SAN JOSE — Microsoft Corp. has taken the rare step of warning about a serious security vulnerability it hasn't fixed yet.
The vulnerability disclosed Monday affects Internet Explorer users whose computers run the Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 operating software.
It can allow hackers to remotely take control of victims' machines. The victims don't need to do anything to get infected except visit a Web site that's been hacked.
Security experts say criminals have been attacking the vulnerability for nearly a week.
Microsoft says it's working on a "patch" — a software fix. Until that's released, the company is urging vulnerable users to disable the problematic part of its software, which can be done from Microsoft's Web site.
___
On the Net:
Microsoft support page:
http://tinyurl.com/kwh8ls
What a hoot! I bet it brightened her day up no end, at least right up until she was arrested.
Money quote: "The criminal complaint said the suspect told investigators she wanted to scare her grandmother but didn't want her dead. She said she knew it was wrong but not illegal."
The world's oldest known Christian Bible goes online Monday -- but the 1,600-year-old text doesn't match the one you'll find in churches today.
Discovered in a monastery in the Sinai desert in Egypt more than 160 years ago, the handwritten Codex Sinaiticus includes two books that are not part of the official New Testament and at least seven books that are not in the Old Testament.
The New Testament books are in a different order, and include numerous handwritten corrections -- some made as much as 800 years after the texts were written, according to scholars who worked on the project of putting the Bible online. The changes range from the alteration of a single letter to the insertion of whole sentences.
And some familiar -- very important -- passages are missing, including verses dealing with the resurrection of Jesus, they said.
Juan Garces, the British Library project curator, said it should be no surprise that the ancient text is not quite the same as the modern one, since the Bible has developed and changed over the years."
The FBI says that it is absolutely, positively, not investigating Sarah Palin. Is anyone surprised?
Here is a rundown of the various health care reform plans being bandied about in Washington right now.
Drug bust nets heroin stuffed in Build-A-Bear toys
A dozen people have been arrested, and 33 pounds of heroin worth $30 million and stuffed inside Build-A-Bear toys has been seized in a drug bust in the Bronx.
Take your pick now: Either Honduras' swift coup was months in the making or there was no 'coup' in Honduras.
Texas brewer, once near defeat, shines again
By all accounts, Shiner beer shouldn't have made it this long. The Spoetzl Brewery ferments its brew in a one-stoplight town that's not on the way to anywhere, and much larger regional brewers long ago succumbed to consolidation and the muscle of national brewers.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
theneiadmuse has gone in for a body mod that requires the help of a professional, but required no tattooing or surgery. Go check out her elf ears.FDA warns against use of Hardcore, New Whey drinks
The Food and Drug Administration is warning consumers not to buy two types of energy drinks packaged in test-tube like vials, saying that utility knife blades were found in two vials in an apparent case of tampering.
The FDA said Sunday that the blades were found in one vial each of Hardcore Energize Bullet drink and New Whey liquid products. Both are being recalled, according to the FDA.
Hardcore Energize Bullet is manufactured by Protica Inc., of Whitehall, Pa. It is sold in Canada in two flavors, Blue Rage and Black Rush. Protica is investigating the incident.
New Whey is made and sold in the United States by IDS of Oviedo, Fla. It comes in two flavors, fruit punch and blue raspberry.
No injuries have been reported as a result of the tampering.
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roadriverrail points out, via the community ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
the_recession, that Sweden has just set new interest rates. New negative interest rates.
They're charging people money for the privilege of keeping their money in the banks.
This happens in a week. Original data here. The money(!!) quote is:
The deposit rate is at the same time cut to -0.25 per cent and the lending rate to 0.75 per cent.
Some commentary here.
I got introduced to Debra Hunter. She's a fascinating woman; she founded Missouri Militia One (which does not have a web site, as it's a clandestine unit) while she was still in Junior High. MMO was formed for the express purpose of exposing the truth about Operation Paperclip, which was a covert operation which brought German (and occasionally Nazi) scientists to the US after WWII.
Included among the charter members of Missouri Militia One were Elvis Presley, Eric Clapton, and Carlos Santana. She knew the latter two because they sought her out in her Junior High and asked her to marry them (individually, I think, not as a group thing); her principled response to both was "I might not marry either one of you but I might want a lovechild someday. If you come back when I'm sixteen I'll give ya guys a kiss."
She's since had love children by both of them (one son with Carlos, and a later set of twins with Carlos, two sets of twins with Eric) but she doesn't know where most of those children are and she's unlikely to find out, since the FBI has forbidden both those men to contact her.
The FBI is upset with her group because she exposed Operation Paperclip. If you're now thinking that Operation Paperclip is a fairly well-documented event and not being covered up, that's because the government, in order to throw you off the track, revealed only part of the truth, that German scientists were given US citizenship in exchange for work and nuclear secrets. What the government doesn't want you to know is that they also garnered mind control secrets from those people, and that they experimented on human subjects.
Debra says: "I was one of tens of thousands of victims of that Operation and intended to make sure we had evidence on the human traffic and experimentation the US gov was invovled [sic] in. The gov was also involved in child porn and child prostitution and mass murder and the CIA also controlled the drug and weapons trade."
Actually, you can just read all about it on Ms. Hunter's MySpace page, where she goes by her other name, Layla Clapton Santana. And before you start in with any doubts, she explains that "I know how far out there my story is to people who don't know Jesus."
So don't doubt. Convert. Or just be grateful that *your* brain doesn't treat you this way.
siderea, it's funny for some and a leetle bit too true to be funny for others:How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Relationship
Several years ago Pat Love Ed.D. and Sunny Shulkin Ph.D., two Imago trainers and therapists, published a book titled How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Relationship. Below is part of their list of some behaviors they identify which can, indeed, ruin a relationship:
- Control everything and everyone
- Never take the blame yourself; instead, make your partner wrong
- Make it a habit to spend more money than you have
- Win every fight, even the ones you couldn’t care less about
- Keep score
- Use threat often
- Find your partner’s weak spot and use it against him/her
- When your partner tries to please you, find fault with their efforts
- Hold fast to the belief: “If you loved me you would know what I want”
- Demand your partner remain faithful but refuse to meet his or her sexual needs
- Use silence as a weapon
- Pretend that you don’t hear
- When your partner tries to apologize, bring up more complaints
- Refuse to give information
- When you realize you haven’t given your partner some important info, insist that you did
- Claim to be the only one interested in the relationship
- Never ask for help
- Confide only in friends
- Take it personally when your partner wants time alone
- Discount your partner’s physical complaints
- Give advice where it isn’t welcome
- Never pick up after yourself
- Refuse to seek help for your depression
- Refuse to talk
- Focus on changing your partner
- Focus all your needs on sex
- Take all problems as further proof that the relationship will not work
- Put your friends before your partner
- Keep romantic gestures to a minimum
- Focus on your partner’s faults and deny your own
- Let days go by without a kind word or loving gesture
- Practice verbal abuse
- Do not listen to your partner’s ideas or suggestions
- Ask your partner to share feelings and when s/he does, EXPLODE
- Start conversations when your partner is busy, or better yet, exhausted
- Let disagreements fester
- Say what you think your partner wants to hear, then do as you please
Copyright 2008 Florham Park Counseling.
Shades of the Wild West, except that even Wyatt Earp didn't let people carry guns in bars.
Mississippi's still fattest but Alabama is closing in:
Mississippi's still king of cellulite, but an ominous tide is rolling toward the Medicare doctors in neighboring Alabama: obese baby boomers.
On the outskirts of Lusaka, Zambia, next year's crop of bicycles is being watered by Benjamin Banda. From bush to bike: a bamboo revolution
Ancient DNA used to map extinct bird's colors
NPR plays obscene word games. The issue is whether or not waterboarding is torture; their answer is that, despite the fact that people have been convicted of war crimes for doing it, because the people who ordered it said it wasn't torture, that raises a reasonable doubt.
[...]I believe that it is not the role of journalists to take sides or to characterize things.
[...]
But no matter how many distinguished groups -- the International Red Cross, the U.N. High Commissioners -- say waterboarding is torture, there are responsible people who say it is not. Former President Bush, former Vice President Cheney, their staff and their supporters obviously believed that waterboarding terrorism suspects was necessary to protect the nation's security.
One can disagree strongly with those beliefs and their actions. But they are due some respect for their views, which are shared by a portion of the American public. So, it is not an open-and-shut case that everyone believes waterboarding to be torture. Many in NPR's audience obviously believe it is, but others do not.
Christ on a motorcycle. I don't know how to respond to that bit of bullshit.
Los Angeles County prosecutors allege that a convicted sex offender tried to extort a teenager by demanding cash or sex for the return of her lost dog.
Iowa fair to have butter statue of Michael Jackson
Boy steals from ambulance as paramedics are treating his mother
A boy was arrested over the weekend on charges of stealing from an ambulance while paramedics were treating his mother.
Frankly, I might have done the same thing if someone had lit up in my house after being asked not to, even if that person *did* live here too: Man drenches wife with hose for smoking
Authorities said a man has been charged with domestic battery after he drenched his wife with a garden hose and elbowed her for smoking in the house.
Protection sought again for giant, spitting worms
Yes, you read that right. Protection FOR, not protection FROM.
Western Michigan University student William K. Bradley was sentenced for larceny in a building. He stole a computer. From the Kalamazoo County jail. Where he already was serving a sentence in a different case.
Chosen for Public Information Value: FDA Panel may recommend pulling some acetaminophen drugs
A government advisory panel began voting Tuesday on recommendations for reducing the risk of serious liver injury associated with acetaminophen, found in over-the-counter drugs such as Tylenol and NyQuil.
The panel, assembled by the Food and Drug Administration, is weighing several options, including reducing recommended dosages of acetaminophen or pulling combination drugs, such as NyQuil, from stores' shelves entirely.
Next time you're in Britain, check your change
The Royal Mint admits it's made a rare error, producing coins without a date on them for the first time in centuries.
The mint said Monday that at least 100,000 of the year-less 20-pence coins, normally worth 33 U.S. cents at face value, slipped into circulation at the end of last year.
If found, one coin would garner hundreds of times more on the collectors' market.
Masons' spat over black inductee spills into court
There are a few prerequisites for anyone applying to be a Freemason: You must be a man, you can't be a slave, you must have good character and you must have faith in a supreme being.
Those broad rules have allowed some of the more progressive chapters in the centuries-old fraternal organization, such as Atlanta's Gate City Lodge No. 2, to fill their ranks with diverse members.
The chapter's leaders say that racial harmony was threatened recently when other Freemasons sought to revoke the lodge's charter for allowing Victor Marshall, who is black, to join up. The dispute has drawn the normally secretive group into a rare public battle.
( Article Under Cut )
The ability of people to justify their bizarre actions will probably never cease to amaze me.
Hyundai offers $1.49 gas guarantee for buyers
Hyundai said Tuesday that customers in the U.S. who buy or lease its vehicles by Aug. 31 will receive a gas card that lets them buy fuel at $1.49 a gallon for a year, a promotion to win over consumers worried about volatile prices at the pump.
The most complete terrain map of the Earth's surface ever has been published.
The images were taken by Japan's Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (Aster) aboard the Terra satellite. The resulting Global Digital Elevation Map covers 99% of the Earth's surface, and will be free to download and use.
It's that time of year again: The results of the 2009 Bulwer-Lytton contest have been announced.
,blockquote>Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the "Ellie May," a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.</blockquote>
Colorado beef company expands recall due to possible E. coli
Swedish parents keep 2-year-old's gender secret
In an interview with newspaper Svenska Dagbladet in March, the parents were quoted saying their decision was rooted in the feminist philosophy that gender is a social construction.
"We want Pop to grow up more freely and avoid being forced into a specific gender mould from the outset," Pop's mother said. "It's cruel to bring a child into the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead."
Toyota technology has brain waves move wheelchair
More people are unemployed in every US city, and home prices dropped 18.1% in April. The only reason to post those links is so that you can go get a giggle out of the positive spin that the writers are trying to put on this news. People are training for modern high-tech jobs now! The housing market is clearly stabilizing! Blech.
Also, the recession is all our fault because we are immoral and debauched. That link is a hoot; thanks to
vivian_shaw.Sears Holdings to start buyer protection program
Sears said Tuesday that it plans to offer a buyer protection program for its home appliances to help consumers who lose their jobs during the recession.
The free program, which starts Monday and runs through Aug. 1, covers appliance purchases of more than $399 made on a Sears card by cardholders who lose their job. Cardholders must have held a full-time job for at least 60 days when the appliance was purchased.
If a customer loses his or her job, the program will credit 1/12th of the purchase price to the account for each month the cardholder is out of work. If the person is still out of work one year after the purchase, he or she will receive an account credit for what's left of the purchase amount and get to keep the appliance without any further payment obligations.
All home appliance brands are included in the deal, such as Kenmore, LG, GE, Samsung and Whirlpool, according to Sears Holdings Corp. which is led by financier Edward Lampert.
The program also includes service agreements, installation, delivery and other items as long as they were bought with the appliance.
Sears has about 3,900 full-line and specialty retail stores in the U.S. and Canada.
Have a nice day!
Well, I would have if I weren't lying on the tracks trying to "clear my mind."
Money quote: "The train's operator told police he tried to stop."
Ah, Birmingham, you never fail to amuse.
Drug-resistant swine flu seen in Danish patient
ATLANTA — Health officials have confirmed a case of swine flu that is resistant to Tamiflu, the leading pharmaceutical weapon against the new virus.
This isn't a reason to panic and it's not unusual. The strain developed in this one guy and hasn't spread to anyone else. It is far from the first flu variation to develop such resistances, and, frankly, the only reason this matters is because we haven't--yet--developed a vaccine for this variant.
Still, in the meantime: Wash your hands often, ok? Thanks.
juliarandolph sent me this story from the Scientific American: Weed-Whacking Herbicide Proves Deadly to Human Cells
Used in gardens, farms, and parks around the world, the weed killer Roundup contains an ingredient that can suffocate human cells in a laboratory, researchers say
Used in yards, farms and parks throughout the world, Roundup has long been a top-selling weed killer. But now researchers have found that one of Roundup's inert ingredients can kill human cells, particularly embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells.
The new findings intensify a debate about so-called "inerts" — the solvents, preservatives, surfactants and other substances that manufacturers add to pesticides. Nearly 4,000 inert ingredients are approved for use by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Glyphosate, Roundup's active ingredient, is the most widely used herbicide in the United States. About 100 million pounds are applied to U.S. farms and lawns every year, according to the EPA.
Until now, most health studies have focused on the safety of glyphosate, rather than the mixture of ingredients found in Roundup. But in the new study, scientists found that Roundup's inert ingredients amplified the toxic effect on human cells—even at concentrations much more diluted than those used on farms and lawns.
One specific inert ingredient, polyethoxylated tallowamine, or POEA, was more deadly to human embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells than the herbicide itself – a finding the researchers call "astonishing."
"This clearly confirms that the [inert ingredients] in Roundup formulations are not inert," wrote the study authors from France's University of Caen. "Moreover, the proprietary mixtures available on the market could cause cell damage and even death [at the] residual levels" found on Roundup-treated crops, such as soybeans, alfalfa and corn, or lawns and gardens.
The research team suspects that Roundup might cause pregnancy problems by interfering with hormone production, possibly leading to abnormal fetal development, low birth weights or miscarriages.
Monsanto, Roundup's manufacturer, contends that the methods used in the study don't reflect realistic conditions and that their product, which has been sold since the 1970s, is safe when used as directed. Hundreds of studies over the past 35 years have addressed the safety of glyphosate.
"Roundup has one of the most extensive human health safety and environmental data packages of any pesticide that's out there," said Monsanto spokesman John Combest. "It's used in public parks, it's used to protect schools. There's been a great deal of study on Roundup, and we're very proud of its performance."
The EPA considers glyphosate to have low toxicity when used at the recommended doses.
"Risk estimates for glyphosate were well below the level of concern," said EPA spokesman Dale Kemery. The EPA classifies glyphosate as a Group E chemical, which means there is strong evidence that it does not cause cancer in humans.
In addition, the EPA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture both recognize POEA as an inert ingredient. Derived from animal fat, POEA is allowed in products certified organic by the USDA. The EPA has concluded that it is not dangerous to public health or the environment.
The French team, led by Gilles-Eric Seralini, a University of Caen molecular biologist, said its results highlight the need for health agencies to reconsider the safety of Roundup.
"The authorizations for using these Roundup herbicides must now clearly be revised since their toxic effects depend on, and are multiplied by, other compounds used in the mixtures," Seralini's team wrote.
Controversy about the safety of the weed killer recently erupted in Argentina, one of the world's largest exporters of soy.
( Rest of Article Under Cut )
Well, there's the next thing they won't be allowing on airplanes . . .
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