The internet is great at producing random factoids.

Apparently cook Julia Child was *tall* ... we all sorta knew that, but still ... apparently according to IMDB she was 6'2! For a woman that's towering!



For whatever probably now-obsolete reasons, she was denied service in several women's divisions in WWII, so she had to join something called the "Office of Strategic Services".

Tricky and IQ Questions

without answers
well, you're supposed to login (which I wouldnt do anyway, not being registered) but the login link doesnt work here anyway

From: temp12399@aol.com (Temp12399)
Subject: Badge Names
Date: 23 Nov 1998 03:00:39 GMT

My company has exhibited in one of the largest trade shows in the
U.S. for many years.  Every year we need some extra admittance badges for our
people who lose theirs or need one for a spouse.  Since names John Doe and Mary
Smith would show a complete lack of intelligence, I always make up names that
sound like a real person, but really say something else.  So that the show
people won't catch on too easily (and reject our badge requests) the first
names are usually real names and the last names are spelled strangely enough
that the real meaning is somewhat "hidden".  

The list is below, and after that is the same list with the hidden meaning
spelled out.  Don't cheat now.  See how many you can get.

BADGE NAMES

RANDALL I. DRAWPED     
LIONEL CAUSTRUBLS       
MYRA MANES             
CLAUDE ISBETERNATE     
EATON PAWSUM           
PHYLLIS UPWILLYA

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And even if you do fill in any date, you can't login at all. So the website itself deserves a set of rotten tomatoes...

This one is more informative and less silly, so it's for "Interesting Stuff".

It's Tom Scott (Does he have an IQ of 150!?) on basic password security.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoMOAIzBSpY

I vaguely knew about this stuff, but the incrementally more you learn, slowly you can evolve to better questions that really matter. Hopefully by this point I am not a hopeless case, but it's a tough balance between being a "limited polymath" and being a specialist that drowns the minute you get out of your fields!

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Explaining Rare 'Hole Punch' Cloud With Rainbow in the Middle

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How Your Phone's Flashlight App is Stealing Your Data

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Hijackers get up close and personal with hacked accounts

Wired "caught up" with Mark Russinovich. While I'm sure some of you geniuses are just as good, of the "popularly known" analysts, he kept catching my eye for the ferocious detail of some of his blog entries. (Which read like Scorpion should! "So I ran my tool X, tracked the process ID's, searched for a four character string in hex, and then ran a comparison with the raw data dump of my low level disk indexing system that bypasses Windows..." End fake Gobbledygook).

And of course, he basically punched Sony PR in the nose by finding the rootkit.

Eventually he was too good to be left loose, so Microsoft kept adding zeroes to their offer until he accepted and went to work for them!

http://www.wired.com/2014/05/mark-russinovich/

I've used a few of his tools a couple of times myself. Here's the complete list of the old SysInternal tools (and at the top if you like all that stuff, there's a link for a "bundle" that has all of them rolled up.)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb545027

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Police take down Dark Web markets around the globe

Around that same time, two researchers from Carnegie Mellon, Alexander Volynkin and Michael McCord, were preparing for a presentation at hacker conference Black Hat about work they’d done to easily “break Tor.” They were vague about the details but promised that their work wasn’t just theoretical: “Looking for an IP address for a Tor user? Not a problem. Trying to uncover the location of a Hidden Service? Done. We know because we tested it, in the wild.” In a summary of the talk on the conference website, the researchers claimed that it was possible to “de-anonymize hundreds of thousands of Tor clients and thousands of hidden services within a couple of months,” and that they would discuss examples of their own work identifying ”suspected child pornographers and drug dealers.”

How Did The FBI Break Tor?

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Burger Place Geography

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Wal-Mart to Stretch Black Friday Over Five Days to Lure Shoppers

Walmart's 'new Black Friday' will be a 5-day event this year

Microsoft Fixes Bug in Windows - After 19 Years

Microsoft Corp issued patches on Tuesday to fix a bug in its Windows operating system that remained undiscovered for 19 years.
The bug, which is present in every version of Microsoft Windows from Windows 95 onward, allows an attacker to remotely take over and control a computer.
IBM Corp's cybersecurity research team discovered the bug in May, describing it as a "significant vulnerability" in the operating system.
"The buggy code is at least 19 years old and has been remotely exploitable for the past 18 years," IBM X-Force research team said in its blog on Tuesday.
http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/microsoft-fixes-bug-windows-after-19-years-n247191

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14 Things We Can Tell About You Based On Where You Live  RealClear

^ Too bad Washington DC didn't have Alaska's problem...

Where is DC's problem shown? Or is it just politicians?