They’ve become a part of the pop-culture landscape: sexy, private shots of celebrities (your Scarletts, your Milas) stolen from their phones and e-mail accounts. They’re also the center of an entire stealth industry. For the man recently arrested in the biggest case yet, hacking also gave him access to a trove of Hollywood’s seamiest secrets—who was sleeping together, who was closeted, who liked to sext. What the snoop didn’t realize was that he was being watched, too.
By David Kushner
The hacker’s eyes widened as the image filled his screen. There, without her makeup, stood Scarlett Johansson, her famous face unmistakable in the foreground, her naked backside reflected in the bathroom mirror behind her, a cell phone poised in her hand snapping the shot. Holy shit, he thought. This was a find—even for him. For years, he had stealthily broken into the e-mail accounts of the biggest players in Hollywood. He had daily access to hundreds of messages between his victims and their managers, lawyers, friends, doctors, family, agents, nutritionists, publicists, etc. By now he knew more dirt than almost anyone in L.A.—the secret romances, the hidden identities, films in all stages of development. Still, this photo, a private self-portrait of one of our biggest stars, was something new, something larger than life, especially his. “You feel like you’ve seen something that the rest of the world wanted to see,” he says. “But you’re the only one that’s seen it.”
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Chris Chaney never wanted to become famous as The Man Who Hacked Hollywood. In the beginning at least, he was just a 33-year-old loner looking for something to do. Two years unemployed, he lived in a rundown brick house in a middle-class neighborhood in Jacksonville, Florida, where the streets are named for fairy tales: Cinderella Road, Peter Pan Place. He’d spent his entire life in this same area, had never flown on a plane or traveled beyond the occasional trip to see family in Iowa or Alabama. His parents separated when he was 4, and during his freshman year in high school he moved into this house near Mother Hubbard Drive with his grandmother. Taking a room hardly bigger than his bed, he hung a Fight Club poster on the wall, stacked his DVDs in the corner, lined up his He-Man dolls below the television, and called it home.
One night in early 2008, while his grandma slept, the balding, 290-pound Chaney was idly surfing movie sites like Ain’t It Cool News when he stumbled on the latest celebrity scandal. Stolen pictures had leaked online of Miley Cyrus posing half-dressed, her midriff exposed. Chaney sparked a clove cigarette and considered the story. He couldn’t have cared less about the Miley shots themselves. What intrigued him was the guy who stole them. How’d he do it? Chaney wasn’t a hacker; he didn’t even own a computer until his late twenties and couldn’t write a lick of code. But he’d always loved solving puzzles—completing crosswords, shouting out answers to Jeopardy! This was a tantalizing new riddle: “I was like, ‘How hard could this be if it’s happening all the time?’ ”
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SeatGuru “The ultimate source for airplane seating, in-flight amenities, and airline information.”
Dog nose prints are as unique as human finger prints and can be used to identify them. – Provided by RandomHistory.com
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Climbers braving Spain’s El Caminito Del Rey
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Rare White Orca Spotted off Russian Coast
Scientists have captured the first images of an adult white orca—or killer whale—in the wild. Iceberg, as he has been affectionately named, was spotted swimming with his pod off the coast of Kamchatka in eastern Russia. Orcas are typically black, with white on their undersides, above each eye, and on each flank. Until now, the only all-white orcas that had been observed were young, and none had ever been recorded surviving into adulthood. Researchers hope that future observation will help them determine whether Iceberg is a true albino or whether some other factor is responsible for his unique lack of pigmentation. More …
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Almost a million images of New York and its municipal operations have been made public for the first time on the internet.The city’s Department of Records officially announced the debut of the photo database.Culled from the Municipal Archives collection of more than 2.2 million images going back to the mid-1800s, the 870,000 photographs feature all manner of city oversight — from stately ports and bridges to grisly gangland killings.
COMPLETE COLLECTION HERE
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Syria Ends Occupation of Lebanon (This day in 2005)
In 1976, with his country embroiled in a deadly civil war, the Lebanese president turned to Syria for assistance. At his request, Syrian forces entered Lebanon. Despite their 29-year presence, the Syrians were unable to secure lasting stability. By 2005, Syrian influence in Lebanese government had provoked protests, which intensified after the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, and Syrian troops finally withdrew in April. When did the two countries re-establish diplomatic relations? More…
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Naked female scientist tries to tame beluga whales in the arctic
raving sub-zero temperatures, she has thrown caution — and her clothes — to the wind to tame two beluga whales in a unique and controversial experiment.Natalia Avseenko, 36, was persuaded to strip naked as marine experts believe belugas do not like to be touched by artificial materials such as diving suits. The skilled Russian diver took the plunge as the water temperature hit minus 1.5 degrees Centigrade.
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By the time he was 6, a mole on Didier Montalvo’s back had grown so large that it had earned him the nickname Turtle Boy. The growth — called congenital melanocytic nevus— covered more than half the circumference of Didier’s body, and the itchiness of his skin was painful. Villagers in his rural Colombian town shunned his family, and told his mother, Luz, that her son’s condition was her fault because she had looked at a solar eclipse while pregnant.
But after Didier’s story was featured in a local newspaper, donations poured in, and a London surgeon volunteered to help the boy come out of his “shell.”
“Didier’s CMN was the worst case I had ever seen due to the size and bulk of the lesion,” said Dr. Neil Bulstrode. “When I saw the pictures of Didier, one of my first feelings was that if we could remove it, we would significantly improve his quality of life.”
Done and done. A documentary about Didier’s ordeal, and the successful surgery, aired in the UK this week, and by all accounts, Didier is doing great.
(Heads up: Documentary is graphic.)
From : uniquedaily
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The house I grew up in was ordinary in most ways — a small stucco two-story in suburban Florida at the end of a block lined with more of the same. One thing did set it apart, though: it was outfitted with an advanced security system of 57 crucifixes. The crosses were strategically hung throughout the house: the moment you left the gaze-range of one Christ, you walked straight into the radar of another. There were no blind spots, not even in the bathroom. I understood and even admired their ubiquity. There was no place in the house where I could hide from scrutiny. It was checkmate.
At times I felt a sympathy for the keepers of this vigil. I often looked at the carved, pained expression of one of the living room Christs when my father stalled the television remote on something particularly dull — episodes of that PBS do-it-yourself remodeling program come to mind — and thought, Haven’t you been through enough?
In the presence of the bathroom Christs, though, I avoided eye contact. Still, it happened from time to time. I’d give a pained smile as I sat down, cringing as the porcelain echo broke the silence, then quickly flush and wash my hands. “Thanks for listening,” I’d say apologetically — by which I meant, I’m sure you have better things to do than preside over the excretion of my liquid waste.
It was through this pre-Keanu matrix I had to pass in order to arrive at my first date.
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Among the problems on college campuses today are that students study for exams and faculty encourage them to do so.
I expect that many faculty members will be appalled by this assertion and regard it as a form of academic heresy. If anything, they would argue, students don’t study enough for exams; if they did, the educational system would produce better results. But this simple and familiar phrase—”study for exams”—which is widely regarded as a sign of responsible academic practice, actually encourages student behaviors and dispositions that work against the larger purpose of human intellectual development and learning. Rather than telling students to study for exams, we should be telling them to study for learning and understanding.
If there is one student attitude that most all faculty bemoan, it is instrumentalism. This is the view that you go to college to get a degree to get a job to make money to be happy. Similarly, you take this course to meet this requirement, and you do coursework and read the material to pass the course to graduate to get the degree. Everything is a means to an end. Nothing is an end in itself. There is no higher purpose.
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Forty years in solitary: two men mark sombre anniversary in Louisiana prison
Herman Wallace, left, and Albert Woodfox in Angola prison in Louisiana. Robert King, the third member of the Angola 2, had his conviction overturned and was released in 2001.
“I can make about four steps forward before I touch the door,” Herman Wallace says as he describes the cell in which he has lived for the past 40 years. “If I turn an about-face, I’m going to bump into something. I’m used to it, and that’s one of the bad things about it.”
On Tuesday, Wallace and his friend Albert Woodfox will mark one of the more unusual, and shameful, anniversaries in American penal history. Forty years ago to the day, they were put into solitary confinement in Louisiana’s notorious Angola jail. They have been there ever since.
They have spent 23 hours of every one of the past 14,610 days locked in their single-occupancy 9ft-by-6ft cells. Each cell, Amnesty International records, has a toilet, a mattress, sheets, a blanket, pillow and a small bench attached to the wall. Their contact with the world outside the windowless room is limited to the occasional visit and telephone call, “exercise” three times a week in a caged concrete yard, and letters that are opened and read by prison guards.
A new documentary film takes us into that cell, providing rare insight into the personal psychological impact of such prolonged isolation. Herman’s House tracks the experiences and thoughts of Wallace as he reflects on four decades banged away in a box.
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Architecture is nothing more than a practical combination of arts and science, and nothing symbolized this triumphal combination more than Case Study houses, a high point in modern American architecture. Between the mid-1940s and the mid-1960s, major architects of the day were invited to design affordable and efficient model homes, and some thirty of them were built, mostly in Southern California. The sponsor of this ambitious project was the Californian magazine Arts & Architecture, which engaged an architectural photographer named Julius Shulman to dutifully record them.
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Places You are Not Allowed to See on Google Maps – YouTube.
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City streets can be mean, but somewhere near Brooklyn, a tree grows far better than its country cousins, due to chronically elevated city heat levels, says a new study. The study, just published in the journal Tree Physiology, shows that common native red oak seedlings grow as much as eight times faster in New York’s Central Park than in more rural, cooler settings in the Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountains. Red oaks and their close relatives dominate areas ranging from northern Virginia to southern New England, so the study may have implications for changing climate and forest composition over a wide region.
The “urban heat island” is a well-known phenomenon that makes large cities hotter than surrounding countryside; it is the result of solar energy being absorbed by pavement, buildings and other infrastructure, then radiated back into the air. With a warming climate, it is generally viewed as a threat to public health that needs mitigating. On the flip side, “Some organisms may thrive on urban conditions,” said tree physiologist Kevin Griffin of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who oversaw the study. Griffin said that the city’s hot summer nights, while a misery for humans, are a boon to trees, allowing them to perform more of the chemical reactions needed for photosynthesis when the sun comes back up.
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How to Develop a Photographic Memory
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10 Vestigial Traits You Didn’t Know You Had
Humans have an amazing knack for clinging to the past. We all have traits or behaviors that suited our ancestors just fine, but no longer make any sense — but we just can’t seem to get rid of them.
Over time, these traits and behaviors become what are known as “vestigial” — as in, they exist as a vestige of our evolutionary heritage. At their most innocuous, our vestigial features are funny to think about. At their worst, though, they’ve been known to be detrimental to our health (scientists often refer to this second case as en example of “evolutionary baggage”).
So here are ten vestigial traits and behaviors that you may still be clinging to.
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The parliamentary attacks on women’s rights has drawn great criticism from women’s organizations in Egypt. By Abeer Tayel
Al Arabiya
Egypt’s National Council for Women (NCW) has appealed to the Islamist-dominated parliament not to approve two controversial laws on the minimum age of marriage and allowing a husband to have sex with his dead wife within six hours of her death according to a report in an Egyptian newspaper.
The appeal came in a message sent by Dr. Mervat al-Talawi, head of the NCW, to the Egyptian People’s Assembly Speaker, Dr. Saad al-Katatni, addressing the woes of Egyptian women, especially after the popular uprising that toppled president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011.
She was referring to two laws: one that would legalize the marriage of girls starting from the age of 14 and the other that permits a husband to have sex with his dead wife within the six hours following her death.
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The 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores in the World
With Amazon slowly taking over the publishing world and bookstores closing left and right, things can sometimes seem a little grim for the brick and mortar booksellers of the world. After all, why would anyone leave the comfort of their couch to buy a book when with just a click of a button, they could have it delivered to their door? Well, here’s why: bookstores so beautiful they’re worth getting out of the house (or the country) to visit whether you need a new hardcover or not. We can’t overestimate the importance of bookstores — they’re community centers, places to browse and discover, and monuments to literature all at once — so we’ve put together a list of the most beautiful bookstores in the world, from Belgium to Japan to Slovakia. Just so you know now, all you bookstore fiends: neither the Strand nor Powell’s is on this list. They’re both great bookstores, of course, but not particularly pretty (at least in our minds), and thus disqualified. Click through to see our picks for the most beautiful bookstores in the world, and as always, if we’ve left off your favorite, be sure to add to the collection in the comments!
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