Facebook is adding profile pictures to its facial recognition technology

Facebook is mulling using its controversial facial recognition technology on profile photos, saysReuters.

The firm’s chief privacy officer, Erin Egan, claimed that the move would protect users’ privacy. “Our goal is to facilitate tagging so that people know when there are photos of them on our service,” she said, adding that Facebookers worried about the issue could always opt out of the Tag Suggest feature. “Can I say that we will never use facial recognition technology for any other purposes? Absolutely not. If we decided to use it in different ways we will continue to provide people transparency about that and we will continue to provide control.”

Ironically, the news comes a couple of weeks after the social network announced that all access to the site via apps and web browsers would be SSL encrypted, a response, perhaps, to theNSA‘s X–Keyscore program, which monitors the Internet on a vast scale.

The relationship between the state and larger tech firms is becoming more tense––Facebook received 38,000 official requests from government agencies worldwide in the first half of this year––hence the open letter to the U.S. government last month that pleaded for more transparency on the matter.

New bug in town to crash IOS.....

There's a new bug in town, and it's here to crash your Mac and iPhone applications. Posters in a HackerNews thread from late yesterday have discovered that it's possible to crash Web browsers and other apps running on current versions of iOS and OS X by making them render a specific, nonsensical string of Arabic characters. The title of the HackerNews thread implies that the issue is with the WebKit browser engine, but it actually affects any browser or application that uses Apple's CoreText API to render text. Ars Microsoft Editor Peter Bright has taken great pleasure in sending the text string to his co-workers, which has crashed the Limechat IRC client and Adium chat client, among other programs.

Safari crashes in both OS X 10.8.4 and iOS 6.1.3 when it attempts to read the text string, and rendering the string in the current stable release of Chrome prompts the browser's typical "Aw snap!" error page (though Chrome's sandboxing implementation keeps the bug from bringing the whole browser down). Firefox, which uses its own font rendering engine, can display the text just fine. This supports the idea that it's a CoreText issue and not a problem with any particular application.

Some Mac and iOS device users on Twitter were only half joking when labeling the string the "unicode of death." Text messages that display the characters caused some people's iMessage apps to spiral into an extended crash loop, since the string would be displayed each time the user loads previously sent messages. Many e-mail programs were also felled by the text. It can even be triggered by including the text in the network name of a wireless access point, creating problems for vulnerable devices that encounter the name when a user looks for available connections. Tweets and other social networking dispatches were enough to cause browsers to crash, so within a few hours of the bug becoming public, Facebook was already preventing the characters from being posted to user walls and timelines by displaying the message below.

Human brain in size of a pea????

Scientists have grown a miniature "human brain" the size of a pea, in a feat they hope will transform the study of neurological disorders.

The structures have reached the same level of development as that of a nine-week-old foetus, but are incapable of thought.

The team from the Austrian Academy of Sciences have already used the technique to study certain developmental defects, and say they hope to be able to use it to research disorders such as autism and schizophrenia.

Differences in Linux and windows file System

Linux’s file system has quite a few differences from the Windows file system. You won’t find any drive letters or backslashes, but you will find an alien-looking layout where files can have the same name, differing only in capitalization.

This isn’t an exhaustive list. It is intended for new Linux users who aren’t aware of all the differences between Linux and Windows. There are many more differences that apply.

Directory Structure:

You won’t find any Windows, Program Files, or Users folders if you start browsing around the file system on your Linux computer. (Although the /home/ directory is very similar to the Users folder.)

The Linux directory structure doesn’t just use different names for folders, it uses an entirely different layout. For example, on Windows, an application might store all its files in C:\Program Files\Application. On Linux, its files would be split between multiple locations – its binaries in /usr/bin, its libraries in /usr/lib, and its configuration files in /etc/.

Case Sensitivity:

On Windows, you can’t have a file named file and another file named FILE in the same folder. The Windows file system isn’t case sensitive, so it treats these names as the same file.

On Linux, the file system is case sensitive. This means that you could have files named file,File, and FILE in the same folder. Each file would have different contents – Linux treats capitalized letters and lower-case letters as different characters.

Drug used by Reasearchers to test participants honesty

The problem every survey administrator faces is how to assess the authenticity of the responses. When it comes to surveying young adults and teenagers it becomes even more difficult as the respondents will often answer facetiously and not take the survey seriously. When it comes to assessing drug use and abuse, researchers include fictional drugs to weed out respondents who are simply taking a done-it-all approach to answering the questions. The most common fake drug used is called Derbisol (or a variation like Derbs or DB). Other less commonly used fake drugs include metabene, shimeron, and nazuphan–all drug names with no relation to any real substance of abuse.

What is an SSD????

A solid-state drive (SSD) is simply a data storage device that uses integrated circuits to store persistent data. This solid state storage is a contrast to the electro-magnetic media (such as traditional platter-based hard drives and floppy disks) that dominated the data storage market for the later part of the 20th century.

While solid-state technology has existed since the 1950s in various forms, it wasn’t until the 1990s that it began to appear in the consumer market. Flash drives, the ubiquitous little USB-based drives used for portable data storage, are an early example of a compact solid-state drive widely adopted by consumers. Astronomical pricing kept computer hard drives based on solid-state technology out of consumer reach until a few short years ago. Now it’s possible to enjoy the benefits of a solid-state drive–such as lightning fast seek times and silent operation–without taking out a loan to do so.

Smurf Attack

A Smurf Attack is a specific form of denial-of-service attack in which a large volume of ICMP packets with the victim’s spoofed IP address swapped in place of the senders IP address are broadcast over a computer network using one of the IP broadcast addresses available on that network.

As a result, any ICMP request (like a ping request) sent via Smurf Attack to the IP broadcast address of the network would prompt all the computers within that broadcast address block to response, effectively burying the unsuspecting IP address (and attached computer equipment) of the targeted user under a mountain of misdirected responses, rendering their connection unusable until the deluge of replies stops.

Smurf Attacks were extremely easy to execute prior to the late 1990s as most networks were poorly configured and unable to resist abuse in such a fashion. Since then hosts and routers have been routinely configured not to respond to ICMP requests addressed on the IP broadcast level or to forward requests they receive.