I want one. Now.

Hewlett Packard launched a free Web security scanning tool Monday specifically geared to help Flash developers protect their Web sites against malicious security threats and reduce the risk of hackers accessing sensitive data.

The new tool, known as HP SWFScan, is specifically aimed at helping Flash developers detect and monitor increasingly sophisticated security threats, such as cross site scripting and SQL injection attacks, that are often conducted via Flash applications.

It’s nice that the tools tests their applications for security threats. Known security threats anyway. I’ve never used HGH, but maybe if I had I might have a better outlook on this matter. Sorry if I sound pessimistic, but it seems a lot like locking your doors but leaving your windows wide open. What about the unknown security threats?

Mac users long ago discovered the incredible power of Adium, the open-source, multiprotocol instant-messaging application for the Mac. The next time someone suggests that open source can’t innovate, is not user-friendly, etc., point them to Adium. It’s simply incredible.

What Adium isn’t, however, is a good Twitter client. That’s about to change, starting with Adium’s next version (1.4), when sophisticated Twitter functionality will be integrated into Adium.

Wow, this is awesome news. I use Adium on my Mac, and having Twitter built in will make my daily life that much easier.

It seems we weren’t the only ones who had trouble with Best Buy recently.

Best Buy charged Nicole $99 to backup her data but then replaced her hard drive without backing up a single byte. Nicole’s service contract clearly stated that Best Buy would perform the backup before any other service. Now Best Buy is claiming that her old hard drive is their property and that she has no right to the data that they failed to backup or restore.

Read the rest over at the Consumerist.