Most Intelligent Bird:

Autistic Girl Expresses

Train Lays Its Own Track.

Congress spent $2.6 million on food and drinks over nine month period between 2009-2010. Maybe they should consider cutting out some of the pork

House members spent part of their Members Representational Allowances on these items -- and more -- during the nine-month period between late 2009 and early 2010 covered by the Sunlight Foundation's House Expenditure Reports Database. The info is highly enlightening, revealing, for instance, the popularity of Chantilly Donut's sinkers; what it costs to feed hungry congressional pages; and how lucrative it can be to own a part of the cottage industry of keeping our duly elected representatives fed and well hydrated.

Details emerge of the first-ever control system malware that has been spreading via USB devices. It is programmed to steal data from systems running specific software used in utilities and industrial manufacturing plants.

The attack involves several components: a worm that spreads via USB drives and exploits a previously unknown vulnerability in Windows and a Trojan backdoor that looks to see if an infected machine is running a specific type of software created by Siemens used in control systems including industrial manufacturing, utilities and even nuclear powered aircraft carriers. The worm, dubbed Stuxnet, propagates by exploiting a hole in all versions of Windows in the code that processes shortcut files, ending in ".lnk," according to a Microsoft Malware Protection Center blog post. Merely browsing to the removable media drive using an application that displays shortcut icons, such as Windows Explorer, will run the malware without the user clicking on the icons. The worm infects USB drives or other removable storage devices that are subsequently connected to the infected machine. Those USB drives then infect other machines much like the common cold is spread by infected people sneezing into their hands and then touching door knobs that others are handling.
The malware includes a rootkit, which is software designed to hide the fact that a computer has been compromised, and other software that sneaks onto computers by using a digital certificates signed two Taiwanese chip manufacturers that are based in the same industrial complex in Taiwan--RealTek and JMicron, according to Chester Wisniewski, senior security advisor at Sophos. (Sophos has posted a video showing how a computer is infected on YouTube.) It is unclear how the digital signatures were acquired by the attacker, but experts believe they were stolen and that the companies were not involved.
Once the machine is infected, a Trojan looks to see if the computer it lands on is running Siemens' Simatic WinCC software. The malware then automatically uses a default password that is hard-coded into the software to access the control system's Microsoft SQL database. The password has been available on the Internet for several years, according to Wired's Threat Level blog.

Anti-Piracy group Antipiratbyrån accused of blackmailing teen file-sharers, to snitch on their friends and hand over information on the sites they use.

Last year, representatives from several indie music labels infiltrated a private BitTorrent tracker with the aim of gathering information on both users and admins and using that data to force it to close down. One member, who had uploaded a lot of music to the site, was befriended by the infiltrators and over a period of several months was persuaded to part with sensitive information on site staff and other users. Armed with that information the label workers later revealed themselves to the site’s admin, along with a threat – close down or else. They quickly learned that two can play that game.

RapidShare Scores Another Win Against Movie Studio

Like most file-hosting services, RapidShare hosts a wide range of movies, music and software files that are distributed without the consent of the rightsholders. This situation has caused the company to be dragged to court on multiple occasions, but the file-hoster has come out the winner several times already. In May this year, the United States District Court of California ruled that RapidShare is not guilty of copyright infringement. In a hearing closer to home for the Swiss company, a German court ruled in the same month that RapidShare cannot be held not liable for acts of copyright infringement committed by its users.

Doritos…for your health

Man hit by six meteorites is being 'targeted by aliens'

Lajic has his own explanation, of course. After the fifth rock struck his house, he said: 'I am obviously being targeted by extraterrestrials. I don't know what I have done to annoy them but there is no other explanation that makes sense. The chance of being hit by a meteorite is so small that getting hit six times has to be deliberate.'
50-year-old Lajic has had a steel girder reinforced roof put on the house to protect it from the alien bombardment - which he funded by selling one of the meteorites to a university in the Netherlands.

81-year-old bitten by copperhead, stomped it to death, sucked out venom.

81-year-old Wilkes County man didn't see a doctor after receiving a bite from a copperhead snake, but rather decided to remove the venom on his own.Loyd Church, who lives along Vannoy Road, said he was in his garden last week when the snake snapped at him and bit him on his hand between his thumb and index finger."I was picking cucumbers, and he was hiding up under them vines," the soft-spoken Church said Friday.

What the Chevy Volt was supposed to look like...

Sure blame the neighbors kids...

Finger in Butt Crack Sparks Knife Fight

According to a police report, the unnamed suspect rubbed a finger along the victim's butt crack, prompting her to clench her buttocks. The victim claimed the clenching caused the bed she was sitting on to break, angering the suspect...

The Fish Slapping Dance

Red-blooded vertebrates evolved twice, independently

Through the process of natural selection, it finds new uses for existing features, often resulting in what is known as convergent evolution -- the development of similar biological traits in different orders of animals, such as powered flight in birds and bats.
Now, research by University of Nebraska-Lincoln biologists has found convergent evolution of a key physiological innovation that traces back through the two deepest branches of the vertebrate family tree.
A team led by Jay Storz (prounounced storts), assistant professor of biological sciences, analyzed the complete genome sequences of multiple vertebrate species and found that jawless fishes (e.g., lampreys and hagfish) and jawed vertebrates (pretty much everything else, including humans) independently invented different mechanisms of blood-oxygen transport to sustain aerobic metabolism.

Shit! Shit! Eject!! Eject!!!

British firm designing mammoth 10MW offshore wind turbines with 275m wingspan

British, American and Norwegian engineers are in a race to design and build the holy grail of wind turbines – giant, 10MW offshore machines twice the size and power of anything seen before – that could transform the global energy market because of their economies of scale.
Today, a revolutionary British design that mimics a spinning sycamore leaf and which was inspired by floating oil platform technology, entered the race. Leading engineering firm Arup is to work with an academic consortium backed by blue-chip companies including Rolls Royce, Shell and BP to create detailed designs for the "Aerogenerator", a machine that rotates on its axis and would stretch nearly 275m from blade tip to tip. It is thought that the first machines will be built in 2013-14 following two years of testing.

Badass Lego tattoos via Pilot Ball Point.

Crazy Facebook Facts

· Over 1 billion photos and 10 million videos are uploaded to Facebook each month
· Every month, over 25 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook

· If Facebook were a country, it would be the fifth-largest country in the world, after China, India, the U.S., and Indonesia

· About 8.3 billion hours are spent on Facebook every month

· Osama Bin Laden had a Facebook account that was deleted for security reasons

· Psychologists have identified a new mental health disorder called Facebook Addiction Disorder

· 99 percent of the 500 million users on Facebook have uploaded at least one photo

· Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, is the world’s youngest billionaire, worth 1.5 billion

· The average Facebook user has 130 friends and sends eight friend requests per month

· Approximately 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States

Beat It!