Alex and Lindsay join us from Defcon, and the Geeks cover the news of the week.
In a recent presentation, Kepler co-investigator Dimitar Sasselov preempted the official announcement that the exoplanet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope has discovered about 140 candidate worlds orbiting other stars that are “like Earth.”
Usually, announcements like these happen after an official press release, but during the TEDGLobal conference in Oxford, U.K., Sasselov unexpectedly dropped the groundbreaking news in one of his presentation slides.
The 2.8GB torrent was compiled by hacker Ron Bowes of Skull Security, who created a web crawler program that harvested data on users contained in Facebook’s open access directory, which lists all users who haven’t bothered to change their privacy settings to make their pages unavailable to search engines.
The file contains user account names and a URL for each user’s profile page, from which details such as addresses, dates of birth or phone numbers can be accessed. Accessing a user’s page from the list will also enable you to click through to friends’ profiles – even if those friends have made themselves non-searchable.
Check out this page for instructions on how to secure your Facebook page. (Highly recommended by all the geeks)
Screen capture software.
“The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) won three critical exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) anticircumvention provisions today, carving out new legal protections for consumers who modify their cell phones and artists who remix videos
SCHOOLBOY Hibiki Kono climbs a sheer brick wall after turning himself into Spiderman – with the help of two
The Chevy Volt can travel ~40 miles per charge without a drop of gas. Still can’t drive in California’s HOV lane or get that state’s tax rebates.
The list of green features goes on and on. From the double-skinned, triple-glazed facade to the cooling beam structure and greywater collection system this skyscraper design has all it needs to be as lightweight on the Guangdong grid as it can manage. Though the company behind the building, the CNTC Guangdong Tobacco Corporation, isn
Pearl River Tower
Guangzhou, China
The 2.3-million square-foot Pearl River Tower redefines what is possible in sustainable design by incorporating the latest green technology and engineering advancements. The 309-meter tower’s sculpted body directs wind to a pair of openings at its mechanical floors, where traveling winds push turbines which generate energy for the building.
The design for the tower incorporates a series of other integrated sustainable and engineering elements, including solar panels, double skin curtain wall, chilled ceiling system, under floor ventilation air, and daylight harvesting, all of which contribute to the building
Reporters who attended the “Antennagate” presser today in Cupertino were invited to tour the company’s “$100 million antenna designing and test facilities.” They’re blinding us with science! Bonus: When I right-clicked to save this jpeg from the Apple website, I noticed that the original file name included the words “Stargate Chamber.” The hell with your free bumpers, Mr. Jobs, I want one of these suckers!
From a listener:
Jared Dick
Hey guys,
One of the things I like most about your program is that before you begin
to comment or give advice on anything, you list the credentials of every
person in the room,most of which include substantial programing knowledge.
This way the average listener can feel confident that you know what you’re
talking about—it’s one thing to simply call oneself a geek, it’s another
to actually have the know-how.
As a technology enthusiast, I read a large assortment of tech-blogs and
listen to podcasts on a daily basis (Engadget, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Silicon
Alley Insider, CNET, etc.), one of the things that always irks me is that
the large majority of these publications do not post the qualifications of
the writers/podcasters. Furthermore, when I am able to uncover their alma
mater, their major in college, or even their resume, it always seems to be
a B.A in communications or english from a small liberal arts college
(generally located in CA or New England), and then their work has only been
in reporting or blogging.
