Alcohol consumption has many effects and most of them are negative. If you consume (large quantities of) alcohol you already know by experience that your reflexes are slowing down and you can’t do many things efficiently like walking and driving. But these are not the only negative effects, alcohol also worsen the effects of disease and impair the ability of your body to fight off viral infection. According to a new study from University of Massachusetts Medical School shows that alcohol modulates the anti-viral and inflammatory functions of monocytes. Alcohol impairs the anti-viral immune response (including Hepatitis C (HCV) and HIV), especially in the liver.
Gamers are on fire
After the announcement that gamers with the use of Foldit have found protein folding patters which helped the research for AIDS and HIV now gamers helped the discovery of two new planets. The two planets are exoplanets orbiting distant start. Gamers have found the planets playing Planet Hunters. Planet Hunters is a (browser) game which is product of the collaboration between Yale University and the Zooniverse. The lightcurves on the game are from the NASA’s Kepler mission and all of them are released to public.
Theme song for Hacktivists
Anonymous and TeaMp0isoN joined together and thanks to an independent rapper they now have a theme song. There is also a professional looking video clip on YouTube made for the theme and hacktivists hope that the song will storm the music charts. If you see the video you will see scenes from the recent London riots. While TeaMp0isoN was focusing on the music chart storm, Anonymous was focusing on the Wall Street protests. The artist is Lyricist Jinn and the theme song is for #OpCensorThis.
Microsoft earns big from Android
Analyst of Goldman Sachs estimate that Microsoft will have a revenue of $444 millions during fiscal year 2012 (July 1, 2011 – June 30, 2012) from Android patent deals. Microsoft settled with companies like HTC and Samsung and according to Goldman it receives around $3-$6 from every android device that is sold. Microsoft has its own smart phones and generating this income from its competitors shows that patents are a very strong weapon.
Google+ is growing very fast
Google+ is growing very fast since it opened for public and you don’t need an invitation. The user base of Google+ is now over 50 million in just 88 days after its launch. The growth is now about 4% per day and in numbers this means about 2 millions new members per day. Since the launch of Google+ we saw Facebook changing and trying to look more like Google+. They added some functionality about post visibility and some other things like lists, subscribe feature, longer posts etc, which is what Google+ already had. It is good to see the competition forcing companies to change and users benefit from that.
TiGER-M@TE hacked 700.000 sites with one shot
TiGER-M@TE hacked 700.000 websites hosted on InMotion hosting network in one shot. Some attacks target single websites, some attacks target hosting server and this one a whole data center. TiGER-M@TE hacks since 2007 and this one is his largest attack. The attack didn’t make any serious damage, especially if the targets had backups. The method is simple, the hacker was adding a custom “index.php” file in several directories and if the same file was already there, it was replaced by the custom one. The index.php file is the file that it is shown by the web server when someone visits the website/folder.
HTTPS is Vulnerable to Crypto Attack
Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is used by millions of websites to secure the communications with their visitors. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption protocol is used to provide encrypted communication and secure identification. HTTPS is the combination of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) with the SSL/TLS protocol. Security researchers found that HTTPS is vulnerable for decryption by attackers…
Hero Rabbit is Dead
Having a rabbit as a pet can save your life. After realizing that there was a fire, the pet rabbit went to homeowner’s bedroom and wake her up by scratching on her chest. The homeowner smelt the smoke and realized that there was fire. She woke up her daughter and left the house. Luckily, both mother and daughter are with no injuries. The sad thing is that our hero didn’t make it, it inhaled too much smoke
Solve Puzzles in the Name of Science
Scientists were trying to solve the mystery behind a protein which is the key for the development of AIDS. They were trying for a decade without any results and then a company decided (2008) to create a game named “Foldit”. Foldit is an online game where users fold proteins and create different shapes according to some basic rules. Gamers managed to decipher the structure of that key protein in three weeks and now the research for AIDS and HIV has a bright future
OS X Lion Security is for Lulz
I have already posted that Apple laptops can be easily hacked. Now, with the new version of Apple’s OS X, you thought that security will be improved but this is not the case. OS X Lions passwords can be hacked faster and easier than ever. You don’t even have to crack the passwords, you can just change them to whatever you want if you have physical access to the terminal. By cracking the password, we mean to find the password from its hash or with a brute force attack. If you have access to a computer, you can change the password with the following command