The headline was taken from this weeks b3ta, so don’t get all mad at me. But I think they have a point when they couldn’t find a use for this doll other than a body double for an eight-year-old who’s wanted by the mob or as a plaything for sicko perverts.
Category: Scary
Your Color Laser Printer’s Hiding Something
Apparently this has been going on for years, but it’s only now in this PCWorld article that this is becoming common knowledge.
Peter Crean, a senior research fellow at Xerox, says his company’s laser printers, copiers and multifunction workstations, such as its WorkCentre Pro series, put the “serial number of each machine coded in little yellow dots” in every printout. The millimeter-sized dots appear about every inch on a page, nestled within the printed words and margins.
“It’s a trail back to you, like a license plate,” Crean says.
The dots’ minuscule size, covering less than one-thousandth of the page, along with their color combination of yellow on white, makes them invisible to the naked eye, Crean says. One way to determine if your color laser is applying this tracking process is to shine a blue LED light–say, from a keychain laser flashlight–on your page and use a magnifier.
I have a nice Xerox Phaser 860DP here at the office, and I’m going to see if I can find a blue LED to see if I can find the damn serial number. It just makes me wonder what else these machines are hiding from me.
Someone Needs A Hobby
A 38-year-old with degrees in psychology, education and computer science needed only 11.8 seconds to calculate the 13th root of a 100-digit number in his head, setting a new record. Freak.
Drugs Are Bad
They cause you to do bad things to your home:
Police surrounded a southeast Bend home for more than two hours Monday while the renter inside, apparently under the influence of methamphetamine, went on a destructive rampage with a baseball bat, causing at least $20,000 in damage before kicking his way through a wall and finally being taken into custody, officers said.
Shot in the dark here, but my guess is he won’t get his security deposit back.
It’s That Time of The Year
Make sure you watch out for those flying frozen turkeys.
The World From A Dog’s Point of View
If I had a dog, this is the last thing I’d buy it. Why would I want to watch a dog lick itself all the time? Thanks Cheryl for the link.
KFC Is On The Scene
Several hundred chickens are believed to have died after the trailers they were being transported in overturned following a traffic crash at the intersection of Highway 213 and Beavercreek Road in Oregon City. Two persons in a passenger vehicle were transported with minor injuries. Full Story. The story states that an estimated 400 chickens died in the crash and hundreds more were running loose on the highway. Many others remained in their crates. That’s a lot of poultry!
School Wants to Drug Test 7th Graders
Key Quote: “It’s crucial to hit them at that age.” Am I just naive, but are drugs a major problem at this age? Maybe there are, but it just seems young. I just know they’ll start doing random drug test when my younger daughter hits the first grade in about five years.
All But Six-Million of Us Will Have To Go
All we have to do to save the Earth is lower our human population down to about 6,400,000 folks (based on the current world population of just about 6.4 billion, which is 1000 times that). We do that, and we should be able to survive just fine. Thanks Barney for the link.
That’s Comforting
Diebold, whose electronic voting systems will be widely used in the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 2, continues to run its public web site on Windows NT4, forgoing newer Microsoft operating systems. Granted, it’s for a Web site that’s completely separate of their ATM-like voting machines, but it doesn’t really lend much to their credibility as security experts when they’re running a stupidly old and insecure operating system on their Web site. Full story.