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OCAU News |
Tuesday Afternoon
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Tuesday, 24-December-2013 16:04:13 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Alan Turing has received his royal pardon, 61 years after his death. He was the father of modern computing whose work on the Enigma code at Bletchley Park is said to have shortened the Second World War. But he was also gay and in those less enlightened times was chemically castrated by an ungrateful nation after being convicted of “gross indecency” with a man in 1952. Now, nearly 60 years after his suicide from cyanide poisoning at the age of 41, Alan Turing has been officially pardoned by the Queen under the little-known Royal Prerogative of Mercy. More here. It's worth noting that he received an apology from the PM in 2009.
The MPAA insisted you wouldn't download a car, but Porsche disagree, thanks Owen. Sadly, in the immortal words of Patsy, it's only a model. The car company is offering 3D blueprints for its Cayman S model, which can be downloaded for free through Porsche’s official site. This allows anyone to print a copy of the car in real size or as a miniature.
Meanwhile a Lego Car has arrived in Melbourne. What happens if you take 500,000 pieces of Lego and 256 pistons, then hand them over to Steve Sammartino and Raul Oaida? This fully functioning, life-size, air-powered Lego car is what. With four orbital engines powering the massive lump of plastic bricks, the vehicle can hit speeds of up to 20mph.
Wired have a detailed article on the case against Kim Dotcom. In a 191-page "Summary of Evidence," government lawyers marshal Skype chats, financial data, and dozens of e-mails to make their case that Megaupload was a criminal network designed from the start to distribute copyrighted material. It discusses the payments made to heavy uploaders to encourage them to drive traffic to the files of movies and TV shows they hid online.
Chuck Norris, or at least, a CGI rendering of him, is hitting back with a Christmas Split in response to the earlier Van Damme one.
Bank of America reckon this Bitcoin thing could be a big deal. Bank of America has issued a research report suggesting that the crypto-currency Bitcoin could become “a major means of payment for e-commerce” on its way to emerging as “a serious competitor to traditional money transfer providers.”
Many Bitcoins are finding their way to the maker of some ransomware called CryptoLocker. Dell SecureWorks estimates that CryptoLocker has infected 250,000 victims. The average payout is $300 each, and millions in laundered Bitcoin have been tracked and traced to the ransomware's money runners. Spreading like wildfire from offices to homes, it arrives in email attachments (or over infected networks) to aggressively encrypt all files on a system (including mapped drives, Dropbox files, and all locally connected, network-attached, or cloud-based storage) - while an ominous onscreen timer demands payment within 72 hours.
A Facebook user in Melbourne has walked off a pier while transfixed by her phone. "She was still out in the water lying on her back in a floating position because she told us later that she couldn't swim," he said. "She still had her mobile phone in her hand and initially she apologised and said sorry. "She said, 'I was checking my Facebook page on the phone and I've fallen in'."
I've always said that in any conflict, right up to brink-of-nuclear-war scale, a sternly-worded fax is the way to go - and North Korea seem to agree. But my favorite aspect of this story by far isn't North Korea's fax threatening to launch a war at any moment. It's the fact that South Korea, on Friday, turned around and sent the North Koreans a threatening fax right back.
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All original content copyright James Rolfe.
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