Seagate hard drives ship with virus

Interesting…an undisclosed number of Seagate’s Maxtor Basics Personal Storage 3200 units have shipped with a virus that steals passwords to online games, such as World of Warcraft.  Identified as Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah by Kaspersky Labs, the virus also deletes similar viruses and can disable virus detection software as well.

The virus, which was loaded onto the Maxtor units at a sub-contract manufacturer’s location in China, is sending stolen passwords back to a server that’s also located in China.

Not good.  Read more at eWeek.

Computer program detects author gender

I read an excerpt at the Nature website by Phillip Ball, wherein a computer program, developed by Moshe Koppel and his colleagues, can guess/tell whether the author [of a book] was written by a man or a woman.  It’s algorithm (see below), says Ball, basically scans for keywords and syntax to accomplish this feat, and is surprisingly “around 80 percent accurate.”

Ball states:

The program’s success seems to confirm the stereotypical perception of differences in male and female language use.  Crudely put, men talk about objects, and women more about relationships.  Female writers use more pronouns (I, you, she, their, myself), say the program’s developers, Moshe Koppel, and colleagues.  Males prefer words that identify or determine nouns (a, the, that) and words that quantify them (one, two, more).

There’s also a Perl module on CPAN called Lingua::EN::Gender that uses the algorithm below.

Moshe Koppel and colleague’s algorithm

Take any piece of fiction and do the following:

1. Count the number of words in the document.

2. For each appearance in the document of the following words ADD the number of points indicated:
‘the’ (17)
‘a’ (6)
‘some’ (6)
any number, written in digits or in words (5)
‘it’ (2)

3. For each appearance in the document of the following words SUBTRACT the number of points indicated:
‘with’ (14)
possessives, ending in ‘s’ (5)
possessive pronouns, such as ‘mine’, ‘yours’, ‘his’, ‘hers’, (3)
‘for’ (4)
‘not’ or any word ending with ‘n’t’ (4)

4. If the total score (after adding and subtracting as indicated) is greater than the total number of words in the document, then the author of the document is probably a male. Otherwise, the author is probably a female.

Air Canada’s paperless mobile boarding pass

You might be surprised to know that your mobile (cell phone) device may be the new airline boarding pass.  It’s an interesting concept, but I’m a bit skeptic about the security issues that this could have.

As stated on Air Canada‘s website:

Introducing a new and efficient way to improve your flying experience,image from the moment you check-in using your mobile device, to boarding. Our enhanced Mobile Check-in service now offers a paperless Mobile boarding pass. Making your flying experience quicker and easier by proceeding directly to the security check point. This enhanced Mobile check-in service has certain restrictions, if the restrictions do not apply, you can still use our regular Mobile Check-in service.

Read more here.

BigBelly to the rescue

I watched a segment (on the Science channel) about BigBelly, a solar-powered trash image compacting garbage bin that’s currently being used in some areas of New York. Built and developed by Seahorse Power Company and priced around $4,500, it crushes garbage based on some algorithm into eighth of its size when needed; thus, reducing the frequency of garbage collection. Well worth it, I think, considering the resources needed in a city like New York.

What’s really a nice feature is it can last up to 4 weeks (on full charge) without sunlight, and still crush garbage efficiently. This is definitely one of those innovations that we humans desperately need, since garbage is a big problem these days. Nice…

Don’t you love living in the 21st century? I do.