Hackers attack epileptic forum and make sufferers convulse

By Mark O’Neill

epilepticbrain.jpgIn what is being described as the first attack over the internet to cause immediate direct physical harm, hackers have caused an unknown number of epileptic sufferers to suffer seizures by hacking into an epileptic support forum and leaving flashing animation screens.

The flashing screens, made with javascript code, would then adversely affect those suffering from pattern-sensitive epilepsy or photo-sensitive epilepsy (I also suffer from a strain of it). This means that if the eyes are exposed to rapidly flashing lights for a prolonged period of time, the brain reacts violently and sends the body into a seizure. The risk becomes even higher if the flashing lights are in a darkened room such as a nightclub or a cinema (you may have seen cinemas warning epileptics about strobe lighting in movies)

Circumstantial evidence has responsibility pointing to a group that seemingly has a beef with scientologists (Edit: After further investigation, we believe that the culprits were not who everybody though to be responsible at first… everybody points their finger at everybody else, and it’s not our position to determine who did it. Please note that WIRED, which usually is a reliable news source, reported the story first). But it’s one thing to have an argument with a religious cult. It’s quite another thing to target a group of people with a medical disability and provoke traumatic and terrible seizures in their head.

I am trying to be impartial about this but being a fellow epilepsy sufferer myself, I am shaking at the moment with deep anger. I am currently going round several other epilepsy support groups online that I am involved with to see if anything has been going on there as well.    Is this a co-ordinated attack or a one-off deal?    It’s essential to know.

Who in their right mind gets off on making people convulse uncontrollably? If they could just realize for a moment what a seizure actually involves and if they were to experience one themselves, they wouldn’t be so cavalier about inflicting that hurt on others.



LOST theory might be the real deal

Fellow LOST fanatics, we all have our own little theories as to what exactly is going on. Some of them are a simple “they’re all dead” and others are a little more complicated than that. I can almost certainly guarantee however, that they aren’t nearly as accurate as this one seems to be.

I’d start this post by summarizing the whole theory in a terse paragraph with witty annotations and humorous dialog but, it’s a complete analysis of every minute theory and is impossible to summarize completely. Basically, they all travel back in time by accident.

After sitting in front of this page for the last half hour, amazed at how well this thing is written and organized, I can definitely say that it’s worth a read.

Remember to sound off in the comments about your own theories!

The Time Line

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Is PC gaming on the way out? Long live consoles?

By Mark O’Neill

During the very brief and infrequent periods that I have played games, they have nearly always been on the PC. I played the Sims very briefly (before my character burnt the house down by setting the Christmas tree on fire) and I played a game where you created your own golf course. But that was years ago and these days everyone and their dog seems to have a games console. Which begs the question : is PC gaming dying?

The only thing that seems to be keeping PC gaming afloat these days is World of Warcraft. Apart from that, everyone is flocking in droves to the Nintendo Wii, the X-Box and the Playstation. When you walk into the store to buy a PC game, you’ve got to fight your way past the huge console game section to find the ever-shrinking PC games section in the corner.

So now it’s over to you. Do you think PC gaming is a dying pastime? Are consoles set to take over the hearts and minds of gamers? Or will World of Warcraft prove to be the one thing that keeps PC gaming from dying off completely?


Creative Commons License photo credit: Tom Lawrence



Plasma speaker looks awesome… in a dangerous way

The following videos shows 2 prototypes of FM modulated plasma arc speakers. Even if plasma speakers aren’t new in any way (they’ve been around since the late 1950’s), it doesn’t make them look any less cool. Just like regular speakers, plasma speakers work by creating compression waves in the air. Enjoy the show!


Does the human brain have hidden super-powers?

By Mark O’Neill

head_and_brain.jpgBeing epileptic, I have had a deep interest in neuroscience for almost twenty years, and one of the most common things we know about the brain is that there’s a lot of things we still DON’T know about it.

But thanks to some accident victims who have subsequently suffered severe brain trauma, scientists have been able to unlock multiple “super-abilities” of the brain, abilities that ALL of us may have lying dormant – and undiscovered – within our heads – Heroes style.

Not all of the test cases owe their remarkable abilities to head injuries though. Some of the people involved are autistic such as Stephen Wiltshire who can glance at something and then make intricate drawings of it. Or Daniel Tammet whose near-fatal epileptic seizures now give him stunning talents including the ability to learn perfectly one of the most difficult languages ever, Icelandic, in only 7 days.

But it is the head injury cases which have excited scientists the most. It seems that damage to the brain has activated these normally dormant abilities and we are then given a startling glimpse into what the human mind is capable of doing.

Watch the following YouTube video to see Daniel Tammet in action doing complex mathematical calculations in his head – and watch him beat the calculator!


Reddit River – a mobile river of stories for Reddit fans

By Mark O’Neill

Digg may get all the relentless fawning but Reddit isn’t that bad either at the end of the day (Mixx is another goodie). I was introduced to Reddit by Kiltak who swears by it.

One other Reddit fan has proved that the love is there by creating a mobile version of the site which is apparently three times lighter than the regular site.

Reddit River is run using Python. It automatically detects mobile versions of all the links on Reddit’s front page and redirects you there when you click on one. For example, if it finds a printable version of a linked article on the Washington post, it sends you there.

This is especially handy if you’re trying to access the page on your phone and speed is of the essence. You don’t want to be standing there with the phone in your hand while it tries to download a large JPG picture of Britney Spears spreading her legs.

Gmail & Outlook Synchronization Service launched

By Mark O’Neill

Mailshadow for GoogleMr William Gates is probably cursing in his Cheerios at the moment. A company called Cemaphore Systems has announced the launch of a new product that will allow Gmail users to completely do away with their Microsoft Exchange servers and run Microsoft Outlook directly from Google servers instead.

Called Mailshadow for Google Apps, it is already being hailed by industry analysts as the product that will make Gmail skyrocket. Since a lot of businesses operate on Outlook, using Mailshadow to synchronise email, address books and calendars will encourage a lot more people to use Gmail and Outlook together for work.

Google has offered Outlook access to Gmail for quite a while, but it seems that Mailshadow is the first product to offer across-the-board synchronization for email, address books and calendars between Microsoft Outlook and Gmail.

What do you think? Is this something you would use?

Comcast does 180 on P2P blocking

By PatB
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

I have written here a few times that Comcast was justified in using traffic shaping to protect equal access among all of their customers.  Because of the aggressiveness of the bittorrent P2P protocol, neighbors on the shared pipe could have experienced slowdowns.  To fix this, Comcast was sending resets on some of the connections to inhibit the full speed of file sharing applications.

But now they have declared that they will reengineer their network to better provide full access and a network neutral position.  So why did they change their minds?  Because of competition.  Verizon worked with P2P vendor Pando to speed up their network’s handling of Bittorrent traffic.  So now Comcast is doing the same.

From the AP here:

Comcast Corp., an Internet service provider under investigation for hampering online file-sharing by its subscribers, announced Thursday an about-face in its stance and said it will treat all types of Internet traffic equally.

Comcast has said that its practices were necessary to keep file-sharing traffic from overwhelming local cable lines, where neighbors share capacity with one another. On Thursday, Comcast said that by the end of the year, it will move to a system that manages capacity without favoring one type of traffic over another.

“This means that we will have to rapidly reconfigure our network management systems, but the outcome will be a traffic management technique that is more appropriate for today’s emerging Internet trends,” Tony Werner, Comcast’s chief technology officer, said in a statement.

Comcast now says it is in talks with BitTorrent Inc., the company founded by the creator of the protocol, to come up with better ways to transport large files over the Internet. The companies said they want to work out these issues privately, without the need for government intervention.

For its part, BitTorrent acknowledged that service providers have to manage their networks somehow, especially during peak times.

“While we think there were other management techniques that could have been deployed, we understand why Comcast and other ISPs adopted the approach that they did initially,” Eric Klinker, BitTorrent’s chief technology officer, said in a statement.

Verizon Communications Inc. two weeks ago announced the results of a collaboration project with Pando Networks, another file-sharing company. By sharing information with Pando, Verizon was able to speed up file-sharing downloads for its subscribers while reducing the strain on its own network.

Note that Comcast did not bow to customer pressure or to the hysterical outrage in the community over net neutrality.  They are simply responding to the natural demands of the market.  When a great competitor like Verizon proves that they can have their P2P cake and eat it too, Comcast would naturally have to follow.  And I think this shows who are the real leaders in this market space.