Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Superior Alternatives to Crappy Windows Software

It may be the year 2008, but a whole lot of sucktacular software still rears its ugly head on PC's everywhere, even when better-behaved options are freely available. Whether it's molasses-slow bloatware, shameless adware, anemic default apps, or "trial period expired!" nagware, it's time to replace stinky Win software with its superior alternatives

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Monday, April 28, 2008

Life underground

The mind of a child kept captive in a sunless cellar.

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Man Admits to Daughter Abuse

A 73-year-old Austrian man has confessed to imprisoning his daughter in a cellar for 24 years and fathering her seven children. Yikes.

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Sunday, April 27, 2008

Is Ubuntu usable enough for a non-tech-savvy girlfriend yet?

The author asks his girlfriend to perform simple tasks using a fresh Ubuntu installation. It's surprising how some of the simple things we assume to be easy are actually hard for someone who's never used Linux. Interesting insight into how ready Linux is for the desktop.

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Saturday, April 26, 2008

Hackers Now Target Firefox and Safari

Many people are switching from Internet Explorer to alternative browsers such as Firefox and Safari. Though that might make them feel more secure, the shift has also opened new doors for bad guys.Case in point: We have no IE bugs to report this month, but both Firefox and Safari have been hit hard.

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The Adult Crime Game Kids Love

Get ready: There's a new Grand Theft Auto game about to roll out this week, and we're probably in for a burst of discussion about violent video play.

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Friday, April 25, 2008

Homemade 'Bum Bot' Has Water Cannon, Shoots Vagrants

The regulars hardly glance outside. They've seen bar owner Rufus Terrill's invention on patrol before — its bright red lights and even brighter spotlight blazing, infrared video camera filming and water cannon at the ready in the spinning turret on top.

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Helicopter Moms vs. Free Range Kids

When Lenore Skenazy, a columnist for the New York Sun, wrote about letting her son take the subway alone to get back to her Manhattan home from a department store on the Upper East Side, she didn't expect to get hit with a tsunami of criticism from readers.

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STUDY: Chicken among closest living relatives of T-Rex...WTF

Protein retrieved from a 68-millon-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex bone closely resembles the main protein in chicken and ostrich bones and is only distantly related to lizard protein, strengthening the popular idea that birds, and not reptiles, are the closest living descendants of dinosaurs.

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Thursday, April 24, 2008

How to survive the switch to Digital TV

Did my TV screen just shrink? That's the question a lot of people will be asking after installing one of the converter boxes that will keep their older TV sets tuned in to over-the-air broadcasts after February 17, when most stations will switch from analog to digital transmission.

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Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Agents Free to Search Your Computer and Keep it Forever

Border Agents may keep your computer forever, search through it, copy it, do anything they want, even if they have absolutely no reason to think you did anything wrong. I wonder what happens if you use PGP? a trip to a certain military base is Cuba?

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Net neutrality battle returns to the U.S. Senate

The saga of Comcast's throttling of BitTorrent file-sharing traffic--and intense interest from the Federal Communications Commission, including a hearing at Stanford University last week--has appended the topic onto at least some politicians' to-do list.

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Friday, April 18, 2008

Crackdown on cell phones on public transit ignites debate

The crackdown in the southern city of Graz has triggered a noisy debate between advocates of free speech and people who say they're simply fed up with having to listen to annoying ring tones and intrusive cell phone chatter.

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Thursday, April 17, 2008

New Facebook Feature: Import Your Digg Stories!

"...So why does this matter? Once you enable this feature the stories you digg will not only post to your mini-feed, but also syndicate to your friends through the main Facebook news feed. This helps further our mission of spreading the news you care about, to the people you care about."

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Suffering From Facebook Fatigue? - TIME

It started innocently enough: last month a friend sent me a virtual lily plant on Facebook and invited me to create a (Lil) Green Patch, a digital garden that would grow on my profile page,

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Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Facebook Launched A New Way To Share With Friends

The option to import stories from other sites can be found via the small "Import" link at the top of your Mini-Feed. Only a few sites—Flickr, Yelp, Picasa, and del.icio.us—are available for importing at the moment, but we'll be adding Digg and other sites in the near future.

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How to fight splogs

At first glance, it seems like a regular blog. But look closer and you'll see there's something very odd about the blog's content: It's very familiar. Too familiar.

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Twitter Saves Berkeley Student Arrested in Egypt

Buck, 29, used the ubiquitous short messaging service to tap out a single word on his cellular phone: ARRESTED. The message went out to the cell phones and computers of a wide circle of friends in the United States and to the mostly leftist, anti-government bloggers in Egypt who are the subject of his graduate journalism project.

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Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Gone in 60 seconds: Spambot cracks Live Hotmail CAPTCHA

Needing only six seconds per attempt, and with a success rate of 10-15 percent, new anti-CAPTCHA bots are dismantling fraud protection systems at Gmail and Windows Live Hotmail, and they are flooding the tubes with spam. Is CAPTCHA finished?

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Amazing Apple IIGS Laptop

We're still reeling from Ben Heck's amazing PS3 laptop but the man just hit us again with this amazing Apple IIGS laptop. Based off an original IIGS motherboard, the one-of-a-kind laptop features a 15-inch color screen, custom acrylic keyboard, a CompactFlash-based hard drive, and -- most importantly a glowing blue IIGS logo that flashes yellow.

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Updated Web Browsers: Which One Works Best?

Apple's Safari, Mozilla's Firefox 3, and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 duke it out to be the program you use most on your PC.

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Monday, April 14, 2008

Sick f*** throws someone else's dog off overpass - IT LIVES!

This poor woman's cute little dog ran away and rather than return it to her, the guy who found it decided to throw it off an overpass onto the interstate. SOMEHOW it managed to survive and will be out of the hospital and back with her soon.

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Are Animals Stuck In Time?

Dog owners, who have noticed that their four-legged friend seem equally delighted to see them after five minutes away as five hours, may wonder if animals can tell when time passes.

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The man who can't get fat

"He cannot put on weight because of a condition called lipodystrophy that makes his body rapidly burn fat."

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Do We Care About Swearing Anymore ??

Swearing has become less of a deal on TV, but it's still quite important on radio.

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Cluttered desktop folders become art [PICS]

Storing tons of files on your desktop is never a good idea, and Teknograd Mac Support from Norway has come up with an ad campaign that visualizes the feeling of helplessness that a cluttered desktop can cause. Thanks to faithful Macenstein reader John Hawkins for the pics!

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Rage Against the Machines: Gallery of Gadget Revenge

We love technology, but sometimes it just pisses us off. These readers feel the same way, and they did something about it. We asked our readers to terminate their most offensive technology and submit the best photos of the destruction. After weeks of voting, these are the 10 top revenge photos from those who won't kowtow to our future overlords

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Judge: Seize cell phones from polygamous sect's women, child

SAN ANGELO, Texas - The judge overseeing a massive investigation into alleged child abuse within a polygamous sect on Sunday ordered law officers to confiscate electronic devices from women and children in state custody at two shelters, cutting off their contact with family.

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Saturday, April 12, 2008

Why haters shouldn't hotlink images

So I was running through my Apache logs earlier and saw referrals from skinheads.net...

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Laptop repair reveals sneak child porn videos of teens

A northwestern Ontario man is facing charges after a computer store worker in St. Vital Centre found homemade videos on a laptop of two teenage girls taking off their clothes, Winnipeg police allege.

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Self-taught hacker admits worldwide attacks

A Whitianga teenager with no formal computer training has confessed to cyber crime which has surprised international investigators with its sophistication.Owen Thor Walker, who taught himself computer programming and encryption, was allegedly the mastermind of a botnet coding group said to have…

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MPAA Gets a Slap From Norwegian ISPs

At the end of March we reported that MPAA’s pirate-chasing lawyer Espen Tøndel sent a letter demanding that Norwegian ISPs disconnect file-sharers from the Internet. Unfortunately for him, the ISPs aren’t going to comply and have issued a letter in response, refusing to break the law to please copyright holders.

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Incredible Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts You May Not Know About

Excellent shortcuts! I knew only 3 of them. All of the shortcuts are quite useful.

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Friday, April 11, 2008

First-Ever Wristwatch with Mechanical Digital Display

Looking at this limited-edition Di Grisogono Meccanica DG, you probably think it's a hybrid mechanical-digital watch. Well, chaps, you're wrong. Despite its appearance, the Meccanica DG is completely analog, comprising of 651 pieces and absolutely no digital parts or LEDs whatsoever.

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Computer viruses hit one million

The number of viruses, worms and trojans in circulation has topped the one million mark.

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Thursday, April 10, 2008

Dell Breaks Your Laptop, Sends Replacement Full Of Pubes

Reader K's call to Dell tech support for his laptop resulted in the tech helping him break a different computer, then sending him a replacement laptop full of human pubic hair.

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The Future of Broadband: We're Totally Screwed

As turtle-tastic as broadband is in the US compared to Asia, other than Time Warner's experiment to charge by the byte, at least consumption-based billing has mostly been a problem for Canadians. Until now.

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Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Researchers uncover black holes across the Internet

The reason why you cannot reach a specific web site at any given time can be very simple. Server and hosting issues, maintenance or the plain fact that a site has been discontinued are the most likely explanations why a site just won’t load. But there is another, more mysterious possibility: Black holes.

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Big Content in worldwide "whisper campaign" against fair use

Google's copyright chief warns of a "counter-reformation" by content owners who seek to crack down worldwide on liberal fair use rights. Fortunately for consumers, copyright "protestants" are fighting back.

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Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Beautiful Handwriting, Lettering and Calligraphy

Handwriting seems to have lost some of its attraction over the last years. Nobody writes beautiful handwritten letters, and uses digital means of communication with smileys, abbreviations and standard lettering instead. And that’s a pity. Since handwriting is unique, it has a tremendous expressive power a standard lettering isn’t able to achieve.

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Red Hat Asks Federal Court To Limit Patents On Software

Today, Red Hat took a public stand challenging the standards for patenting software.

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Sunday, April 6, 2008

10 Ways the Internet (As We Know It) Will Die

We often think of the Internet as a platform for unfettered global communication, where information flows freely, innovators can launch new applications at will, and everyone can have a voice. But it’s unlikely that our children’s Internet will look anything like what we have now.

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Saturday, April 5, 2008

Friday, April 4, 2008

5 Best Instant Messengers Compared & Analyzed

5 Winners from the 550 comments on Lifehacker from users of IM services......They are compared and analyzed so that you can select the ones right for you.....Great article

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Saudi man catches daughter on Facebook, Murders Her

A man from Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, beat and then fatally shot his daughter after catching her using Facebook to conduct a conversation with a man, according to reports.

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Thursday, April 3, 2008

Maine Law Students Try to Derail RIAA Lawsuit Express

Students at the University of Maine School of Law's Cumberland Legal Aid Clinic are continuing their fight against the RIAA's legal tactics. A motion filed earlier this week on behalf of two "John Doe" University of Maine students sued by the RIAA seeks to bar the RIAA from bringing any such lawsuits in the future.

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Feds lie about link between software piracy and terrorism

Attorney General Michael Mukasey claims that terrorists sell pirated software as a way to finance their operations, without presenting a shred of evidence for his case. He's doing it to push through a controversial piece of legislation that's bad for you.

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Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Google searchers could end up with a new type of bug

Cybercrooks are manipulating the computer code used to put the pizazz in millions of websites in hopes of taking over unsuspecting consumers' PCs. The vulnerability occurs when someone does a Google search, then clicks on a result that has been secretly tainted by hackers. They will usually be taken to the Web page they expect.

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