Author Archives: Tigr

Olympics 2012

I wonder, is it only my personal impression or Olympics 2012 is really quite a bit understated and under-promoted? I have a feeling that all previous Olympics were going up the curve in terms of publicity, advertisements and public expectations.

This time… it feels like if the world has a lot on its mind and could not care much for a yet another Olympics. Weird.

Kinda related :)
  • Hottest Female Athletes in the Olympics 2012
  • The naughty 2012 Olympics logo
… --> continue reading →

Murders, rapes and walking in the dark

Bumped into some statistics today and found it interesting enough to share:

  • Murders (per capita) by country
  • Rapes (per capita) by country
  • Walking in the dark by country

Not obvious a priori, say?

I picked out some for you:

Country Safety Perception Murder rank Rape rank Sweden 85% #16 Canada 82% United States 82% Denmark 81% #14 Finland 81% #12 #7 Netherlands 81% #25 Japan 78% #45 Austria 78% #28 Switzerland 77% #20 France 77% #27 Belgium 77% #17 #3 United Kingdom 70% Italy 65% #21 Australia 64% #18 New Zealand 62% #29 #2… --> continue reading →

Some farmers they are

Historically, farmers tended to try and defend their crops, sometimes with weapons, sometimes with the tools of trade. But this is still amazing, as Reuters reports that:

Farmers armed with assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars forced Lebanese government troops to abandon an operation to destroy their illegal cannabis crop in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley on Monday

Farmers? With mortars and rocket-propelled grenades? Those are some farmers, I tell you.… -->

continue reading →

Portugal: don’t jump to conclusions but…

I just noticed an interesting article over at Forbes about the “Owners of Portugal” documentary. The article pointed to a couple of extremely interesting charts. And, although it asks not to jump to conclusions I find that, not jumping to conclusions, extremely hard to do.

The charts in question are: the big family and 30 years, 115 members of the government.

Check for yourself, I bet you’ll start jumping to conclusions!… -->

continue reading →

McDonald’s sucks ever more

Well, that’s a good thing I do not go to McDonald’s to eat, it seems you are opening yourself to physical abuse by stepping over their threshold. Dr. Steve Mann, inventor and engineer of the Glass Eye technology that helps partially blind people to see gets thrown out of McDonald’s for wearing his own invention. I do hope you will heed the warning and stay away from that evil, evil place!… -->

continue reading →

Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They are From Nigeria?

A very interesting paper was published at Microsoft Research by Cormac Herley. It looks at the question “Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They are From Nigeria?” and comes out with an unavoidable conclusion that that is by design.

Far-fetched tales ofWest African riches
strike most as comical. Our analysis suggests that is an
advantage to the attacker, not a disadvantage. Since
his attack has a low density of victims the Nigerian
scammer has an over-riding need to reduce false positives.
By sending an email that repels all but the most
gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to
self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his
favor.

An interesting consequence of which is that even if only few people take the trouble to answer those scam letters but never actually go through with the money transfer, the Nigerian Scam would become prohibitively expensive to run.… -->

continue reading →

Holy Hash! Yahoo! keeps passwords in clear!

Washington Post reports on the Yahoo password database leak, the auditors say that Yahoo stores passwords in clear text. I am shocked.

I mean, how more silly can you get? We have been talking about not storing passwords in clear for, oh, I don’t know, ages now. Definitely long enough to expect that nobody in the right mind would do such nonsense any longer.

We do expect an occasional idiocy like the recent discovery that LinkedIn stores passwords hashed with a weak algorithm and not following the security recommendations. Fine, but just storing the passwords in clear is beyond such simple fallacy, this is almost like intentionally evil.

We know that sites get broken into. If a site has not been broken into, it is just a matter of time. And the more prominent sites are, of course, prime targets and should expect the break-ins like everyday business.

When the break-in occurs, the first thing attackers would go after are credit card numbers and other monetary assets. Next on the list are the password databases. And that’s why the passwords are never stored in plain, they are never encrypted, they are hashed. One-way hash, properly done, is a good way to keep passwords safe even when they get stolen.… -->

continue reading →

A manly incentive

This is certanily an unorthodox way of providing incentives to the salesforce. BBC reports that Ergo, a large insurance company, held a party for salesmen where they were rewarded with the services of prostitutes. Most entertaining, I presume, but rather disastrous for the company image, don’t you reckon?… -->

continue reading →