Tech Brief
On Tech Brief today: Playstation gamers frustrated, Opera web browser's "severe" flaw - and the cyber-policing that gives you wings.
• Playstation users in Europe had to wait an extra day for the latest map updates to Modern Warfare 2: Call of Duty. The Playstation Store now updates on a Wednesday in Europe but on a Tuesday in the US, which was when the MW2 maps were released.
In the old days, European gamers would have been even more frustrated as the store used to update on a Thursday, according to .
• that popular web browser has issued a fix for a "severe security flaw" in version 10.53 which affects Windows and Mac users. Opera also wins Tech Brief's Tech Jargon Of The Week award for :
"Multiple asynchronous calls to a script that modifies the document contents can cause Opera to reference an uninitialized value, which may lead to a crash. To inject code, additional techniques will have to be employed."
You have been warned... We think.
• Petabytes are so 2009, Tech Briefers. Word on the street - OK, - is that there's a new measurement big enough to describe all the digital data out there - and it's called the zettabyte.
"Research published today estimates that the so-called digital universe grew by 62% last year to 800,000 petabytes - a petabyte is a million gigabytes - or 0.8 zettabytes. That is the equivalent of all the information that could be stored on 75bn Apple iPads, which would equal the digital output from a century's worth of constant tweeting by all of Earth's inhabitants."
• The US Air Force is to issue a cyberwings medal to digital warriors, . At first, we didn't quite believe it either. And now we all want one.
behind the design of the medal, available at basic, senior and masters levels:
"The design element of the badge holds significant meaning. The lightning bolt wings signify the cyberspace domain while the globe signifies the projection of cyber power world-wide. The globe, combined with lightning bolt wings, signifies the Air Force's common communications heritage. The bolted wings, centered on the globe, are a design element from the Air Force Seal signifying the striking power through air, space and cyberspace. The orbits signify the space dimension of the cyberspace domain."
Move over Blue Peter, there's a new badge in town.
• Parlez-vous lolcat? from the 2010 ROFLcon (Roll On The Floor Laughing Convention) at MIT, a gathering of the brains behind internationally popular memes such as and .
The group met to discuss how memes translate and travel through different cultures. Keynote speaker Ethan Zuckerman from Havard explained:
"While historically Africa had produced no memes, Kenya had recently created its first. Makmende Amerudi, a pseudo-Chuck Norris, has quickly gone viral in Kenya. Web sites have been established listing Makmende facts, and his portrait has found its way onto parody 10,000 shillings notes."
Cyberwings to the first person who can send one Tech Brief's way.
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