Tech News
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The Onion tells how Syrian Electronic Army hacked its Twitter
It is not every day that you can say "Pwned by The Onion" but we can say that The Onion got pwned, for being very relaxed in their security procedures.
ArsTechnica has the story.On Monday, the "hacktivist" group Syrian Electronic Army briefly took over the Twitter account of the satirical news publication The Onion, posting a series of anti-Israeli "joke" stories and an anti-Obama "meme" image. The Onion returned fire with its own joke story, "Syrian Electronic Army Has A Little Fun Before Inevitable Upcoming Death At Hands of Rebels."
Putting all jokes aside, The Onion's technology team yesterday made a post describing how the SEA had managed to compromise the accounts of a number of employees and take control of the Twitter feed-a series of phishing attacks that took advantage of the organization's use of Google Apps.phishing is one of the leading causes behind identity theft and all it takes is a single person clicking on a bad link to have everything stolen from you. As you can imagine even emails from trusted sources cannot be trusted since embedded malware can send messages to your entire contact list an even use existing emails as a template.
Lesson to learn here is to learn how to spot the fake and if all else fails never NEVER click on a link in an email especially when that email is asking you to verify your account information or sending you status updates. Those URLs are easy to swap in the source code and without peaking at the URL you may never know. -
How Intel Builds Custom Chips for Giants of the Web
This is a great article that proves you can sometimes cut out the middle man and go directly to the source. The Facebook servers are still assembled in Asia (likely by Foxconn or Gigabyte) and then shipped back for use in the datacenter.
According to Frank Frankovsky — who oversees hardware design at Facebook — this started as far back as 2009. That’s when the company first asked Intel for certain changes to the design of the silicon chips it builds for computer servers — the machines that drive the internet and the private computer networks inside the world’s businesses. Since then, Frankovsky says, Intel has worked hand-in-hand with the company to accommodate such changes.
For the most part, he explains, these changes are rolled into the same processors that Intel sells to the world at large, though there are cases where the changes are unlikely to benefit anyone but Facebook. “The more insight we can give our technology suppliers about what makes our software work the best, the more we’re able to influence their design roadmaps,” Frankovsky says. “We do influence their roadmaps — way upstream — but then they are able to bring these changes out to all of their customers.”-- snip --
This is really the best part of the whole article, Intel releasing purposefully overclocked CPUs.
He also says that there are cases where Intel will crank the chip clock speeds to unusually high levels at the request of certain buyers — if the buyer is willing to deal with the extra heat this generates.
I guess we now know where the K and X edition processors got their start.
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