Tech Brief
On Tech Brief today: Harvard drop out comes good, mysterious radio signals and bikers get a power boost.
• Yesterday, it was reported that a number of iTunes accounts linked to PayPal have been targeted in a scam. Several users complained that they have been cleaned out. The initial explanation was that the victims had been targeted in a phishing scam; using e-mail and fake websites to lure people into revealing details such as bank accounts or login names. But :
"Comments on the earlier article from (indignant) users say that they're sure they haven't been phished for the details of their PayPal accounts - and that someone has somehow been making unauthorised (by them, at least) purchases from the iTunes Store."
• Six years ago fresh-faced, Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg launched The Facebook. Six years later, with more than 500m users and a small name change, :
"Common stock in Facebook is trading as high as $76 a share as investors scramble to get a piece of the company before it files for an initial public offering, which analysts say could be the biggest technology IPO since Google's $1.67bn flotation in 2004."
• For the last 20 years a "a mysterious radio station in Russia" has been broadcasting a monotonous signal with little to no variation. Now, :
"Over the past week or so, the output of one particular station that broadcasts from near Povarovo, Russia, increased dramatically. The station has a callsign of UVB-76, but is known as "The Buzzer" by its listeners because of the short, monotonous buzz tone that it normally plays 21 to 34 times per minute. It's only deviated from that signal three times previously - briefly in 1997, 2002 and 2006."
• Pac-Man fans have long been able to play the classic game on everything from old Ataris to Xbox consoles and Android phones. Now, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man, a : a Sequoia AVC-Edge DRE voting machine:
" We could have reprogrammed it to steal votes, but that's been done before, and Pac-Man is more fun."
• Finally one for gamers, who cycle and live in Portland, Oregon. . Let's-a go.
"Unfortunately, the bananas, star and speed arrows don't actually confer the same powers they do in the game, but we did smirk to see that all of the bikers do faithfully avoid the banana peel, and hit the rest of the symbols head on."
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