How much time do you have to read the privacy policies you encounter?
In The Cost of Reading Privacy Policies, by Aleecia M. McDonald and Lorrie Faith Cranor, the authors calculate that the average Internet user would have to spend one full working month per year in order to skim all the Internet privacy policies she encounters in a year. Mike Masnick reports on Techdirt…
Continue reading… “Reading all the privacy policies you “agree” to would take a month per year”
Mike Mann has been snapping up Internet domain names and selling them off to the highest bidder for years.
Mike Mann is one of the longest members of the world of domain speculators, and he’s buying up names in force these days. Not all of them are on the aftermarket, as some other speculators buy domain names. They are new names. Dot-com names that aren’t registered — even though 100 million-plus already are — that he then turns around and sells for a few hundred bucks, sometimes far more.
Continue reading… “Mike Mann registers 14,962 domain names in 24 hours”
If you were ever curious as to how much body parts can fetch on the black market,Medical Transcription created a snazzy infographic to show you. Some parts are shockingly cheap! Like would you want a new shoulder or a new iPad? Both cost 500 bucks.
Other organs are prohibitively expensive, like a kidney. That little sucker costs $262,000 in the US (other countries have it for cheaper)! Here’s the full list of body parts and their cost…
Continue reading… “Here’s how much body parts cost on the Black Market”
Dr. Julie Palais (left), NSF-OPP Glaciology Program Manager, and Anais Orsi (right) inside a back-lit snow pit at WAIS Divide
Because of global warming, ice sheets in Antarctica are melting and ancient creatures, which have been trapped there for hundreds of thousands of years, are being released into the world.
A well-worn premise for a sci-fi movie? No, actually – it’s happening for real…
Continue reading… “Ancient bacteria emerge from melting ice sheets”
Signs of the impact on the regional ecosystem are ominous: mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp – and scientists and fishermen point fingers towards BP’s oil as being the cause.
Two years after BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, fishermen are finding deformed fish and mutant shrimp in their seafood catch…
Continue reading… “The aftermath of BP oil spill: mutant seafood”
When life begin to look like the Matrix, it’s time to pause and drink the wine.
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Quote of the Day: “The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out, it’s just sort of a tired feeling.” – – Paula Poundstone
Continue reading… “Top 10 Photos of the Week”
Pot holes pepper highways everywhere.
Fixing a hole in a road should be easy—but the fact that our nation’s highways are littered with potholes is testament to the fact that it’s not quite as straightforward as it sounds. But a new solution, inspired by silly putty, could make our streets much smoother in the future.
In fact, the idea—developed by students from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland—has won an engineering contest, reports Science. But prize-winning or not, the idea of mending a road with something like silly putty sounds like madness, right?
Continue reading… “The future of pothole repair is Silly Putty”
CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011 (H.R. 3523), is a successor, of sorts, to the loathesome SOPA legislative proposal, which was shot down in flames earlier this year. EFF’s chilling analysis of the bill shows how it could be used to give copyright enforcers carte blanche to spy on Internet users and censoring the Internet (it would also give these powers to companies and governments who’d been embarrassed by sites like Wikileaks).
Continue reading… “CISPA is SOPA 2.0”
The dead want an iPhone?
Apple’s iPhone is so popular in China that even the dead want one! It’s the latest trend in burnt paper offering, a distinctly Chinese tradition where Hell Bank Notes, and paper items resembling cars, luxury villas, computers and so on, are burnt to send to the deceased…
Continue reading… “Paper iPhones as burnt offerings for the dead”
Keyboard Flip-Flops
The Thailand shoe company, Kito, has designed the Keyboard Flip-Flops which quite literally put computer keyboards on your feet. Of course the keyboards don’t actually work, but they’re realistic enough to give onlookers a reason to take a second glance. Will you potentially look really stupid to the fashion forward? Yes, quite possibly. But for a price of just $1.20 a pair, a few weird looks is worth having the most hacker-friendly feet in your neighborhood. (Video)
Continue reading… “Keyboard Flip-Flops”
Two young sweat shop workers on a smoke break,
huddled under an umbrella to talk rainbows and politics.
Quote of the Day: “I have tried to know absolutely nothing about a great many things, and I have succeeded fairly well.” – – Robert Benchley
Continue reading… “Top 10 Photos of the Week”
Does this equation makes sense?
Apple costs over $600 a share, and has nearly an unfathomable $100 billion in cash lying around. So is it any wonder its CEO is paid more than the national wealth of a small island nation?
Continue reading… “Tim Cook makes more than the GDP of the Kingdom of Tonga”