Fun Toads

Facebook apps leaked users' personal data to advertisers, other third parties, for years

noreply@blogger.com (Desperado) — Wed, 11 May 2011 00:07:00 -0700

A Facebook security hole allowed advertisers and other third parties to access user accounts and personal data, according to a blog post today from internet security firm Symantec. They identify the exposure as having been active for as long as Facebook has offered applications on its platform, beginning in 2007— so, four years.
That unintended access included "profiles, photographs, chat, and the ability to post messages and mine personal information," wrote Symantec's Nishant Doshi, who is credited with finding the issue along with colleague Candid Wueest. "Fortunately, these third-parties may not have realized their ability to access this information."

Facebook today said the problem has been fixed, and there is no evidence that any actual private data was leaked. More from the Symantec post:

Symantec has discovered that in certain cases, Facebook IFRAME applications inadvertently leaked access tokens to third parties like advertisers or analytic platforms. We estimate that as of April 2011, close to 100,000 applications were enabling this leakage. We estimate that over the years, hundreds of thousands of applications may have inadvertently leaked millions of access tokens to third parties.
Access tokens are like 'spare keys' granted by you to the Facebook application. Applications can use these tokens or keys to perform certain actions on behalf of the user or to access the user's profile. Each token or 'spare key' is associated with a select set of permissions, like reading your wall, accessing your friend's profile, posting to your wall, etc.

Triple Cheetah Cute Sound Madness

noreply@blogger.com (Desperado) — Tue, 10 May 2011 23:42:00 -0700

Now we don’t wanna overload you on cat videos, but we’ve got a perfect pair for you here today. What’s the problem with kittens? They turn into cats and they get a little less cute. But cheetahs seem to have solved this problem by retaining their cuteness into adulthood. Case in point:

Why Microsoft is Buying Skype for $8.5 Billion

noreply@blogger.com (Desperado) — Tue, 10 May 2011 23:07:00 -0700

midnight: Microsoft has bought Skype for $8.5 billion, in an all cash deal. The deal closed a few hours ago.
is close to finalizing a deal to buy Skype for between $7 billion to $8 billion
. The Wall Street Journal confirmed the news after we had first reported it yesterday. The announcement is likely to come out later today or tomorrow morning, according to several reports. Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft is said to be a big champion of the deal, the largest in the history of the company. Ballmer and Skype CEO Tony Bates will host a press conference in a few hours.
Skype has been up for sale for some time, thanks to some very antsy investors. My sources indicated that the both eBay and Silver Lake Partners have been getting nervous about the delayed initial public offering and have been pushing for a sale of Skype. Facebook and Google were said to be earlier dance partners for Skype, and Microsoft was a late entrant and is now close to walking away with the prize.
It won’t surprise me if Microsoft comes in for major heat on this decision to buy Skype — and the software company could always botch this purchase, as it often does when it buys a company. The Skype team is also full of hired guns who are likely to move on to the next opportunity rather than dealing with the famed Microsoft bureaucracy.
I also don’t believe that Facebook and Google were serious buyers. Google, with its Google Voice offering, doesn’t really need Skype. In essence, I feel that Microsoft was bidding against itself. Even then, I personally think this is a bet worth taking, especially for a company that has been left out in the cold for so long.

Skype gives Microsoft a boost in the enterprise collaboration market, thanks to Skype’s voice, video and sharing capabilities, especially when competing with Cisco and Google.
It gives Microsoft a working relationship with carriers, many of them looking to partner with Skype as they start to transition to LTE-based networks.
It would give them a must-have application/service that can help with the adoption of the future versions of Windows Mobile operating system.
However, the biggest reason for Microsoft to buy Skype is Windows Phone 7 (Mobile OS) and Nokia. The software giant needs a competitive offering to Google Voice and Apple’s emerging communication platform, Facetime.

Guess Who’s The Big Winner
The biggest winner of this deal could actually be Facebook. The Palo Alto-based social networking giant had little or no chance of buying Skype. Had it been public, it would have been a different story. With Microsoft, it gets the best of both worlds — it gets access to Skype assets (Microsoft is an investor in Facebook) and it gets to keep Skype away from Google.
Facebook needs Skype badly. Among other things, it needs to use Skype’s peer-to-peer network to offer video and voice services to the users of Facebook Chat. If the company had to use conventional methods and offer voice and video service to its 600 million plus customers, the cost and overhead of operating the infrastructure would be prohibitive.
Facebook can also help Skype get more customers for its SkypeOut service, and it can have folks use Facebook Credits to pay for Skype minutes. Skype and Facebook are working on a joint announcement and you can expect it shortly.
Why Did Skype Want To Sell?
Skype had filed for an IPO and was going to do about a billion dollars in revenues and was on its way to becoming profitable. So why sell? Silver Lake and eBay were both getting impatient and wanted to lock in their profits. Some sources also believe that Skype’s revenues had stalled.
The company had bet heavily on is video sharing service. The premium version of video calling and sharing was a way for Skype to increase its average revenue per user and move into the enterprise market. However, given Skype’s DNA is that of a consumer Internet company, the challenges are not a surprise.
So Who Made What?

Using the $8.5 billion price as the likely sale price, eBay gets $2.55 billion for its 30 percent stake in Skype. So in the end, eBay did make money on the Skype deal.

The Skype Founders

Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the co-founders with their 14-percent stake, take home about $1.19 billion. Damn, these guys know how to double dip!
Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) own 56 percent of the company and that stake is worth $4.76 billion.
Andreessen Horowitz had 3 percent of the deal and made $205 million profit on their $50 million initial investment.

AN INTERESTING CHALLENGE FOR YOU

noreply@blogger.com (Desperado) — Tue, 10 May 2011 23:03:00 -0700

There are more than 100 world known personalities on this painting. If you can name a minimum of 25, you may consider yourself a well-informed person.

Frog Baby

noreply@blogger.com (Desperado) — Tue, 10 May 2011 12:19:00 -0700

On 2006, this bizarre-looking baby was born in Nepal, attracting a huge number of onlookers to witness the astonishing sight. The bizarre baby, however, died after half an hour of its birth. the baby has a condition called anencephaly, a neural tube defect (like the cyclops baby), with no proper brain formation.

There is a town in Colorado called Dinosaur.

noreply@blogger.com (Desperado) — Mon, 9 May 2011 06:13:00 -0700

In 1966, Artesia, CO changed its name to ‘Dinosaur’ in order to take advantage of the nearby Dinosaur National Monument. As a result, many of the streets in town have subsequently been given dinosaur names, including: Brontosaurus Boulevard, Stegosaurus Freeway, Triceratops Terrace, Cletisaurus Circle, and Tyrannosaurus Trail.

The longest full name ever of a person.

noreply@blogger.com (Desperado) — Mon, 9 May 2011 06:11:00 -0700

The longest full name ever is Adolph Blaine Charles David Earl Frederick Jack Gerald Hubert Irvin John Kenneth Lloyd Martin Nero Oliver Paul Quincy Randolph Sherman Thomas Uncas Victor William Xerxes Yancy Zeus Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorft, Sr.

Adolph Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorft, Sr. was born in 1904 near Hamburg, Germany. was born in 1904 near Hamburg, Germany.

Toward the end of his life, billionaire Howard Hughes was known for storing his urine in bottles.

noreply@blogger.com (Desperado) — Mon, 9 May 2011 06:08:00 -0700

During Hughes’ later years he was probably best known for the dramatic eccentricities he displayed. He became extremely germophobic, insisting that anything handed to him be wrapped in tissues. A painkiller addict, Hughes also refused to cut his hair or fingernails and wore Kleenex boxes as shoes.

During the last decade of his life he would travel sporadically, working for days without sleep and in complete solitude in darkened hotel rooms. And yes, he used to store his pee in large jars.

Mathematician William Shanks spent 15 years calculating the value of pi to 707 places…but he made a mistake on the 528th digit.

noreply@blogger.com (Desperado) — Mon, 9 May 2011 06:07:00 -0700

Luckily, this discovery was made over 60 years after his death – Shanks would not have been pleased to know that he’d accidentally written a 5 instead of a 4 – which threw off the next 179 calculations!
Pi is an irrational number that describes the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. It has an infinite number of digits, but that doesn’t stop mathematicians from calculating it to as many places as they can.
Thankfully, now that we’re calculating pi to trillions of places, we have advanced computers to help, so no more careless human errors!

Some hair bands manufactured in China are made of recycled condoms.

noreply@blogger.com (Desperado) — Mon, 9 May 2011 06:06:00 -0700

Supposedly the condoms are unused rejected ones, but it’s not clear whether or not they were repurposed after having served their originally intended function. In that case, this could lead to the spread of disease.

According to government regulations, the prophylactics (technical term for condoms) should have been sent to a plastics factory and broken down first. Instead, the rubbers were just inserted directly into the center of the hair bands in their original state. When some women took their hair bands apart, they found out what they were made of.

The record for the world’s tallest dog belongs to a Great Dane named Giant George.

noreply@blogger.com (Desperado) — Mon, 9 May 2011 06:05:00 -0700

George measures a colossal 3 feet 7 inches from paw to shoulder and over 7 feet long from nose to tail. As you would probably expect, the 245 lb behemoth sleeps alone in his own queen size bed!

Sylvester Stallone once worked as a lion cage cleaner.

noreply@blogger.com (Desperado) — Mon, 9 May 2011 06:02:00 -0700

Back in 1969, Stallone was struggling to get by as a 22-year-old writer and actor in New York City. Money was so hard to come by that at one point he appeared in a cheap porno just to earn $200 with which to feed himself! After a while, he was able to land a few steady jobs which were marginally less humiliating. At various points in his early career he worked as a movie theater usher and even sliced and wrapped smelly fish! Regardless, his worst regular job by far would have to have been his time spent at the Central Park Zoo.
Here he was paid $1.12 an hour to scoop poop out of the lion cages. It gets worse though – often when he would enter the confinements, the kings of the jungle would pee on him!

The average chocolate bar has 8 insect legs in it!

noreply@blogger.com (Desperado) — Mon, 9 May 2011 06:01:00 -0700

After cocoa beans are harvested they need to be fermented. This means that they are put in an earthen pit near where they are harvested and covered with leaves. In the hot sun they ferment (rot) and then can be shoveled out as mature cocoa beans. Of course during this process lots of insects are present. Almost all chocolate have bugs in it, because it is too expensive to manufacture without bugs. The FDA allows a certain amount of bugs or animal in most foods you eat. Almost all manufactured food you eat comes with an animal you won’t think would be in it.
Cottage cheese is allowed to have 10 fecal coliforms / gram (fecal coliform being bacteria like Escherichia coli that is normally associated with human and animal feces). Doesn’t mean that it will hurt you either.

German Shepherd bite humans more than any other breed of dog.

noreply@blogger.com (Desperado) — Mon, 9 May 2011 05:59:00 -0700

In the United States, one source suggests that German Shepherd Dogs are responsible for more reported bitings than any other breed, and suggest a tendency to attack smaller breeds of dogs.
An Australian report from 1999 provides statistics showing that German Shepherd Dogs are the third breed most likely to attack a person in some Australian locales. However, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which advises on dog bite prevention and related matters, states
“There is currently no accurate way to identify the number of dogs of a particular breed, and consequently no measure to determine which breeds are more likely to bite or kill.

An Amazing Fact From Libya

noreply@blogger.com (Desperado) — Mon, 9 May 2011 05:55:00 -0700

In Libya, if you hit man with a car and he dies, you do not go to jail, because it's Allah's will.
But if you hit men with a car, and he survives and sue you, then you go to jail.

Razia Sultana

noreply@blogger.com (Desperado) — Mon, 9 May 2011 05:53:00 -0700

Daughter of Iltutmush, Razia Sultana was the first female Muslim ruler of South Asia. She was a talented, wise, just and generous woman. She was a great administrator and was well versed in governmental affairs. She was not only a good leader in the battlefield but herself was also an excellent fighter. As the most capable son of Iltutmush died during his own life, and the rest were incompetent to govern, Iltutmush nominated his daughter, Razia Sultana, as his successor on the throne of Delhi. Whenever Iltutmush had to leave his capital, he used to leave Razia Sultana in charge of the affairs in Delhi. But when Iltutmush died, Rukn-ud-din Firuz, one of his sons, occupied the throne and ruled for about seven months. Razia Sultana, with the support of the people of Delhi, secured the throne after defeating her brother in 1236.

Razia Sultana established complete law and order in her country. To rule the country, she abandoned her femininity and adopted a masculine getup. She used to dress as a man when appearing in public, be it in court or on the battlefield. She made an Ethiopian slave named Jalal-ud-din Yaqut her personal attendant and started trusting him the most. This challenged the monopoly of power claimed by the Turkish nobles.

Jamal-ud-Din Yaqut, (Habshi) slave, was one of his advisors. According to some accounts, Razia and Yaqut were lovers.

The Turkish nobles resented having a woman as their ruler, especially when she started challenging their power. They began conspiring against her. In 1239, the Turkish governor of Lahore rebelled against Razia Sultana. However, when she marched against him, he first fled and then apologized. Then the governor of Bhatinda revolted. When Razia Sultana was trying to suppress the rebellion in Bhatinda, her own Turkish officers deposed her from the throne of Delhi and made her brother Bahram the Sultan. Razia Sultana married the governor of Bhatinda, Malik Altunia, and with his help tried to reoccupy the throne. She was defeated by the Turkish nobles and was compelled to flee away. A peasant who had offered her food and shelter while fleeing from an encounter killed her in her sleep. She died in 1240.

World's Heaviest Apple

noreply@blogger.com (Desperado) — Mon, 9 May 2011 05:51:00 -0700

The heaviest apple weighed 1.849 kg (4 lb 1 oz) and was grown and picked by Chisato Iwasaki at his apple farm in Hirosaki City, Japan October 24 2005.

World's Youngest Mother (5 years old)

noreply@blogger.com (Desperado) — Mon, 9 May 2011 05:49:00 -0700

Lina Medina born in 1939, she's the youngest confirmed mother in medical history, giving birth at the age of five years, seven months and 21 days. Born in Ticrapo, Peru, Medina was brought to a hospital by her parents at the age of five years due to increasing abdominal size. She was originally thought to have had a tumor, but her doctors determined she was in her seventh month of pregnancy. Dr. Gerardo Lozada took her to Lima, Peru, prior to the surgery to have other specialists confirm that Medina was pregnant.

Girl Addicted To Eating Soap And Washing Powder

noreply@blogger.com (Desperado) — Mon, 9 May 2011 05:09:00 -0700

The 19-year-old girl Tempestt Henderson Addicted To Eating Soap And Washing Powder with a dangerous compulsion. Doctors say it could kill her because of it’s toxic compulsion.
But this 19-year-old girl claims she is hopelessly addicted… to eating soap and washing powder.

A rare medical condition has left Tempestt Henderson, from Florida, eating up to five bars of soap a week – and washing powder too.
‘I remember the first time I dipped my fingers into the washing powder,’ she said.
‘I dabbed the powder onto my tongue and it tasted so sweet, and salty…it just felt so right. I was hooked straight away.’
The nursing student says she knew eating soap was dangerous, but ignored the warning labels on the box in favour of licking the deadly powder daily, from the minute she woke up in the morning.
Soon she had moved onto licking the bubbles of soap in the shower, too, a habit that was getting her through up to five bars of soap a week.
‘In the shower, I like to lather up a green bar of soap, and lick the bubbles. And as the soap disintegrates, I pop a tiny amount of the soap into my mouth and suck it. It’s heavenly.
‘I love the clean feeling it gives me. Eating soap feels so much cleaner than just washing with it.’
After six months of eating soap, unhappy Tempestt decided to be brave and seek medical advice. She was diagnosed with a rare disorder called PICA, which doctors told her is characterised by an appetite for substances that are largely non-nutritive.
Sufferers have been known to compulsively eat metal, coins, chalk, batteries and even toothbrushes. It can often be caused by a mineral deficiency, which explains why pregnant women often crave eating coal when needing iron.
But in Tempestt’s case doctors believed the condition was bought on by stress.
‘Things got really stressful for me when my boyfriend, Jason, split up with me and left for college,’ she admitted.
‘He told me he was going to college in Kansas to study business. I begged him to give the long distance relationship a go, but he told me it was over. I was devastated.’
When Tempestt herself had to leave for college, hundreds of miles away from her family home in Florida, things took a turn for the worse.
‘College was five hours away from my family, and the stress got bigger. With no boyfriend and my family miles away, I got lonely, sad and depressed. I turned to bath soap and laundry detergent and my problem got increasingly worse.’
Dr Barton Blinder, the world’s authority on PICA, says that eating soap in these quantities could seriously affect Tempestt’s health:.
‘With soap, the worry is the problems associated with ingesting toxic chemicals, which are typically alkaline but there are other toxic substances in soap.
‘These can damage someone’s metabolism and cause digestive problems. With soap, you’re also concerned about the acid-base balance of the blood.’
But for Tempestt, therapy got to the bottom of her addiction to soap, and the cause of her PICA.
‘I always knew I loved the smell of washing detergent,’ she explained.
I remember the brand my Mum always used to use – I remember the smell vividly, it was the smell of her cardigan when she hugged me, and the smell of my bed sheets as a child.
‘I used to love smelling the powder, but when life got so stressful I found only eating the soap would help.
‘It is an addiction, I can’t stop, and I have sought the help of a doctor who specialises in addiction. The doctor told me I must empty my house of all washing detergent and soap, anything that triggers my addiction.’
Psychologists have said that Tempestt most likely turned to soap eating as a comforting coping mechanism when she found herself away from her family.
‘We use liquid at home now,’ she said, ‘and for some reason I’ve got no need to eat that.’
The doctor gave Tempestt intensive Cognitive-behavioral therapy, or CBT, to give her replacement thoughts that will prevent her from compulsively reaching for soap.
‘I’m learning to think about positive things when I feel I need to eat soap,’ she said.
She has also been encouraged to go for long walks, avoiding places where soap is present, like bathrooms and laundrettes.
She added: ‘Doctors have encouraged me to talk about my issues, because they think my addiction is caused by me bottling things up.’
And for the teenager who used to take not one, not two, but three bottles of soap into the shower, she hasn’t eaten soap since September 2010.
When her mother found out about her daughter’s addiction, she ordered Tempestt to return home from college. It may have been a smart move as Tempette admitted: ‘I just couldn’t face being back there, alone, with a campus full of soap.’
Today, she faces a long road of recovery, but says she hopes she’ll never have to eat soap ever again.
‘I suppose my Mum is secretly relieved that I was addicted to soap,’ she admited, ‘and not dangerous drugs or something.’

You're living in a computer simulation, and math proves it

noreply@blogger.com (Desperado) — Mon, 9 May 2011 05:03:00 -0700

Is your life really your life, or is it actually the dream of a butterfly? Or is it a complex computer simulation indistinguishable from "real" reality? Don't worry, it's just a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.
Questions about the nature of reality weren't invented by high-as-a-kite college sophomores. Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi noticed sometime around 300 BCE that his dreams of being something other than human (a butterfly, most famously) were indistinguishable from his experience being Zhuangzi. He could not say with certainty that he was Zhuangzi dreaming of being a butterfly rather than a butterfly dreaming of being Zhuangzi.
The whole "reality is an illusion" idea has been kicked around by everyone from Siddhartha to the existentialists. It is Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom who is most often associated with the idea that we are living in a computer simulation. His premise is based on a series of assumptions:
1). A technological society could eventually achieve the capability of creating a computer simulation that is indistinguishable from reality to the inhabitants of the simulation.
2). Such a society would not do this once or twice. They would create many such simulations.
3). Left to run long enough the societies within the simulations would eventually be able to create their own simulations, also indistinguishable from reality to the sub-simulations inhabitants.
As a result, you have billions of simulations, with a nearly infinite number of cascading sub-simulations, all of them perfectly real to their inhabitants. Yet there is only a single ultimate progenitor society. The math is actually pretty simple: the odds are nearly infinity to one that we are all living in a computer simulation.

One very strong argument against this unsettling theory is that a computer with the computational power to accomplish this is impossible. Setting aside the fact that today's computational power surely seemed unimaginable 100 years ago, there's a more interesting solution – the computer only actively simulates what it needs to. This is something that actually happens in modern computer games, and you've seen it if you've ever moved faster than your graphics card was capable of rendering the scenery, as the trees and buildings that had previously been beyond your view were drawn on the screen before your eyes. It actually explains a few of the trickier things about quantum physics, like why particles have an indeterminate position until they're observed.
Even more disturbing, it may be a much smaller simulation that you think. There could be just a few active simulation inhabitants, with the rest of the world filled with "non-actor" or NPC characters controlled by the computer. Their actions are only simulated as you perceive them, carefully performed so as to present the illusion that they have entire lives separate from yours. This helps explain why the creepy homeless guy at the end of your street doesn't seem to do much other than hang out and ask you to bring him 10 dire wolf pelts.
If all that seems too weird, let's just kick it back to Zhuangzi. There are almost seven billion people in the world. They all sleep. They all dream. Odds are we're all just living someone else's extremely vivid dream.
Source: Bostrom, Nick. "Are you living in a computer simulation?" Oxford University.

Highest Glass Floor of the World in Chicago USA

noreply@blogger.com (Desperado) — Mon, 9 May 2011 04:58:00 -0700

If you're scared of heights, it may be time to look away now.

Not content with having the tallest building in America, the owners of Sears Tower in Chicago have installed four glass box viewing platforms which stick out of the building 103 floors up.
The balconies are suspended 1,353 feet in the air and jut out four feet from the building's Skydeck.

Fearless: Anna Kane, five, spreads out on the floor of the 10ft square box which is 1,353ft up

Spectacular: She also enjoyed amazing views out across the city

'At first I was kind of afraid but I got used to it', 10-year-old Adam Kane from Alton, Illinois, said as clouds drifted by below.

'Look at all those tiny things that are usually huge.' John Huston, one of the owners of the Sears Tower, even admitted to getting 'a little queasy' the first time he ventured out on to the balcony. However, after 30 or 40 trips, he seems to have got used to it.

Thrillseekers: The boxes jut out four feet from the building and were specifically designed to make visitors feel as if they are floating

The Sears Tower has always been about superlatives - tallest, largest, most iconic,' he said.

'The Ledge is the world's most awesome view, the world's most precipitous view, the view with the most wow in the world.'

The balconies are 10ft high and 10ft wide, can hold five tons, and have glass which is 1.5 inch thick

Unfazed: Although some adults felt dizzy after experiencing the Ledge, children seemed to take it in their stride

Long way up: Even the floor of the platforms are glass - few were brave enough to look straight down

Inspiration came from the hundreds of forehead prints visitors left behind on Skydeck windows every week. Now, staff will have a new glass surface to clean: floors.

Architect Ross Wimer said: 'We did studies that showed a four-foot-deep (1.2 metres) enclosure makes you feel like you're floating since there's only room for one row of people, not two.'

The Skydeck attracts 25,000 visitors on clear days. They each pay $15 to take an elevator ride up to the 103rd floor of the 110-story office building that opened in 1973.

Towering: A view of the Sears Tower (black building in the foreground). The Ledge is on the 103rd floor

World's Biggest Golden Coin of 1 Million Dollar

noreply@blogger.com (Desperado) — Mon, 9 May 2011 04:52:00 -0700

Here are some amazing pictures of rarest and World's Biggest Golden Coin amounting to USD 1 Million.

Happy Mothers Day

noreply@blogger.com (Desperado) — Sun, 8 May 2011 10:56:00 -0700

Smiles of happy sunshine,

Arms of everlasting luv,

Touch of sweet roses,

There is magic in the air

Whenever ur there,

Mother, everything to U I owe,

May all pleasures of life come ur way.

As children, we were poor. Some would say, “Oh yeah, right. You guys always say that.” But no, we were really poor. In fact, one-year things were so bad that the four of us, my brother and 2 sisters only had enough money to purchase my mother a 69-cent bottle of nail polish.

Being so young and poor, the color was not an issue. We simply wanted to get my mother SOMETHING SPECIAL for Mother’s Day.

HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY.

Technology Toons

noreply@blogger.com (Desperado) — Sat, 7 May 2011 19:45:00 -0700

The power of Google

noreply@blogger.com (Desperado) — Sat, 7 May 2011 19:40:00 -0700

Ok Google, we give up! You have Gmail, Google Search, Google map, and your company is worth 150 billion dollars. What else do you want? This?