Hackers Swiped 70,000 Records from Healthcare.gov in Four Minutes

After the bevy of problems Healthcare.gov encountered in its first few months of life, dumping one more onto the pile shouldn’t phase you all that much, right? Well, not if that hiccup is actually a gaping vulnerability—and one that can grant hackers access to over 70, 0000 private records in just four minutes, at that. Read more…        

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Hackers Swiped 70,000 Records from Healthcare.gov in Four Minutes

Microsoft Researchers Slash Skype Fraud By 68%

mask.of.sanity writes “Life could become more difficult for fraudsters on Skype thanks to new research by Microsoft boffins that promises to cut down on fake accounts across the platform. The research (PDF) combined information from diverse sources including a user’s profile, activities, and social connections into a supervised machine learning environment that could automate the presently manual tasks of fraud detection. The results show the framework boosted fraud detection rates for particular account types by 68 per cent with a 5 per cent false positive rate.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Researchers Slash Skype Fraud By 68%

Linux 3.13 Released

diegocg writes “Linux kernel 3.13 has been released. This release includes nftables (the successor of iptables); a revamp of the block layer designed for high-performance SSDs; a framework to cap power consumption in Intel RAPL devices; improved squashfs performance; AMD Radeon power management enabled by default and automatic AMD Radeon GPU switching; improved NUMA and hugepage performance; TCP Fast Open enabled by default; support for NFC payments; support for the High-Availability Seamless Redundancy protocol; new drivers; and many other small improvements. Here’s the full list of changes.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux 3.13 Released

Ball lightning has been captured on video for the first time ever

Reports of ball lightning have existed for hundreds of years, but footage of the rare phenomenon, which appears transiently in the form of a glowing sphere of electrical activity , has never been acquired outside the lab. Now, a team of Chinese researchers claims it has obtained the first recorded scientific video of ball lightning in action. Read more…        

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Ball lightning has been captured on video for the first time ever

World’s most beautiful beach glows like millions of stars at night

Flickr user hala065 brings us these otherworldly images of a beach in the Maldive islands that glows with millions of pinpoints of glowing blue. The light from these bioluminescent phytoplankton looks like a fantastic starry sky somewhere deep in the universe. It’s mesmerizing. Read more…        

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World’s most beautiful beach glows like millions of stars at night

Watch Classical Paintings Come Alive, in Beauty

Italian animator Rino Stefano Tabliafierro breathes subtle (and not-so-subtle) life into dozens of classical paintings in his captivating short, Beauty . [ Fair warning: here be nudity, sex, violence and death. Sometimes all at once.] Read more…        

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Watch Classical Paintings Come Alive, in Beauty

Hacked fridge sends out malicious emails in unprecedented cyber attack

You know how virtually everything these days is connected to the internet? And how tech companies don’t give a crap about security? Well, as a recent Internet of Things cyber attack has shown, our appliances are being made to turn against us. Read more…        

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Hacked fridge sends out malicious emails in unprecedented cyber attack

Microsoft Quietly Fixes Windows XP Resource Hog Problem

An anonymous reader writes “Microsoft indicated this week that it has fixed a Windows XP resource-hog problem associated with the system’s SVCHOST.EXE processes. Windows XP users affected by this problem typically found that the operating system was using up system resources for 15 minutes to an hour after startup, making it difficult to use the machine during that period. The Microsoft Update team had vowed last month to spend the holiday break tackling the issue, which has plagued some users for years. The fix involved stopping the system from perpetually checking Internet Explorer updates. Microsoft indicated that the fix was rolled out on Tuesday.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Quietly Fixes Windows XP Resource Hog Problem

Two fans broke onto Star Trek: TNG sets to film their own documentary

In 1988, two fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation broke onto the Paramount lot and wandered through the Enterprise sets, filming a homemade documentary as they went along. They also caused a little accidental mayhem along the way. Read more…        

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Two fans broke onto Star Trek: TNG sets to film their own documentary

This is how San Francisco sounded just before getting destroyed in 1906

Hardscrabble Pictures added sound to this old black and white silent film of San Francisco’s Market Street in April 14, 1906, just four days before the big earthquake that destroyed 80 percent of the city. It’s really wonderful—put on your headphones and listen to the calm before the storm. Read more…        

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This is how San Francisco sounded just before getting destroyed in 1906