Technology

Five years ago the hotness in web development was showing what you could create without resorting to Flash. Now it seems the same is true of JavaScript. While we’ve nothing against JavaScript, the increasingly powerful tools in CSS 3 mean that JavaScript is no longer a necessity for building cool stuff on the web.

The latest JavaScript-free demo we’ve run across is this very cool stopwatch demo made using only CSS 3, no images or JavaScript necessary. Now before you dive into the code and get all Karl Van Hœt on us, yes, there is a script used to handle CSS prefixing, but the actual stopwatch doesn’t require it to work — via Webmonkey

Mozilla Thimble is a new web-based code editor, part of the company’s recently unveiled Webmakers project. Thimble is designed to give novice webmakers an easy-to-use online tool to quickly build and share webpages.

You can check out Thimble over at the new Mozilla Thimble website. Keep in mind that Mozilla hasn’t formally launched Thimble; the company is still testing, fixing bugs and iterating the app — via Webmonkey

Google revamped its reCAPTCHA system, used to block automated scripts from abusing its online services, just hours before a trio of hackers unveiled a free system that defeats the widely used challenge-response tests with more than 99 percent accuracy.

Stiltwalker, as the trio dubbed its proof-of-concept attack, exploits weaknesses in the audio version of reCAPTCHA, which is used by Google, Facebook, Craigslist and some 200,000 other websites to confirm that humans and not scam-bots are creating online accounts. While previous hacks have also used computers to crack the Google-owned CAPTCHA (short for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) system, none have achieved Stiltwalker’s impressive success rate — via redwolf.newsvine.com

AusCERT general manager Graham Ingram has rejected Eugene Kaspersky’s view that the current golden age of cybercrime will be over in a few years — because the crimes are just too easy to commit.

The returns are high, the risks are low; ie, almost no risk. Isn’t that the type of crime that you would like to do? Ingram said.

You’ll make a lot of money, you will not be caught and you will live a very happy life, he said, because current international law-enforcement cooperation arrangements can’t deal with high-volume, low-impact crime — via redwolf.newsvine.com

In recent days The Pirate Bay announced the addition of a new proxy-friendly version of their site supported by a new IP address. This means that customers of ISPs that had previously implemented a court-ordered blockade could now access the site again. In the Netherlands, anti-piracy group BREIN is already battling to have that censored too. However, it seems that some ISPs are refusing to play ball, and several are challenging the entire blockade — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Peer inside an antique radio and you’ll find what look like small light bulbs. They’re actually vacuum tubes — the predecessors of the silicon transistor. Vacuum tubes went the way of the dinosaurs in the 1960s, but researchers have now brought them back to life, creating a nano-sized version that’s faster and hardier than the transistor. It’s even able to survive the harsh radiation of outer space.

The new device is a cross between today’s transistors and the vacuum tubes of yesteryear. It’s small and easily manufactured, but also fast and radiation-proof. Meyyappan, who co-developed the nano vacuum tube, says it is created by etching a tiny cavity in phosphorous-doped silicon. The cavity is bordered by three electrodes: a source, a gate, and a drain. The source and drain are separated by just 150 nanometres, while the gate sits on top. Electrons are emitted from the source thanks to a voltage applied across it and the drain, while the gate controls the electron flow across the cavity. In their paper published online today in Applied Physics Letters, Meyyappan and colleagues estimate that their nano vacuum tube operates at frequencies up to 0.46 terahertz — some 10 times faster than the best silicon transistors — via redwolf.newsvine.com

According to their Facebook profiles, Mandy Barnes, Jasmine Wilson, May Price and Mindy Bennett have a lot in common. So do Meredith Gonzales, Sonja Watson, Lucia Long and Meredith Baker.

They are all around the same age (early 20s) and attractive, but not in a supermodel kind of way. They are all Facebook friends, despite living in different areas of the country and attending different schools. Their favourite sport is, somewhat inexplicably, cricket. Their favourite movie is the even more obscure Arab Spring Wedding. They have all posted exactly three Facebook photos, and they all have the same favourite quotation.

But the biggest thing they have in common is that they’re all fake accounts, created by the same bot-scammer to commit fraud — via redwolf.newsvine.com

All too many of us are ever-eager to upgrade to the latest and greatest whatever. Whether they be computers, washing machines, or clothes, if something goes wrong or next next arrives, we’re on to the next purchase.

Part of it, too, is that we don’t actually know how to repair our stuff. And our world is set up so it’s dramatically easier to cut and run than sit and fix. And so our landfills overflow with slightly damaged goods … a less-than-convenient truth that threatens our economic and environmental health

This may be changing. In The Netherlands, former journalist Martine Postma stumbled onto an idea that tacks the word repair onto the familiar green mantra, reduce, re-use, recycle. The result is community-based Repair Cafes where folks come together to fix their broken items. What started as a few neighbours in Amsterdam helping each other out has, two years later, become a much bigger deal, with 30 groups springing up around the country — via redwolf.newsvine.com

In OSX Lion Apple decided to hide the Library folder where most of your configuration and cache files are located. This is fine for most people, but for those of us who like to tinker it’s a bit annoying. Developer Daniel Jalkut wanted an automated way to automatically show the Library folder at login, so he put together a simple Applescript — via Lifehacker

If you don’t want your Twitter account to show up on Google the best way to hide it is to change your name in your profile settings or alter your settings so your account is private. Even if you change your account to private every tweet prior to that change is still public and Google will cache those tweets for a long while. So what do you do if you need to hide that angry tweet that shows up in a Google search but you already deleted? Twitter’s suggestion is to take it straight to Google — via Lifehacker

Chrome/Firefox: Non-US users know the pain of having services blocked from them pretty well, and YouTube is no exception. If you’re tired of stumbling on videos you can’t watch, ProxTube will fix the problem by unblocking all US-only videos for anyone to see — via Lifehacker