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17-Year-Old Admits He Went on 3-Year Computer Crime Spree

Teen Hacker Arrested, Dodges Jail Time
In the online world, there are various levels of hackers. Lowest are the script kiddies, would-be miscreants who lack the skills to be a proper threat. Then there are the white hatters who infiltrate corporate and government networks largely just to see if they can -- often alerting the necessary authorities about the flaws. Worst are the skilled black hat hackers -- Dshocker was one of those, and arguably one of the most notable on the Web. Unfortunately (for him), he wasn't the most elusive, and he was sent to a juvenile detention facility for 11 months after being convicted of numerous crimes.

Dshocker is an unnamed 17-year-old kid from Massachusetts whose skills with computers got him into trouble. He not only led personal attacks against other online hackers, but was the leader of a large botnet and used his skills to make a number of bogus 911 calls. He was able to call emergency services and make it appear as if he was at one location, when in fact he was at another. He'd report that a violent crime was taking place, resulting in armed police storming the supposed origin of the call -- a dangerous situation for all involved.

Dshocker could have faced 10 years in prison had he been tried as an adult, but he managed to get away with less than a year in detention. We hope it's enough. [From: The Register]
Engadget

NASA Successfully Tests Interplanetary Internet


NASA is reporting the first successful tests of its Deep Space Network modeled after Earth's own Internet. Instead of using TCP/IP, however, the interplanetary communication network relies upon DTN (Disruption-Tolerant Networking) co-developed by none other than Google's Vinton Cerf. As such, NASA's network does not assume a continuous end-to-end connection -- if a link is lost due to solar storms or a planetary eclipse, the communication node will store the information until the connection is re-established. So, what's the big deal you rightly ask, after all, we've been (purposely) transmitting data to and from space for a half-century. As Leigh Torgerson, manager of NASA's DTN Experiment Operations Center explains it:
"In space today, an operations team must manually schedule each link and generate all the commands to specify which data to send, when to send it, and where to send it. With standardized DTN, this can all be done automatically."
Testing of the Deep Space Network began in October with twice-weekly communications between NASA's Epoxi spacecraft (on a mission to rendezvous with Comet Hartley 2) and nine ground-based nodes meant to simulate Mars landers, orbiters, and operation centers. The International Space Station is scheduled to join the testing next summer. Although the nature of the data transmitted wasn't specified, we can only presume that it was laced with Google ads for Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong.

PC Magazine Closing Print Edition, Staying Online Only

PC Magazine Goes Online Only
Woe betide the print publications of the world -- the Internet is here, stealing your subscribers, and it's not going to go away. Adapt or die is the mantra of the newspapers and pulpy journals of the world, and Ziff Davis is the latest trying to do just that, stopping print publication of the venerable PC Magazine, in favor of an exclusively online publication.

Founded in 1982, the magazine is following in the (very recent) footsteps of the Christian Science Monitor, which is also moving to an online model. PC Magazine, which used to print editions in excess of 500 pages in the heydays of the industry, back in the late '80s and '90s, will print its last edition in January of 2009. After that, the only place to get the word from the original source of PC news and reviews will be online.

So, PC collectors with a closet full of old, beige hardware, you may want to get to the bookstore in the near future -- your tome of choice won't be around for much longer. Not to worry too much, though, since you've probably been reading PC Mag online for years, anyway, and it doesn't look like that part is going anywhere.

The sad part, though, is just how fast all these magazines are shutting down. Check out our gallery below of five titles that have recently moved online only -- four out of five of them have announced the plans in the last couple of months alone. Though now make our living writing for the Web, we have to admit that we still like bringing the occasional newspaper or magazine when we're on, say, an airplane or bus (after all, that Amazon Kindle isn't cheap!).

What do you think? Do you still read magazines? Which do you prefer for news and articles: magazines or Web sites? [From: Paid Content]

Facebook, YouTube Serving as Hot Spots for Hate Groups



Ugh, the online thugs are at it again. Last week, YouTube executives have removed several videos that were made in tribute to the infamous Columbine school shootings of 1999 and the two boys who perpetrated them, the BBC reported.

In a recent investigative report, the BBC found that a small but thriving Columbine-obsessed community, both in the United States and Britain, was responsible for a large number of YouTube videos championing the Columbine shooters -- fan reenactments of the boys' own homemade videos were also found. After that BBC report brought these developments to the attention of YouTube executives, the offending videos, in clear violation of YouTube's terms of service, were promptly removed. Google UK executive Peter Barron explained, "We do not tolerate videos that glorify school shootings and have removed the videos that fall into that category".

Google Brings LIFE Magazine Photo Archives to the Web



Google continues its march towards organizing all the world's information. Just what has it done this time? Google worked with LIFE magazine to digitize and distribute LIFE's enormous archive of photographs, which span over a century and countless cultural, political, scientific sporting, and other historical moments.

Since this was released, we've spent far too much time browsing the archives, and we've found everything from Hitchcock to Billie Holiday, from 'The Third Man' to '2001,' and the historic Lindbergh flight to the Apollo 11 launch. The majority of the photos have titles, descriptions, photographer information, and dates, which makes searching for photos from "World War 2" and "New York," for example, surprisingly easy. You can search by decade, by year, and by pretty much any other search term you can think of. Paul Newman? Check. Dresden, Germany? Got it. Picasso wearing a cow's head mask? Of course!

Motrin Ad Pulled Due to Online Protests



Antagonist online response to a recent Motrin advertisement has led Johnson & Johnson to pull the offending ad and offer a public apology, reports All Things Digital.

The ad in question, which features a narrator complaining of the body pains experienced by mothers who carry their babies in modern-day papooses, riled up lots of folks, creating a furor in the blogosphere and Twitterdom. In fact, in the time it took to enter "Motrin" into the search field and wait for the page to load, the search page at Twitter yielded eight new results. It yielded 41 new results in the time it took us to write this sentence.

Due to this online outpouring of frustration, Johnson and Johnson temporarily took down Motrin's Web site to purge the video from the site, and to offer the following statement (after the break):

Would You Fall For This?


We understand that there are people out there who are gullible or uninformed, and that's why we try to help as much as we can. That said, we have never, ever seen a scam this obvious, at least not a real one. The sad thing is there are probably enough people that are dumb enough to fall for it, and therefore scammers who would try it, so it's not out of the question that this ruse actually exists. Scoff if you like, but halfway intelligent people still send money to Nigeria or think that a random link will really show them nude pictures of Jessica Simpson.

Thanks to sites like 419eater.com, we know that many of the criminals out there aren't exactly masterminds, which makes us wonder what other examples of unintelligent Web fraud are out there? There are all sorts of Fail sites, so we here at Switched propose that Scam Fail become the latest genre of captured stupidity. If you have any good examples of this, leave them in the comments below. We can't wait to see the depths of idiocy you've encountered on the Web.

Oh, and by the way, if you haven't figured it out yet, don't put your credit card number into anything like that. Ever. [From: FAIL Blog]

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God-Friendly 'Guitar Hero' Clone Gets Shown Off


Oh man... we were excited when we first heard about 'Guitar Praise,' but now that we've seen the three-minute over-explanatory trailer, we might just buy two copies, just in case one isn't enough to get us heathens past St. Peter.

The 'Guitar Hero' clone features songs from Christian Rock acts like Day of Fire and Family Force 5 (What!? no Stryper?), as well as a wireless controller that lets you "shred the riffs and thump the bass." And if you were wondering what to do while you wait for your turn, the trailer lets you know that you can sing along. Exciting!

We really hope that other religions get in on the guitar-based rhythm game fad soon. We're really excited to rock out to 'Hava Nagila.' [From: Joystiq]

Facebook Sounds Death Knell for Birthday Notification Apps


Well, with one fell swoop Facebook may have put a whole class of applications out to pasture. A new feature rolled out by the social networking service sends you a weekly notice of your friends' upcoming birthdays, which makes popular applications like Birthday Calendar and Birthday Alert redundant.

The birthday alert business is big money. Social networking service Beebo (owned by our parent company AOL) was founded as a birthday notification service that boasted 100 million users before expanding with more Facebook style features.

While the more popular birthday apps that offer features such as e-cards and e-gifts (those $1 trinkets that people "send" each other on Facebook) might not disappear into the ether over night, many of the smaller ones will quickly fade now that Facebook has replicated their usefulness. [From: TechCrunch]

Jerry Yang Steps Down as Yahoo! CEO, Remains Chief Yahoo!


Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo! is stepping down from his post as CEO and returning to his job as Chief Yahoo!... whatever that means.

Yang was tapped by the board of directors last year to step in at the helm of the floundering company as part of a massive reorganization. Yang and the board both feel that the time is right to find a successor. Yahoo! is in a much better position than it was 18 months ago. The company has cut products, like the Yahoo! Music, that were hemorrhaging cash, while launching Yahoo! Buzz and updating profitable services like Flickr and Delicious. That said, the company is still the target of buyout rumors, thanks to its continued loss of market share to Google's search product.

Yang sent out a memo to "all Yahoos" explaining the reason for his resignation and his future at the company (read the entire memo here), complete with his characteristic lack of capitalization. He also took time to praise his employees saying, "thanks in large measure to your tireless efforts, we have created a more open, competitive yahoo!"

Yang will certainly continue to influence the company in his new/old role as Chief Yahoo!, and one can only hope that more positions with ridiculous titles are to come from this Internet pioneer. [From: BoomTown]

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