"As mobile marketers have latched onto the convenience and cool-factor of QR codes, hackers are starting to take advantage of these square, scannable bar codes as a new way to distribute malware. Like all mobile attack vectors, it is a new frontier that security researchers say is not extremely prevalent but which has a lot of potential to wreak havoc if mobile developers and users stand by unaware."

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"The HHS Office for Civil Rights announced it is beginning HIPAA audits to assess covered entities' compliance with the privacy, security and breach notification rules."

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"The first thing a forensics team will do is try to get the hackers off the company’s network, which entails simultaneously plugging any security holes, removing any back doors into the company’s network that the intruders might have installed, and changing all the company’s passwords."

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"December holiday shoppers were not just interested in buying the hottest electronics and toys -- they also were purchasing record numbers of guns, according to the latest FBI figures on background checks required to buy firearms."

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"The flaw results in too much information about the PIN being returned to an attacker and makes the PIN quite weak, affecting the security of millions of WiFi routers and access points."

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"Every part of the supermarket from parking lot to checkout counter is designed to make you spend more money and buy more food than you need."

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"If you're long-winded, then maybe you shouldn't type so much. If you're brusque, then God bless you. Don't change anything. Despite any evidence to the contrary in these columns, we're fervently pro-brusque. As far as we're concerned, brusqueness is a key part of the engine of commerce."

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HELLO!

"Your credit will recover and you will live to see another day no matter how many desperate calls you get from collection agencies. Start squirreling away some cash, brace for the worst and when you get back on your feet, then you can go back to paying down your debts."

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"This approach could be a useful addition to the arsenal of today's spam-fighting techniques, observers argue, in that, unlike other typical spam fighting approaches, the content of the email does not have to be scanned."

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"human clinical trials are supposed to begin in early 2012, and there's also a video (below) of the World's Bravest Dentist shooting a plasma beam into his own mouth."

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"Next week brings the expected closing of the world's largest electronics chain's deal to buy Mindshift Technologies Inc...Mindshift, of Waltham, Mass., was founded in 1999, and provides IT services to more than 5,400 small and medium-sized businesses throughout the U.S."

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"Dollars are valuable because they're the official medium of exchange for the $14 trillion US economy; euros and yen are valuable for similar reasons. Bitcoin boosters have traditionally suggested that Bitcoin is an alternative to these currencies. But we'll suggest an alternative explanation: that Bitcoin is not so much an alternative currency as a "metacurrency" that allows low- cost and regulation-free transfer of wealth between nations. In other words, Bitcoin's major competitors aren't national currencies, but wire-transfer services like Western Union."

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"Prospero is a prototype for a larger, singular robotic organism that Dourhout is working toward in his spare time (he’s an entomologist by trade and a roboticist by hobby, which makes him very good at his hobby). Right now, he’s got a small fleet of six-legged robots capable of working together to optimize the planting of a given piece of farmland using swarm technology and software running game theory. Via infrared, the robots communicate with each other, marking places that have already been planted and signaling to each other when one needs help seeding a particular plot."

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"But MIT researchers who studied the growth of the newly hatched Twitter from 2006 to 2009 say the site’s growth in the United States actually relied primarily on media attention and traditional social networks based on geographic proximity and socioeconomic similarity. In other words, at least during those early years, birds of a feather flocked — and tweeted — together."

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