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03 Oct 00:18

Researchers Show How Easy It Is To Manipulate Online Opinions

by samzenpus
jcatcw writes "A recent study shows that a single random up-vote, randomly chosen, created a herding behavior in ratings that resulted in a 25% increase in the ratings but the negative manipulation had no effect. An intuitive explanation for this asymmetry is that we tend to go along with the positive opinions of others, but we tend to be skeptical of the negative opinions of others, and so we go in and correct what we think is an injustice. The third major result was that these effects varied by topic. So in business and society, culture, politics, we found substantial susceptibility to positive herding, whereas in general news, economics, IT, we found no such herding effects in the positive or negative direction."

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01 Oct 09:21

Security Researchers Rewarded With $12.50 Voucher To Buy Yahoo T-Shirt

by Unknown Lamer
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "More and more companies are offering Bug Bounty Programs remunerating security researchers for reporting vulnerabilities and weaknesses in their applications and software. Now Security analyst Graham Cluley writes that researchers at High-Tech Bridge informed Yahoo's Security Team about three cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities affecting the ecom.yahoo.com and adserver.yahoo.com domains. According to High-Tech Bridge, each of the vulnerabilities could compromise *any* @yahoo.com email account. All that was required was that the victim, while logged into Yahoo, should click on a specially-crafted link received in an email. Forty-eight hours later, Yahoo had patched all of the vulnerabilities and Yahoo's security team responded, thanking the researchers and 'offering the mighty bounty of err.. $12.50 per vulnerability,' writes Cluley. But there was one catch. The $12.50 was given as a discount code that can only be used in the Yahoo Company Store, which sells Yahoo's corporate t-shirts, cups, pens and other accessories."

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19 Mar 13:57

You can tell a lot about a country by the porn it searches for on the Internet

by Rob Bricken

In an achievement that takes our "Map Porn" tag to its ultimate limit, the scholars/gentlemen of Porn MD have composed a completely SFW interactive map that displays the top 10 pornographic search terms of many, many countries. The results are both informative, terrifying and hilarious.

For instance:

• USA's #1 term is "MILF," which I think says a lot about us.

• Russia is oddly fixed on ex-porn star Sasha Grey, whose name ranks #5 on their list.

• Spain's #4 term is "cumlouder," which I absolutely refuse to Google myself.

• India keeps it in the family and keeps it extremely specific with their #4, "Indian Aunty."

• Libya's #1 is "Silver Daddies" and #3 is "American anal sluts," proving that the U.S. is still producing the world's best anal sluts, at least.

• The #1 search term in China is "Japanese," which is its own political nightmare, I think.

And that's not all! If you aren't feeling international, they also have the Top 10 XXX search terms for each U.S. state! I have to warn you, though, it's mostly "Teen" and "MILF" until you get to my home state of Kentucky, whose #1 is "Free Gay Porn," possibly the only geographic area on the planet that requests for its porn be free. Are we cheap? Or are we just savvy economists? Time will tell.

You check out the full map here at (again, the totally SFW) PornMD.

18 Mar 16:50

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