Egyptian names his daughter Facebook
WIKINEWS claims: An Egyptian man in his early twenties has named his newborn daughter ‘Facebook’ following the 2011 Egyptian Revolutionwhich was almost solely organized on the social-networking site Facebook. The father, Gamal Ibrahim, told the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram that he gave his child the name to “express his joy at the achievements made by the January 25 youth.”
Fake Apple Stores in China
You have already guessed the punchline, of course: this was a total Apple store ripoff. A beautiful ripoff – a brilliant one – the best ripoff store we had ever seen (and we see them every day). But some things were just not right: the stairs were poorly made. The walls hadn’t been painted properly.
Apple never writes “Apple Store” on it’s signs – it just puts up the glowing, iconic fruit.
Story at Bird Abroad (Via BoingBoing)
Report accidentally finds pirate movie website to be full of law abiding citizens
In June, police across several countries raided the operators of streaming video links portal Kino.to. This massive operation was one of the largest of its type and site admins and users alike were branded as enemies of the TV and movie business. However, it now appears that in respect of the latter group, the opposite was found to be true.
The June raids against Kino.to, which involved as many as 250 police and other authorities, dwarfed even the 2006 raids against The Pirate Bay.
Following the event the Kino.to site displayed notices which stated that the site had been “closed on suspicion of forming a criminal organization to commit professional copyright infringement.” While noting that several operators of the site had been arrested, it also criticized the site’s users.
“Internet users who illegally pirated or distributed copies of films may be subjected to a criminal prosecution,” read the warning.
But were the site’s users all criminals hell-bent on destroying the movie industry? According to a report from Telepolis, a recent study found the reverse was true. This, the survey claims, leads pirate site users to buy more DVDs, visit the cinema more often and on average spend more than their ‘honest’ counterparts at the box office.
“The users often buy a ticket to the expensive weekend-days,” the report notes.
In the past similar studies have revealed that the same is true for music. People who pirate a lot of music buy significantly more music than those who don’t.
Full report at Torrent Freak
Spacecraft Visits Giant Asteroid This Weekend
A spacecraft launched in 2007 will soon slide into orbit around Vesta, the solar system’s second-heaviest asteroid.
Located 117 million miles from Earth, Vesta has a circumference of 329 miles. When NASA’s Dawn spacecraft arrives over the weekend of July 16, it will be the first human object to visit.
“It has taken nearly four years to get to this point,” said Dawn project manager Robert Mase of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a press release. “Our latest tests and check-outs show that Dawn is right on target and performing normally.”
Dawn navigated toward the asteroid belt, a space rock-rich zone between the solar system’s inner and outer planets, using gravitational energy from Mars and by firing its ion-powered thrusters. Its arrival at Vesta is expected at 1:00 a.m. EDT on July 16.
It will take 10 minutes and 30 seconds — the time it takes light from Vesta to reach Earth — for engineers to know if the operation succeeded.
Full Story at Wired
Trial, error and the God complex (video)
Economics writer Tim Harford studies complex systems — and finds a surprising link among the successful ones: they were built through trial and error. In this sparkling talk from TEDGlobal 2011, he asks us to embrace our randomness and start making better mistakes.
LulzSec Hacks The Sun Newspaper homepage
Looks like hacker group LulzSec is back in action, this time redirecting the homepage of the Murdoch-owned The Sun to a fake story about Murdoch’s death from a drug overdose located on the UK Time’s URL http://www.new-times.co.uk/sun. They then redirected The Sun’s homepage to the @LuzSec Twitter account. (The original page is archived at http://freze.it/pX)
The fake story was meant to mirror an actual The Sun story about the latest development in the Murdoch/New Corp/News of the World mess, “Ex News of the World journalist found dead.” After about 10 minutes of being up (and I swear the real Sun homepage was redirecting) the fake story was been pulled from the UK Times site.
Full Story by Tech Crunch
Climate sceptic Lord Monckton told to stop claiming he’s a member of the House of Lords
The House of Lords has taken the unprecedented step of publishing a “cease and desist” letter on its website demanding that Lord Christopher Monckton, a prominent climate sceptic and the UK Independence party’s head of research, should stop claiming to be a member of the upper house.
The move follows a testy interview given by Monckton to an Australian radio station earlier this month in which he repeated his long-stated belief that he is a member of the House of Lords. When asked by ABC Sydney’s Adam Spencer if he was a member, he said: “Yes, but without the right to sit or vote … [The Lords] have not yet repealed by act of parliament the letters patent creating the peerage and until they do I am a member of the house, as my passport records. It says I am the Right Honourable Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. So get used to it.”
Last year, the then clerk of the parliaments, Michael Pownall, wrote to Monckton stressing that he was not entitled to call himself a member, nor should he use parliament’s famous portcullis symbol on his letterheads or lecture slides, as he has done for a number of years.
Full story at The Guardian
70 year old woman sued for “porn piracy”
For those who believe that using the BitTorrent protocol for piracy is a young person’s game, you might want to know about a San Francisco woman risking a potential $150,000 fine for torrenting porn. She’s 70 years old, you see.
Of course, she claims to not even know what BitTorrent is, but who can believe the word of a thief? Well, as you might expect, the case isn’t exactly a slam dunk. The anonymous 70-year-old was named as part of a lawsuit against multiple users for illegally downloading adult material, but she believes that someone else was using her unsecured Wi-Fi to do so.
Refusing to pay the $3,400 settlement requested by the lawsuit, the woman plans to go to court and explain to the judge what’s what.
Full article at Techland
Watch the worlds largest fish tank on web cam
Courtesy of Shark Week at the Discovery Channel
