Your guide to interesting stuff
Scientists are studying the sounds of the magnitude 9.3 earthquake in the Indian Ocean that killed thousands several months back. The sounds were picked up by the microphones located in Diego Garcia, located more than 1700 miles from the epicenter, and with the sounds, the scientists are gaining insight about the quake.
Link: CNN.com.
Citibank Malaysia has recently modified the way user logs into the system. Instead of typing in the PIN number, the users now need to press the buttons like how you usually do at ATM. The numbers of the “keypad”, however are scrambled in random order.
This I believe, is to prevent keyloggers from harvesting PIN numbers. SSL alone cannot ensure your transaction is safe. Keyloggers are programs that run invisibly in the background, recording all the keystrokes, usually saving the results to a log file. There are zillions of ways for a keylogger to infest in your PC without you knowing it.
I guess this works for now. But the more aggressive keyloggers now capture screenshots in addition to keystrokes. It should not be so difficult for the keyloggers to capture a screenshot whenever the keydown event is fired.
The shortfall to this approach is, it’s only practical for numeric PINs. It will be a real nuisance to key in an alphanumeric password with a QWERTY keypad on screen, let alone the keys have been scrambled.
Link: Citibank Malaysia.
Sixty years after the first atomic bomb test, a group of California artists opposed to the continued existence of nuclear weapons commemorated the event by setting off a simulated nuclear blast in the Nevada desert.
Link: Wired News, Simnuke.org.
This game is a test of hand-eye coordination and reaction times. The game is based on the DDR (Dance dance revolution) games and is set to a Crazy Frog tune.
Link: Crazy Fox Remix.
MusicMoz is a comprehensive directory of all things music, edited by volunteers. We list, and accept submissions of, music-related reviews, articles, factual information, biographies, and websites.
Link: Musicmoz.
The MDI Air Car is a car that runs on compressed air, capable of running up to 120km/h and has the driving range of 200-300km.
When you run out of, er, air, you need to recharge it from an, er, air station.
Link: The Air Car (via).
Google Maps have extended to the moon. Sort of. Not all moon surfaces are covered. In fact, you can only see a fraction of them. Previous landings of the Apollos are marked.
Update: There is a hidden easter egg: try to zoom your map to the maximum level.
Link: Google Moon.
Do you skype? Today is a Free Skypeout day, and they are giving away 10 minutes of free airtime to members. Not much, but it’s useful for those who haven’t purchased any Skypeout airtime before, and you get to test the quality.
For your information, Skypeout lets you call from a PC to landline or mobile numbers around the world. Hurry, offer is valid for 24 hours only.
Link: Skype.
Need any of those? I have more than a handful of Yahoo 360, Gmail and Wallop invites to give away. If you need one, feel free to drop me an email.
Update: Yahoo 360 is already open to public.
Mozilla has released Firefox and Thunderbird 1.0.6. These releases fix several security holes.
Link: Mozilla.
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