firehose

The Office of Management and Budget released a new report today surveying the economic damage from the federal government shutdown last month — and the news is grim. All told, OMB estimates the 16-day shutdown cost the country as much as $6 billion, taking between .2 and .6 percentage points off fourth quarter GDP growth. OMB also notes that the shutdown stands as the longest in US history when measured in furloughed employee-hours.

The report also breaks out specific damages from shutting down regulatory agencies. Closing the Treasury's Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade bureau resulted in more than two million liters of US products left sitting at ports unable to ship. Shutting down the IRS delayed $4 billion in tax refunds. EPA inspections were also halted at 1200 sites, including waste facilities and drinking water systems. Additionally, 59 airplane accidents went uninvestigated thanks to furloughed employees at the National Transportation Safety Board.

Government research was hit particularly hard hard, with 98 percent of National Science Foundation researchers sent home on furlough, and crucial observation hours disrupted at three separate National Radio Astronomy Observatories and 10 Very Long Baseline Arrays across the countries. Four of the five nobel laureate researchers employed by the government were sent home on furlough, including three physicists at NIST and another laureate working on a space telescope at NASA.

Things aren't getting much better for Adobe after the company endured a major security breach last month. If you believe the Sophos Naked Security blog, things may be far worse than originally thought. Adobe's initial estimate was that information on nearly 3 million user accounts was compromised during the intrusion. That number quickly ballooned up to 38 million. But according to Paul Ducklin at Naked Security, a database of Adobe user data has turned up online at a website frequented by cyber criminals. When all is said and done, Ducklin suggests Adobe's security blunder could rank among the worst in history. He says over 150 million "breached records" can be found in the database dump, which is a staggering 10GB when uncompressed. After analyzing a sample pool of records that were part of the leak, Sophos found that Adobe used some questionable encryption techniques.

For its part, Adobe is standing by its latest 38 million figure, and says that all impacted users have already been notified. The company was quick to reset passwords for everyone involved. Adobe says the perpetrators likely picked up "many invalid Adobe IDs, inactive Adobe IDs, Adobe IDs with invalid encrypted passwords, and test account data" in the breach, which may be playing a significant role in the huge total cited by Sophos. "We currently have no indication that there has been unauthorized activity on any Adobe ID account involved in the incident," a spokesperson tells The Verge. LastPass has set up an online tool to quickly find out if your email address is listed in the massive database.

A sampling of posts from the Am I Ugly? subreddit.

r/amiugly

The Internet has disseminated its fair share of concerns about insecure teen girls who are asking “am I pretty or ugly?” to possibly the last audience they should be consulting (the ever-hostile ranks of YouTube commenters). But a new examination of reddit by PsychGuides shows that teen boys aren’t immune to appearance-related anxiety. They’ve just found a different place to express them: in subreddits.

According to PsychGuides, four out of five submissions to the r/amiugly subreddit are by a male redditor, and the average age is between 18 and 19. In this subreddit, users post photos of themselves for open critique of the 35,000 subreddit subscribers and any passers-by who have thoughts.

But while men constitute most of the submissions, women make up most of the responders: 62 percent of the responses to submissions were made by female redditors 18 and under. Female submissions also get the most responses at an average of 54 replies per submission compared to male submitters’ average of 14 replies.

Mail in OS X 10.9.

Apple

Apple has just issued a patch specifically for Gmail users running Mail.app in OS X 10.9. The 32.46MB Mail Update for Mavericks is said to bring "improvements to general stability and compatibility with Gmail," specifically a bug that causes unread message counts to be inaccurate, and another bug that "prevents deleting, moving, and archiving messages for users with custom Gmail settings."

The support page for the fix recommends backing up your data via Time Machine or some other mechanism before installing. You can get the update either through Software Update or by grabbing it manually.

The rumor mill says that Apple is also testing some other new features and fixes for Mavericks, most notably in an OS X 10.9.1 update designed to fix minor-but-pressing problems and a larger 10.9.2 update later on. Neither of these has appeared in Apple's standard developer portal as of this writing, but given that Apple has followed this pattern for every single version of OS X to date, it's not exactly a stretch of the imagination. Apple also released version 1.0.1 of iBooks for OS X today, which includes some non-specific "bug fixes and improvements to performance and stability."

While New York and San Francisco are undeniably huge tech centers in the US, Boston has some impressive credentials of its own. The city is well-known for its academic institutes, a growing tech start-up scene — and massive companies like Microsoft, Twitter, and Google have a presence in the area as well. Now, Facebook's officially joining that list: the company just announced the creation of a new Boston engineering team. This marks the fifth formal engineering center for Facebook, joining others in Menlo Park, Seattle, London, and New York.

Facebook actually has had a presence in the city for some two and a half years — in a blog post, team leader Ryan Mack recounts how a small remote team in Boston worked on major projects like the Timeline and Photos products. That team is getting more formalized now and looking to hire additional hands, though Mack notes the team will start small. Initial projects will focus on infrastructure challenges like networking, storage, and security — Facebook should soon be posting open positions on its careers page.

I'm 23 years old and live in Vancouver, WA. I have lived here my entire life and I'm currently a part-time clark community college student. I'm finishing up a general aa degree in two quarters before I transfer to WSUV hopefully. I haven't had a real job in two years but i'm financially stable thanks to my aunt that passed away in 2000 (She was an accountant for chevron). Most of my friends are either busy working their jobs in Portland or have all moved away to some expensive university while i'm stuck here doing nothing all day but playing video games, doing a little bit of homework, watching netflix, and reading.

I tried a post like this once before and was going to hangout with one or two people that lived in the area but they got too busy with work and dropped all contact with me.

If anyone is interested feel free to pm me! I'm a really nice guy that just wants a few new friends or a group of friends to hangout with. I'm pretty lucky if I get one person texting me on a daily basis. Oh, and here's a pic of me: http://imgur.com/cgBC9 I'm tall and skinny with a deep voice.