Now We Can All Keep Track of Our Poo!

iPhone apps are getting weirder and weirder... The writers of a popular best-selling book called "What's Your Poo Telling You" have come up with an iPhone app called the Poo Log. The book centered around how important it is to know what your bowel movements are telling you about you body's health and general well being. One can learn how to read the signs of a sub-par operating digestive system by just taking the time to examine the color, contents and texture of each bowel movement.

The app just builds up on the fundamentals taught in the book and gives a poo journaling and digital timing system where a user can keep track of how their poo is behaving on a day to day basis. With a clever mix of bathroom humor and legitimate medical information, the ‘Poo Log’ allows the user to track his/her digestive workings and graph their ‘poo’ – all with one hand.

According to the app’s developers, AvatarLabs Inc, the tracker features medically accurate info that is suitable for all ages, and of course helpful tips such as, “Light a match. Now.”

10,000 Hotmail Passwords Leacked Online

An anonymous user posted usernames and passwords for over 10,000 Windows Live Hotmail accounts to website PasteBin, including accounts on email domains like @hotmail.com, @ msn.com and @live.com. The accounts appear to be genuine accounts and most appear to be based in Europe. The accounts leaked include usernames in alphabetical order beginning with the letters "ar" to "bl". Microsoft has also confirmed the leak, so if you're a Live Hotmail user and you suspect that you may be affected, change your password.

Some would blame Microsoft, others would blame naive Hotmail users who fall for phishing or fake websites. But why would phishing only get very specific alphabetically ranged passwords? Either way, something like this has never happened to Gmail users.

*HotSlice is not affiliated with Microsoft or Google and does not attempt to promote any Microsoft or Google based propaganda...

Update: It was later revealed that the phishing campaign also affected Gmail and Yahoo mail accounts.

Computer Program Can "Out" Gay Facebook Users

Several MIT students have created quite a project for their class on “ethics and law on the electronic frontier”. According to the Boston Globe:

Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction. The two students had no way of checking all of their predictions, but based on their own knowledge outside the Facebook world, their computer program appeared quite accurate for men, they said.

Even their professor, a computer scientist, was amazed. The project, which was done in 2007 and dubbed “gaydar” by the class, has yet to be published in a scientific journal. The data plugged into the program consisted of the friend links of 1,544 men who said they were straight, 21 who said they were bisexual, and 33 who said they were gay. According to the Globe:

Gay men had proportionally more gay friends than straight men, giving the computer program a way to infer a person’s sexuality based on their friends.

Spam amongst friends

Email is really amazing; I just wish some people could be blocked from using it. We all know that there is not much that can be done to stop the spambots, these are automated computer programs designed with the sole intent of bombarding our inboxes with lots and lots of junk. Luckily for us, our ever effective spam filters stop these emails dead in their tracks. The same cannot be said for friendly spammers.

Yes, that's right, I said it. Friends too can be spammers. They send us emails containing a joke that they think is funny. They send us emails about missing children in Australia. They even send us emails about how if we send this email to 10 of our friends, we will have a good thing happen to us that week (one good thing... how amazingly awesome!!!)

Even though this type of spam ranks as fairly innocent in the face of bootleg Viagra peddlers and Nigerian "princes," indiscriminate email blasts to one's acquaintances is never well received. Nobody wants to live in a world where giving contact info to a friend or colleague is tantamount to checking the "Yes, please keep me informed about exciting product offers!" box.

This problem among acquaintances seems to be evolving with the advent of social networking sites where spamming takes on the form of status updates, group and cause invitations, and "tweets". Unless one sets it otherwise, you will be getting these new forms of spam as email notifications, it seems friendly spam will never go away.

The only remaining option (tough but effective) is to mark Facebook, Twitter and friendly spammers as junk mail.

How to kill... Gmail Adverts?

Google has always claimed that it never has and never will do anything evil. However, some may argue that being irritated with sponsored adverts on every single Google website can be a tad bit evil. Even more so when the adverts are triggered by keywords in one's own private emails.


It turns out the solution is quite simple. All you have to do is add a relatively "innocent" signature to all your emails. That is until the evil masterminds at Google headquarters find out about this... The magic words are:

I enjoy the massacre of ads. This sentence will slaughter ads without a messy bloodbath.

If you are worried about your friends and colleagues (and boss) thinking that you have gone mad, you can just elegantly append the signature in white text so as to not arouse too much suspicion.

Not Enough Facebook Friends? Buy Some

Whoever said money can’t buy friends is dead wrong…at least when it comes to Facebook friends. A new service called uSocial offers the chance to buy Facebook “friends” for the bargain price of $200 for 1,000 friends or you can get 5,000 buds for the reduced rate of $654.30.

Here’s how it works:

USocial logs in to a client’s Facebook profile or creates a new one. It seeks out people who would be a good fit—like car buffs if uSocial is trying to promote an auto-parts company—and sends them friends requests tailored to that business. The requests don’t mention that uSocial is working on behalf of the business.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Facebook representatives say uSocial violates Facebook’s terms of service. They say that volunteering your account information makes the site less secure, and that doling out friend requests for someone else—as the uSocial service does—makes the social networking site less authentic. Plus, some critics warn that random”friend” requests could potentially really irritate Facebook users.

Sure, receiving “friend” requests from someone you’ve never met can get pretty annoying. But is Facebook really that authentic in the first place? Ask the person who has 2,000 so-called “friends”—no matter how they acquired them.

Happy birthday, Internet!!!

The internet turned 40 years old this week. On September 2 1969, a group of computer scientists in Leonard Kleinrock's UCLA lab connected two computer nodes using a Grey cable, signalling the first instance when two seperate computers where connected together for the purpose of information exchange.

Though some may argue that the true birth of the internet only occurred later that year in October when two computers in separate labs (one in UCLA and one in Stanford University) where connected. And the message passed between them? "LO" It was supposed to be "LOGIN" but the system crashed after the letters "L" and "O" where typed in.

Kleinrock and colleagues were working with the government-backed Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), without which we would not be blogging these words today.

Happy 40th Internet, and many more!

Shooting that Photo

The Doryu 2-16 is a new camera fashioned to look like a gun! Taking the shot has an all new meaning with this baby. Produced by Japanese Nikkor, this little baby has been made to specification for the Japanese police force. It is also unlikely that this camera will be sold to the general public.

It is still unclear as to what the Japanese Police are planning to do with this ingenious camera but it should prove to be interesting that is for sure!

The camera will feature a Cine-Nikkor 25mm F1.4 lens and is currently is currently in production across the sea’s.

If nothing else, this camera is definately unique. One of the Japanese snipers, Mr. Ryu Kaokimoto is one of the first to use this little weapon and his snapshots are killer!

Joe Blogg