Technology

Lots of blind people have blind friends, so This game of cat and mouse takes place regularly. It can be funny but it’s certainly a little frustrating.

As smart phones are fast becoming a basic part of a blind person’s toolkit, it’s perhaps not surprising that someone has now created an app for that.

People Finder has a very basic but accessible interface. Like mainstream products with similar aims, such as Grindr for the gay community and Spotme for networking at conferences, you have to have the app running if you want to meet up with people in your circle.

It alerts a user, via a vibration and a noise, when someone else with the app comes within 50 feet. It uses Bluetooth to detect people.

As you search for your friend, the app will let you know how close you are, by saying near or cold as you walk around.

To aid social niceties, There’s the option to message the person through the app to say you’ve clocked them, before descending on them — via redwolf.newsvine.com

My daughter, however, jumps at the chance to play games with her old man. She’s only 3, but she’s always exhibited a keen interest in games. Recently, she took a fancy to Ron Gilbert’s new puzzle adventure game The Cave. While she prefers not to play, she insists that I do and then she bosses me around in the game. She’s confident enough, however, to play some of the older arcade games. She’s not too shabby with Pac-Man; her favourite version is Pac-Man Arrangement.

But out of all of the older games, she most enjoys playing Donkey Kong. Maybe it was because it was the first game we really played together, or the fact that she watched the King of Kong documentary with me one afternoon from start to finish. Maybe it’s because Mario looks just like her Grandpa. Whatever the case, we’ve been playing Donkey Kong together for a while. She’s not very good at it, but insists on playing it over and over again until she finally hands me the joystick in total frustration.

Finally, one day after work, she asked to play Donkey Kong, only this time she raised a pretty innocent and simple question: “How can I play as the girl? I want to save Mario!”

It made sense. We had just played Super Mario Bros 2 on the NES a few days before, and she became obsessed with playing as Princess Toadstool. So to go back to Donkey Kong, I can see how natural it seemed to ask the question. I explained to her that Donkey Kong, while similar, is not the same game. On this occasion, I really could tell that she was disappointed. She really liked Donkey Kong, and really liked playing as Princess Toadstool. We left it at that and moved on.

But that question! It kept nagging at me. Kids ask parents all the time for things that just aren’t possible. But this time, this was different. I’m a game developer by day. I could do this — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Sometimes a browser needs to leave a little data on your computer, just a little 5-10KB nibblit, a cookie. HTML5 is a hungrier beast than that which came before it though, and sometimes wants a little more. Maybe 5MB or so. But that’s where it should end. Thanks to a little HTML5 vulnerability, however, this site can and will fill your entire hard drive with trash.

In order to keep sites from going to wild, most browsers put a hard limit on how much space any site can get. Google Chrome says 2.5MB, Firefox goes with 5MB, Internet Explorer opts for 10MB, etc. And HTML5 standards dictate that a single stash should apply to all affiliated sites. So a1.example.com should have to share with a2.example.com. Except in most browsers, as discovered by Feross Aboukhadijeh, they don’t.

In Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer (FireFox users, pat yourselves on the back), subdomains all get their own little data cubbies, so as long as a site keeps churning out new ones, your hard drive will keep eating up the data until it’s bulging at the seams. And Feross Aboukhadijeh’s Filldisk.com does exactly that. Fortunately for you, it’s merciful enough to give you all your space back if you ask it to stop, but it’s easy to see how this could be a pain if it didn’t play nice — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The spam-blocking technology in Gmail is fairly effective, but that doesn’t mean spammers and criminals don’t want to use Gmail to send dubious messages. A blog post from Google notes a dramatic increase in attempts to hijack individual accounts.

We’ve seen a single attacker using stolen passwords to attempt to break into a million different Google accounts every single day, for weeks at a time, Google security engineer Mike Hearn wrote in the post. A different gang attempted sign-ins at a rate of more than 100 accounts per second — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Out of chaos, comes order. A computer that mimics the apparent randomness found in nature can instantly recover from crashes by repairing corrupted data.

Dubbed a systemic computer, the self-repairing machine now operating at University College London (UCL) could keep mission-critical systems working. For instance, it could allow drones to reprogram themselves to cope with combat damage, or help create more realistic models of the human brain.

Everyday computers are ill suited to modelling natural processes such as how neurons work or how bees swarm. This is because they plod along sequentially, executing one instruction at a time. Nature isn’t like that, says UCL computer scientist Peter Bentley. Its processes are distributed, decentralised and probabilistic. And they are fault tolerant, able to heal themselves. A computer should be able to do that — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The Los Angeles Times has scrubbed its Web site of malicious code that served browser exploits and malware to potentially hundreds of thousands of readers over the past six weeks.

On 7 February, KrebsOnSecurity heard from two different readers that a subdomain of the LA Times’ news site (offersanddeals.latimes.com) was silently redirecting visitors to a third-party Web site retrofitted with the Blackhole exploit kit. I promptly asked my followers on Twitter if they had seen any indications that the site was compromised, and in short order heard from Jindrich Kubec, director of threat intelligence at Czech security firm Avast.

Kubec checked Avast’s telemetry with its user base, and discovered that the very same LA Times subdomain was indeed redirecting visitors to a Blackhole exploit kit, and that the data showed this had been going on since at least 23 December 2012.

Contacted via email, LA Times spokeswoman Hillary Manning initially said a small number of users trying to access a subdomain of the site were instead served a malicious script warning on 2 and 3 February. But Manning said this was the result of a glitch in Google’s display ad exchange, not a malware attack on the company’s site — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The YahooXtra email service is the victim of two separate, but potentially related malicious attacks, Telecom has said.

The security breach, which began on Saturday morning, saw emails sent to everyone on users’ contact list, asking them to click on a link directing them to an online advertisement.

Telecom responded in a statement issued this afternoon, saying the attacks were believed to have similarly affected other Yahoo mail users using Yahoo servers — via redwolf.newsvine.com