JIMZ N’ FLOZ

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has claimed he doesn’t pay enough tax, and says wealthy Americans should contribute more in order to solve the deficit problem. This follows the State of the Union address in which Barack Obama called for the rich to aid with the growing deficit problem in the United States by increasing taxes for those who can afford it. Speaking on BBC World, Gates said taxing the rich, was “just justice”. Gates also said everyone should take responsibility for the deficit, which includes higher taxes for the rich and concludes he probably isn’t paying as much as he should.

Twitter and federal law enforcement are investigating the hacking of the Twitter account of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). The hacker left a series of tweets and did not try to cover up the fact the tweets were not coming from Grassley. The illicit tweets mocked the senator repeatedly for not having a better password and accused Grassley of supporting Internet censorship. Jill Kozeny, a spokeswoman for Grassley, said as soon as the senator’s staff noticed the phony tweets, they contacted Twitter to regain control of the account. “The password has been changed and Sen. Grassley controls the account again.” Twitter declined comment on the hacking of Grassley’s account.

Golf is a dangerous sport. Lataurus Randall, 35, of Deerfield Beach, Florida, was golfing with his cousin Melvin Philpart when they were approached by two armed, masked suspects who came out of the bushes near the 17th hole at the Deerfield Country Club around 6:30 p.m. During the armed robbery attempt, Randall was shot in the back and died the next morning at the North Broward Medical Center.

This was not the first shooting at a South Florida golf club. In 2009, Miami-Dade police arrested a 19-year-old man who allegedly shot at a golfer and at several nearby homes in the Killian Greens Golf Club in the Kendall area. Nobody was hurt. In 2006, Cynthia Moffett, a shop employee at the Forest Oaks Golf Club in Palm Beach County, was shot dead as she was closing up. In 1998, Benjamin Stein, 65, was shot and killed during a robbery at the 16th hole of the Bayshore Golf Course, now called the Miami Beach Golf Club.

Kinda gives a whole new meaning to the phrase: “How did you shoot today?” Oh well, never take a golf club to a gun fight!

– Vietnam’s Transport Minister has banned his senior staff from playing golf, saying it distracts them from their work too much. Dinh La Thang issued an document recently saying, “Some ministry leaders have had lackluster performance and part of the problem was they spent too much time playing golf.” The Transport ministry’s website posted a statement late Tuesday saying Thang has ordered all senior ministry officials and executives of corporations under the ministry not to play golf, particularly in this difficult time. Golf has become more popular among Vietnam’s growing middle class, including Communist Party officials, in recent years and there are several dozens of golf courses across the country.

– Donald Trump made some bizarre comments on marriage equality recently. At one point, he compared his opposition to the legalization of same-sex marriage to his reluctance to use a new kind of putter. “It’s like in golf, a lot of people — I don’t want this to sound trivial — but a lot of people are switching to these really long putters, very unattractive,” said Mr. Trump, a Republican. “It’s weird. You see these great players with these really long putters, because they can’t sink three-footers anymore. And, I hate it. I am a traditionalist. I have so many fabulous friends who happen to be gay, but I am a traditionalist.” Yeah. A “traditionalist” who has been married three times.

Back in October of 2009 I brought you the World’s Smallest Supercharged V8 – Well now a Spanish engineer named Patelo has created what he thinks has to be the world’s smallest V12 engine. Spending more than 1,200 hours transforming blocks of aluminum, bronze and stainless steel. Into the intricate pasts needed to build this amazing V12 engine. The tiny V12 engine is powered by compressed air which is injected into the engine at 0.1kg/sq cm. The pistons on the V12 engine measure just 11.3 mm in diameter, and with the twelve combined boasts a total displacement of 12 cubic centimeters. The complete engine is constructed from 261 handcrafted pieces, together with 222 screws which hold everything in place. Wow, this Spanish dude has some mad metal working skillz… and way too much time on his hands!

…and that is putting it nicely. This video probably won’t last long – watch it quick. Kurt Busch does a real attitude number on Dr. Jerry Punch of ESPN. Now how will NASCAR sanitize this one? My apologies, but this video has not been edited for profanity. If there are any little ones nearby… send them into the next room at minimum.

You noticed Dr. Punch was the one who decided “no interview” – which means no air time for Busch’s sponsor – Pennzoil. Hmmmmmmmmmmm. Did I mention Kurt Busch is a d*ck? And he is also my “Doofus of the Week.” Congrats Kurt!

Have you been playing your favorite games on Steam lately? Well then Valve spokesman Gabe Newell has a message for you – Steam’s database was hacked and all your personal information up for grabs, including encrypted credit card details. What is the deal with gaming sites that don’t take the security of your personal info seriously? Steam’s forums were hacked into and defaced over the weekend, and upon further investigation, Valve discovered the intrusion runs much deeper. “We learned that intruders obtained access to a Steam database in addition to the forums. This database contained information including user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information. We do not have evidence that encrypted credit card numbers or personally identifying information were taken by the intruders, or that the protection on credit card numbers or passwords was cracked. We are still investigating,” Gabe Newell said last Tuesday. Even though Valve is only aware of “a few forum accounts that have been compromised” and so far has no evidence of any compromised Steam accounts or credit card misuse, Valve says “you should watch your credit card activity and statements closely.” Another one of many reasons to not patronize Steam… did you need more?

Have you ever been playing Battlefield 3 and wondered whether you could jump from a plane and board a helicopter in flight? Or can a jeep drive over you while you are flat on the ground? Well the answers are finally here…

There. Do you feel better now?

A well-known German hacker group has accused the German government of releasing a Trojan horse program into the wild. According to the Chaos Computer Club, the program is the stuff of political fiction: it was designed to allow the government to spy on its citizens. The CCC released its findings on its website, in the form of a 20-page PDF file (in German), along with an accompanying post in English. In part, the CCC said the following:

“The malware can not only siphon away intimate data but also offers a remote control or backdoor functionality for uploading and executing arbitrary other programs. Significant design and implementation flaws make all of the functionality available to anyone on the internet. The trojan can … receive uploads of arbitrary programs from the Internet and execute them remotely. Activation of the computer’s hardware like microphone or camera can be used for room surveillance.”

Meanwhile, Internet security firm F-Secure confirmed many of the findings of the CCC, saying the software includes a keylogger and code which can take screenshots and record audio. F-Secure also confirmed it’s a backdoor Trojan, meaning it opens a backdoor in a computer system, allowing remote access without authentication to the computer in question. What F-Secure didn’t do was assign the blame to the German government. F-Secure said:

“We do not know who created this backdoor and what it was used for. We have no reason to suspect CCC’s findings, but we can’t confirm this trojan was written by the German government. As far as we see, the only party that could confirm that would be the German government itself. We have never before analyzed a sample that has been suspected to be governmental backdoor. We have also never been asked by any government to avoid detecting their backdoors.”

In fact, F-Secure detects the malware as Backdoor:W32/R2D2.A, where R2D2 comes from a string inside the trojan: “C3PO-r2d2-POE.” There is a so-called “legal” Trojan known as “Bundestrojan,” or “federal Trojan” in English. If authorized by a court order, authorities can use the Bundestrojan to listen in on Skype-based phone calls. This new program goes far beyond the abilities of Bundestrojan. F-Secure said it expected an official response from the German government, but no response has been released yet.

Dr. Joel Yang from the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE), a research institute of Singapore’s Agency of Science, Technology, and Research (A*STAR), along with collaborators from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Data Storage Institute (DSI), came up with a way to increase HD capacities six-fold using sodium chloride, the chemical grade of regular table salt. Sounds yummy… do go on.

The team used an “extremely high-resolution e-beam lithography process that produces super fine nano-sized structures.” By adding sodium chloride to a developer solution used in existing lithography processes, Dr. Yang found that he was able to produce highly defined nanostructures down to 4.5nm half pitch. Best of all, his method doesn’t require expensive equipment upgrades. Current technology uses grains of about 7-8nm in size deposited on the surface of storage media. “What we have shown is that bits can be patterned more densely together by reducing the number of processing steps,” said Dr. Yang. The good news in all this for you and me is that a 1TB drive could, in theory, hold up to 6TB of information in the same spacial size using this new technology.