If you recall, we talked about small text files called cookies that websites will leave on your machine to track you, or remember you, or serve ads to you, or a host of other tasks. Now, to feed in to the hysteria about government spying, it appears that the NSA and GCHQ (Britain’s version of the NSA) have been using those cookies to monitor those individuals that were already under suspicion.

Remember, cookies can be very useful; they are used to remember who you are when you visit websites and serve up relevant ads. They are also benign in and of themselves, text files are not natively harmful. But they do contain a lot of information about you and your behavior, and that is very valuable to, well, everyone. Also, if you’re being good, then nothing to worry about, right?

Right?

If you’re interested in seeing some of your cookies (or ‘Temporary Internet Files’ as IE likes to call them) in Windows you can navigate to the Temporary Internet Files folder on your hard drive, although the options menu in most browsers should give you a view of the ones you have. Here is the folder showing a few of mine, and it shows what your path would be, without the ‘Darren’ of course. There are other files in there, but the image is an example of what cookies look like – and they are *all* from sites that serve up advertising!

Today is the 107th birthday of one of the most important people in computing history. Grace Hopper, the Navy Rear Admiral, mathematician and computer scientist was the first ever to write a compiler (the process that converts your programs into machine language, or ones and zeros), one of the first to see computers as something other than gigantic calculators, and even coined the term ‘debugging’ for removing problems within a machine. Of course, it was literally debugging in her case, since a moth had flown into relay 70 of the massive – and I mean massive; that’s a picture of it below and all it did were calculations since it used mechanical relays as opposed to circuits – Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator at Harvard University causing the system to experience operational problems. I have also included a picture of the bug itself, which is in the collection of the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History. She admits she didn’t actually find it, but her name is most often associated with it.

The above is just a small sample of her accomplishments, she really was a pioneer in the then-emerging world of computing capabilities. (One other thing that deserves mention – the site gracehopper.org, ostensibly for celebrating women in computing, never actually mentions or discusses Grace Hopper!)

The bug

Remember writing Christmas lists? You have a list, sometimes a really long list, but there’s stuff you want! You write it all down, or word process it (although it’s nice to know that in the future, robot Santa still uses a scroll and parchment), and send it off.

But we can also assume that Santa has a sizable enterprise-wide back end with distributed front-end processing for all his elves, right? If he wants to keep up and be able to continuously distribute gifts to all the good boys and girls, and a few adults as well, he needs to computerize. And that’s exactly what this kid is assuming. I think it’s a safe assumption, and I have to give him credit for writing all that out! A regular list would have been easier.

There were some other sites as well, but these were the big ones. The article I’m linking below talks a lot about Botnets and Keyloggers and what makes a good password and things such as that, and we’ll be discussing all of that as we wrap up the semester (although if you want to read a scary story about new types of BotNets, just head over to this story on Ars Technica). But just be aware that although the list of stolen passwords from these sites that originated in the U.S. is very small, you should always use robust passwords when first creating them.

How exactly do you do that? There’s a hint right here on this page, but I’ll just tell you anyway.

Later.

Two million stolen Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, ADP passwords found on Pony Botnet server

…here’s an interesting clip from last night’s 60 minutes interview with Jeff Bezos that I found quite interesting. Although I personally find him evil and heartless, this was so off the wall I had to share it. Apparently, Amazon is experimenting with drones that will airlift packages right to your door. It seems overkill, but if it works then you know what the next step will be – that’s right, just beam them directly in to your living room like Star Trek. You know it will happen.

And Hanukkah too, if you celebrate that. The two holidays coinciding won’t happen again for 70,000 years! If you’re celebrating the Festival of Lights and feeling especially techie, there are some surprising tech alternatives to a traditional Menorah. Consider the circuit board Menorah, for example:

Or perhaps you would just prefer a Menorah app:

Or just go for broke, and have a robot do the whole thing for you!

But what about Thanksgiving? If you’re in space, you get to have a freeze-dried celebration! Me, I think that would be perfectly fine, seeing as you’re enjoying it IN SPACE! Here’s more info about the specifics of the foodstuffs that astronauts use to celebrate liberating the Earth from martians.

Thanksgiving…..In……….SPAAAACE!

If you’ve ever had your blood drawn, you know that while it’s not necessarily a pleasant experience, but it’s not so bad, either. A little pin-prick, a few vials of blood and an Oreo cookie later and it’s all over.

That is unless they can’t find a vein, or have to stick you more than once, or one of any other issues that can crop up. If only there was some way to find your vein easily, have a Google map of the arm or something like that.

Well now there is. A new product from Evena Medical allows the phlebotomist to see the blood flowing right beneath the skin. It’s pretty remarkable, a little creepy, and another example of some nifty medical technology. Watch the video below and be amazed.

You may recall when we were discussing hardware we talked about dual-core and quad-core processors, which are single chips that act as though you had multiple CPUs all running at once (remember, that’s very difficult to program for).

We also talked about how we are seeing not just desktop PCs but phones and tablets with multi-core processors, and discussed the potential advantages (speed) and disadvantages (battery life) to having such power in a small device.

Well it turns out we were discussing old-hat! The first ever 8-core mobile processor. Mobile is the operative word,since 8-core processors for larger devices have been around for a while.

So soon, if you have the need to use your phone or tablet to remotely pilot a 747, or design the next space station, or chart the evolutionary path of armadillos, or an endless amount of other large-scale tasks, well now you can.

Watch out for speeding particles.

Remember our talk about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) over at CERN, the same place that developed the World Wide Web? About how people were worried that in its quest to find the Higgs boson (or ‘G-d particle‘ as it is more colloquially known) it would create black holes that would destroy the universe?

Well, in a nod to that beast of physics and discovery, and in response to some emails and Facebook notifications I’ve received about it, I would like you to feast your eyes on the most beastly PC I’ve ever seen. The editors over at PC Gamer have developed what they call the Large Pixel Collider, a PC meant to test the limits of PC gaming functionality. Like it or not, gaming pushes computing technology further than any other force outside of government research, and many of our best technologies have come from it (pathfinding artificial intelligence, leaps in graphical fidelity, input methods, etc.).

It’s not just that this machine is in a case that could house a small family, or has 8 storage bays, or a 1200 watt power supply; no, it’s the quad-SLI graphic setup they put in. What that means, simply, is that they have four graphics cards all running together serving as a single device. Specifically, four NVidia GTX Titans which run about $1000 apiece.That means it will be able to push images and video at beyond-4K resolution.

Four fans, massive liquid-cooling…if you’re a PC enthusiast, prepare to drool. If not, prepare to ask ‘Why would anybody *do* this?’ Just don’t ask if it can play Angry Birds. Because it can! It’ll fling those birds clean off the screen and onto your desk!

Well, it has finally happened. The computer virus, started way back (at least in its popular form) on the Apple IIe, has made it’s way into outer space! The International Space Station has been infected with a virus carried by one of the astronauts on a USB stick. In fact, that is how *all* viruses are transmitted; they need a host of some sort. Whether it’s a file set through email or a physical vector like a flash drive, viruses can’t act or propagate on their own.

However it was not the Stuxnet virus as many outlets are reporting. You may recall Stuxnet was the virus that infected Iran’s nuclear plants a couple of years ago.

On a related note, look what came up while I was researching this: Just another example of why you have to be careful what yo read and where it comes from. They’re not quite exact opposites, but they’re close.

So which was it?

I’m more amazed by the fact the ISS has a USB port!