Everything is Interesting
Social Engineering describes methods of influencing people with the goal of illegally obtaining sensitive data (e.g. passwords, credit card information). Social Engineers observe the personal environment of their victims and use fake identities to gain secret information or free services. In most cases Social Engineering is used to infiltrate third party computer systems to spy on sensitive data; in that case social engineering is also called Social Hacking.
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A joe job is a spamming technique that sends out unsolicited e-mails using spoofed (falsified) sender data. Early joe jobs aimed at tarnishing the reputation of the apparent sender or inducing the recipients to take action against him, but they are now typically used by commercial spammers to conceal the true origin of their messages.
The name ‘joe job’ originated from such a spam attack on Joe Doll, webmaster of Joe’s Cyberpost. One user’s joes.com account was removed due to advertising through spam. In retaliation, the user sent another spam with the ‘reply-to’ headers forged to make it appear to be from Joe Doll. Besides prompting angry replies, it also caused joes.com to fall prey to denial-of-service attacks that temporarily took the web site down.
The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) is an American non-profit organization based in Washington, DC whose aim is to move public opinion sufficiently to achieve the legalization of non-medical marijuana in the United States so that the responsible use of cannabis by adults is no longer subject to penalty.
The organization was founded in 1970 by Keith Stroup, funded by $5,000 from the Playboy Foundation. Since then, it has played a central role in the cannabis decriminalization movement.
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Lim Yo-Hwan (b. 1980) of South Korea, known by the pseudonym Boxer, is one of the most successful players of the real-time strategy computer game StarCraft to date. Dubbed The Emperor by his fans, he is the most popular Starcraft player with a fan club of more than 1,000,000 members.
Lim has a record of 547 wins and 416 losses (56.80%) in his professional career. He is one of the highest-paid professional gamers, with annual earnings that exceed $300,000 US Dollars and endorsement contracts that bring in an additional $90,000 per year.
Lee Jae-Dong (b. 1990), nicknamed The Tyrant, is a South Korean professional StarCraft player representing team Hwaseung Oz. He is currently ranked second in the world by the Korean E-Sports Association and by ELO ranking (a rating system invented by Arpad Elo, used in chess to place players into categories – 2500 and above is grandmaster level). He is one of two players to achieve a winning percentage above 66% with a career record of 482 wins and 219 losses (68.76%).
The computer game StarCraft has an active professional competition circuit, particularly in South Korea. Two major television game channels, Ongamenet and MBCGame, each run a league viewed by millions of fans. Starting in about 2002, pro-gamers started to become organized into teams, sponsored by large South Korean companies like Samsung and SK Telecom. StarCraft is also the most popular computer game competition during the annual World Cyber Games thanks to its Korean fanbase, and it is among the world’s largest computer and video game competitions in terms of prize money, global coverage and participants.
Electronic Sports, abbreviated e-Sports is used as a general term to describe the play of video games competitively. Other terms include competitive gaming, professional gaming, cybersports and V-Sports. Games that are played as electronic sports normally belong to the real-time strategy (RTS), fighting, first-person shooter (FPS), massively-multiplayer online (MMOG), and racing genres. They are played competitively at amateur, semi-professional and professional levels including in leagues and tournaments.
Recently, the massively-multiplayer online roleplaying (MMORPG) subgenre in particular has generated online tournaments. The most notable is perhaps World of Warcraft, which holds annual leagues with cash prizes for their tournaments. The prizes for 2010 World of Warcraft Global Arena totaled over US$200,000, with a first prize of $75,000.
Peak oil is the idea that at some point a country, or the world, will be producing the most oil it can ever produce at one time. After this point, less oil will be produced and therefore people will have to use less oil because it will cost more money. The first person to come up with this idea was M.K. Hubbert, a U.S. geoscientist who worked at Shell, who said that a graph of oil production looks like a curve (which we now call Hubbert’s Curve).
Hubbert drew a graph in 1956 that predicted that the United States would reach its peak oil in the early 1970s, and the United States did indeed reach its peak oil in the early 1970s. It is unclear as to when the world’s peak oil will happen, though most scientists agree that it was reached in the early 2000s or will be reached before 2020. For example, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has said that peak oil may have happened in 2006.
Hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking‘) is a process that results in the creation of fractures in rocks. The most important industrial use is in stimulating oil and gas wells, where hydraulic fracturing has been used for over 60 years. The fracturing is done from a wellbore drilled into reservoir rock formations to increase the rate and ultimate recovery of oil and natural gas.
Considerable controversy surrounds the current implementation of hydraulic fracturing technology in the United States. Environmental safety and health concerns have emerged and are being debated at the state and national levels. Natural hydraulic fractures include volcanic dikes, sills and fracturing by ice as in frost weathering. Man-made fractures are typically maintained after the injection by introducing a proppant, a material, such as grains of sand, ceramic, or other particulates, that prevent the fractures from closing when the injection is stopped.
Lamborghini Aventador LP700-4 is the name of the high-performance two-door, two-seat sports car that replaces the Murciélago in the Italian automaker’s lineup. It was launched at the 2011 Geneva Motor Show. It features a brand new 6.5 litre V12 engine, producing 700 hp. It was designed by Filippo Perini of Lamborghini Centro Stile under the direction of Lamborghini chief of design Manfred Fitzgerald.
The etymology of the name comes from Lamborghini’s traditional fascination with the world of bullfighting. In this case, the Aventador was named for a Spanish fighting bull, that bore the number 32 singed on his hide, from the breeding stables of the sons of Don Celestino Cuadri Vides. Aventador gained fame in 1993 in the town of Zaragoza, Spain after a notably spirited, bloody and violent battle with a torero that led to the bull’s death.
Al Jazeera (literally, ‘The Island,’ referring to the Arabian Peninsula) is an international news network headquartered in Doha, Qatar. Initially launched as an Arabic news and current affairs satellite TV channel with the same name, Al Jazeera has since expanded into a network with several outlets, including the Internet and specialty TV channels in multiple languages. The original Al Jazeera channel’s willingness to broadcast dissenting views, for example on call-in shows, created controversies in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf. The station gained worldwide attention following the September 11, 2001 attacks, when it was the only channel to cover the war in Afghanistan live from its office there.
The original Al Jazeera channel was started in 1996 by an emiri decree with a loan of 500 million Qatari riyals (US$137 million) from the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa. By its funding through loans or grants rather than direct government subsidies, the channel claims to maintain independent editorial policy. Much of the staff came from the BBC World Service’s Saudi-co-owned Arabic language TV station, which had shut down after two years of operation because of censorship demands by the Saudi Arabian government.
Haute couture [oht koo-toor] (French for ‘high sewing’ or ‘high dressmaking’) refers to the creation of exclusive custom-fitted clothing. Haute couture is made to order for a specific customer, and it is usually made from high-quality, expensive fabric and sewn with extreme attention to detail and finished by the most experienced and capable seamstresses, often using time-consuming, hand-executed techniques.
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Bernard Arnault (b. 1949) is a French businessman. He is the founder, chairman, and CEO of LVMH, a large luxury goods conglomerate consisting of over fifty luxury brands, including Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Fendi. According to Forbes Magazine, Arnault is the world’s 7th and Continental Europe’s richest person, with a 2010 net worth of $US27.5 billion.
