Hackers come in two flavours: white-hats who exploit system vulnerabilities to help companies figure out weak points, and black-hats who exploit systems for less than noble purposes. Contrary to the notion that “hacker” was a white-hat term corrupted by the media, the word’s first recorded use described the latter type. A 1963 issue of MIT’s The Tech newspaper reported on what we now call “phone phreaking,” the illegal use of a private phone system to make calls via voicemail systems and programming ports. Read full article here
Oddities
The Curious Case of the Ancient Brain
In 2008, archaeologists examining the University of York discovered something strange: the decapitated head of an Iron Age man and his very shrivelled but very much intact brain. How a centuries-old brain was preserved is still unknown, but research suggests that it could have been because of brain diseases like dementia. The Yorkshire man’s brain’s proteins were bunched up together, much like how dementia causes brain proteins to bunch up into plaques. This bunching up, or aggregation, could continue even after death, turning regions of the brain into hard masses. Read full article here
Merv
September 30, 2022
