In what may be the first "physical" attack conducted through the Internet, hackers descended upon an epilepsy support group forum and uploaded strobing and complex images with the goal of causing seizures.
It worked.
The attack was conducted by a group of griefers, a special name given to someone whose sole mission is to go online and cause others grief.
According to the article in Wired Magazine, the Epilepsy Foundation closed down the forum briefly to remove the offending images, but not before several people seized up.
It's hard to imagine the reasons or motivations for such an effort ...
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Updated 07/14/10 @ 11:29AM CDT by brian
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People Acting Badly User Interface
Ever wonder what happens when an email gets lost or a Web site is unavailable?
Sure, there are the worldly explanations:
- Someone forgot to pay their hosting bill
- A truck ran into a power substation and blew the grid
- Someone fat-fingered the keyboard while logged in as root
If however, you eliminate all these reasons, one remains.
A black hole.
According to the University of Washington, there are a number of servers across the Internet - connected and accessible - that sometimes lose data for unexplainable reasons. These "black holes" are being mapped through a project called Hubble: Monitoring Internet Reachability in ...
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Updated 07/14/10 @ 11:31AM CDT by brian
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Fun Technology
Recently, we sponsored a national conference organized by the Python Software Foundation called PyCon. Python is a programming language that we use extensively for Web-based applications.
In the past we have sent a staff programmer to present at the conference, however we have never sponsored it. This year it was held in Chicago and the cost for sponsorship was quite reasonable - we were a "silver" sponsor which was a modest level and cost us $1,000. What was particularly nice was that they offered a 50% discount for small firms.
Part of the sponsorship was a booth in their exhibition ...
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Updated 07/14/10 @ 11:32AM CDT by brian
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