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New Zealand Herald “Pwned” by NZ Hackers

The New Zealand Herald’s website fell victim to a page spoofing stunt earlier today, by hackers wanting to publicise their upcoming Kiwicon security conference in November.

clipped from www.stuff.co.nz “Metlstorm”, one of the organisers of Kiwicon Wellington, says it’s comparable to taping a fake article into a printed copy of the Herald, before giving the paper to a reader. The bogus article was marked clearly as “a joke”, he says, and contains “wildly unreasonable comment that no sane person would believe.” “After the page loads, the XSS bug is used to inject Javascript [a type of web-page programming language] that rewrites the article.” Earlier this month, the Computerworld newspaper, part of Fairfax Business Media, was spoofed in the same way by the Kiwicon hackers. The Herald’s multi-media editor Jeremy Rees described the action as a cheap visual stunt and said the people behind it had not intruded into the news sites’ system. “We received an email from the people claiming to have done it straight after. They apologised and said ‘no actual hacking of any of your kit occurred…all the stuff was cheap client side tricks’.”

Bacn – A new Internet term

clipped from grasshopperfactory.com When you receive email that Geek is now following you on Twitter and Jennifer Gold just wrote on your Facebook wall, that’s bacn (pronounced “bacon”). It’s any email you receive that isn’t spam, but isn’t exactly a personal message either. Your electronic phone bill is bacn. Your Google alerts are bacn. Bacn. It’s better than spam. Disclaimer: I had nothing to do with coming up with this term. This was something some of the folks at PodCamp Pittsburgh came up with. I’m not sure who started it. Andy Quayle, Tommy Vallier, Jesse Hambley, and I don’t know who else were at Ground Zero of the discussion.

New Zealand hardware rocketing into space

clipped from www.stuff.co.nz Designers of a venture to launch New Zealand rockets into space believe Kiwi ingenuity will ensure costs are kept under control. A desire by Rocket Lab lead designer Peter Beck to devise New Zealand-made hardware for the project has been supported by $99,000 from a government agency. From September next year, Rocket Lab plans to send six rockets more than 150 kilometres above Earth for research into micro-gravity, solar physics and climate change. The cost was estimated at between $50,000 and $100,000, depending on the type of experiment and how high the rockets would go from their South Island launch pad. The foundation’s sector business manager, Tom McLeod, said the project had the potential to lure sections of the international space industry to New Zealand and broaden scientific horizons. The company’s commitment to New Zealand would also prove beneficial, he said.

The history of the CD

clipped from news.google.com BBC News How the CD was developed BBC News�- 17 Aug 2007 The first compact disc was produced exactly 25 years ago in a factory in Germany after years of development by Philips and Sony. We take a look at the humble disc’s history of development and how it shaped the music landscape. Today marks Compact Disc’s 25th anniversary TG Daily Philips Compact Disc celebrates 25th Silver Anniversary Today TechShout! PC World�- VNUNet.com�- Dallas Morning News (subscription)�- E-Commerce Times all 168 news articles��

Microsoft Fanboys Do Stupid Things – Windows Window

clipped from leo.tumblr.com Windows Casa: Microsoft Fanboys Do Stupid Things Too… – Gizmodo

Thomas Martel surgically altered his Fingers for his iPhone

clipped from northdenvernews.com “From my old Treo, to my Blackberry, to this new iPhone, I had a hard time hitting the right buttons, and I always lost those little styluses,” explains Martel. “Sure, the procedure was expensive, but when I think of all the time I save by being able to use modern handhelds so much faster, I really think the surgery will pay for itself in ten to fifteen years. And what it’s saving me in frustration – that’s priceless.” The procedure involved making a small incision into both thumbs and shaving down the bones, followed by careful muscular alteration and modification of the fingernails. While Martel’s new thumbs now appear small and effeminate in comparison to his otherwise very large hands, he says he can still lift “pretty much anything I could lift before the surgery – though opening spaghetti sauce jars has been a problem. That was a big surprise.”

Video of the inner workings of a cell

Watch Bolinsky talk about his animation programme at TED.com.

From Wired.com:

WN: So this entire 8.5-minute film depicts what’s going on inside one white blood cell?

Bolinsky: Yes. We needed to have a starting point. Something small enough so we could actually accomplish it and show it around and get feedback from the academic community — so we could see if it was a worthwhile direction and use it as a teaser to get funding so we could really do a proper job on this subject. So we decided on a cellular-motility theme and what happens to a white blood cell patrolling the capillary when there’s an inflammation outside the capillary.

WN: How did Inner Life of the Cell come about?

Bolinsky: (We) wanted to make something that would give people a strong sense of a cell — not as a list of topics to be studied, not as a compendium of tables and graphs and charts, (but) as a bustling, immensely purposeful metropolis populated very, very densely by these micro machines that do a huge amount of work at great speed and great precision and purposefulness.

New Zealand Open Source CMS Creators Speak at Google

Quake Zero Coming to a Web Browser Near You

clipped from www.pcworld.com Although id Software’s new game Rage took the center stage at the QuakeCon event in Dallas, Texas, the company also revealed plans to develop a version of its enormously popular Quake franchise specifically to run on Web browsers. The game will be free to play, supported by browser-based advertising. Quake Zero is what it’s being called, and the new free version of Quake will basically be a revision of Quake III Arena, the version of Quake that emphasized multiplayer combat. It’s being developed by a team led by id producer Marty Stratton. In related news, id Software also indicated plans to bring “Quake Arena Arcade” to Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade, a service that enables Xbox 360 game console players to purchase and download games over the Internet, and play them against each other online.