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POPSGmail Spam trick A neat little way to see who sent you what e-mail. This could be useful for figuring out who is selling your email address to spamers
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POPSFree File Format Conversion No need to download any software. Excellent resource to convert quickly between common picture, music, and document files. Have used it several times myself, so far, no spam has been sent to my email address because of this site.
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POPSHow to Become President with Clipmarks You heard it here first. In 2008, you just won't get elected without reaching out to the coveted Clipmarks community. And you can bet we'll be checking candidates' sign-up dates. :) The publicity for Clipmarks 2.0 rolls on....
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POPS YOU JUST GOT SCREWED and Nobody Will tell you! URGENT!! Made the Digg front page in less than 3 hrs. Thank goodness some people still care what is happening in this country! Meanwhile, last year, Freddie Mac paid chairman and CEO Richard Syron nearly $19.8 million in compensation, Fannie Mae pres. and CEO Daniel Mudd recieved $12.2 million, including a $2.2 million bonus!
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POPSSpam on Clipmarks These days I just follow clippers who find me, but for kicks i decided to browse the general clip casts. Disapointingly it was inundated with totaly useless de fact advertising for www.playgames.net. Which appears to have sequentially registered a bunch of dummy names. Not that I'm in favor of censoring content, but is there a way to keep clipmarks non-commercial? It seems like these accounts were set up only to spam us, not to participate in the community or clip the best of the net. What can we do about these kind of virulent users?
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POPSBoredom a sickness or a creative tool? "In experiments in the 1970s, psychiatrists showed that participants completing word-association tasks quickly tired of the job once obvious answers were given; granted more time, they began trying much more creative solutions" "In a recent paper in The Cambridge Journal of Education, Teresa Belton and Esther Priyadharshini of East Anglia University in England reviewed decades of research and theory on boredom, and concluded that it’s time that boredom “be recognized as a legitimate human emotion that can be central to learning and creativity.”
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POPSThe Pirate Bay to sue anti-piracy agencies? The Pirate Bay showed that emails leaked from media defenders servers clearly showed that the company had launched illegal denial of service attack on the pirate bay’s servers, engaged in illegal hacking and repeatedly flooded them with spam. Funny ???
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POPSWill the Internet Evolve into a Lifeform? One route is the evolution of electronic intelligences in situations like the internet-arms race between spammers and shielders. It might sound silly, the idea that new life could be created in an attempt to offer you a great deal on C1@Lis!!, but have you tried registering for a forum recently? Even gaining access to the lowest level of interaction online now requires elementary Turing tests to tell the humans from the robots. Another option is the idea of the net itself becoming sentient, a vast self-modifying array of connections and information storage with limited connections to the outside world (kind of like that glob of grey goo you carry around in your skull). If that happens then Gibson help us all - remember that the net is made of about 90% spam, 9% porn, and quite a lot of whining blogs. If that mixture ever becomes self-aware we're not quite sure what it'll do, but the odds are against it being anything good.
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POPSAbout 90 percent of all email is spam: Cisco
This year, botnets were used to inject an array of legitimate Websites with an IFrames malicious code that reroutes visitors to websites that download computer viruses into their machines, according to Cisco. "The botnet is, in many cases, ground-zero for online criminal threats," Peterson said. "Using malware to infect someone's computers is an incredibly common mechanism and harnessing them all together is a way they do their click fraud, spam emails, and data stealing." As computer security vendors such as Cisco get better at protecting machines from hackers and users grow wary of clicking on unsolicited Web links or email attachments, online criminals are turning botnets on Web-based email accounts. Hackers are "reputation hijacking" by using botnets to figure out weak passwords protecting Web-based email accounts, according to Peterson. Weak passwords consist of family names, birthdays, home addresses, or other terms considered relatively easy to deduce.
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POPS Can boredom becomes a tool for learning and creativity...? "Boredom as a temporary state is another matter, and in part reflects the obvious: that the brain has concluded there is nothing new or useful it can learn from an environment, a person, an event, a paragraph. But it is far from a passive neural shrug. Using brain-imaging technology, neuroscientists have found that the brain is highly active when disengaged, consuming only about 5 percent less energy in its resting “default state” than when involved in routine tasks, according to Dr. Mark Mintun, a professor of radiology at Washington University in St. Louis"