Check out the tale of Repulsel, Cyanide and Happiness’s hilarious take on the Brothers Grimm’s story of Rapunzel.
Philosoraptor [Pic]
[Via]
Today (10/10/10) Is the Most Important Day In the History of Humanity – #42day
You might not be aware of this yet, but the moment this blog entry was posted (10/10/10 – EST time), the most important day in the history of humanity began. Why? Because today, Planet Earth will finally (I hope!) reveal the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything.
For those of you not in the know, Planet Earth was originally created by a computer named Deep Thought, who after being unable to respond to the ultimate question itself, built our planet as a super-computer to calculate the answer. Now Deep Thought worked on that answer for seven and a half million years, but all he could come up with was one number: 42.
42? What could that number mean? Well geeks, we’ll probably get the response we’ve all been waiting for today!
October 10, 2010 = 10/10/10
101010 (in Binary) = 42
If you think about it, today is the only day for the next century that when transformed into binary can be interpreted as number 42. That must mean something right?
Now folks, let’s all pray REALLY HARD that a bunch of Vogons don’t warp out of Hyperspeed in front of our beloved home to create a hyperspace bypass.
So say we all.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be in my bunk with these charming ladies.
Disconnect to Connect [Video]
This morning, while trying to find new content for the site, I stumbled on this:
So I decided to take the rest of the day off. I suggest you all do the same! :)
Have a great weekend everyone!
The Missing Piece [Cartoon]
[Source: Optipess]
Star Fiction? Pulp Wars? [Pic]
And you will know my name is the Lord (Vader) when I lay my vengeance upon thee – Jules Winnfield.
Spammers not shy about punctuation sneakery
Punctuation can be a beautiful thing, and a wonderful tool in the battle to achieve clarity in communications. But now it appears it can be a tool for evil, as well.
Security firm Symantec reports that spammers are now using a particular type of hyphen to make it easier to get URLs into messages and on web pages without being caught by filters designed to block known links to dubious sites.
The hyphen in question is the soft hyphen. From a visual standpoint it looks exactly the same as a standard hyphen–but to a computer it is a signal that it marks as an acceptable, and perhaps even as a preferred, place to split a word or phrase over two lines if needed.
That can be particularly useful in word processing and desktop publishing, as it avoids the software simply breaking up words to fit and, for example, replacing “therapist” with “the rapist”. (I wish I could say that was a hypothetical example…)
When it comes to HTML, there’s a dedicated code (­) for the soft hyphen, but many browsers are set to hide the character unless it is actually used to break a word over two lines.
The spammers take advantage of this by inserting a soft hyphen in the middle of a URL. The viewer doesn’t see any difference in the address, meaning it looks legitimate (in the sense of being a real website address.) The browser simply ignores it, meaning a click on the link takes the user to the correct address.
But a filter that relies on scanning for bogus links won’t necessarily be able to realize that knownbadsite.com is the same as knownbadsite.com, and thus won’t block the link. (That’s a slightly simplified explanation of the procedure, but the principle is the same.)
The good news is that more advanced URL filters can work around the problem. It’s also likely that HTML 5 will limit the issue by making sure all browsers interpret HTML code in the same way.
World’s Youngest Astrophysicist Shares His Thoughts on the Universe
This video was created by Youtube user onesleekblackcat as an entry for Rose Center’s 10 year anniversary video contest. I’m not exactly how old this young fellow is, but his future sure does look promising!