'Anonymous' Hacker Convicted For Attacks On PayPal, Mastercard

The "Anonymous" logo is seen on a tablet screen.

Lionel Bonaventure /AFP/Getty Images

A hacker associated with the collective Anonymous has been convicted in Britain today for attacks against the websites of PayPal, Mastercard and Visa.

Christopher Weatherhead was found guilty following the guilty pleas of three others â€" Jake Birchall, Ashley Rhodes and Peter Gibson. If you remember, the four were arrested for orchestrating denial of service attacks against the companies because they had stopped processing payments for WikiLeaks.

The Guardian reports that the men attacked Paypal for 10 days. They also overwhelmed the servers of the British Recorded Music Industry and replaced an error message with one saying: "You've tried to bite the Anonymous hand. You angered the hive and now you are being stung."

The 11-person jury deliberated for just over two hours Thursday before handing down the guilty verdict.

The Crown Prosecution Service called Weatherhead "a cyber criminal who waged a sophisticated and orchestrated campaign of online attacks."

"These were lawful companies with ordinary customers and hard working employees," the CPS said in a press release. "This was not a victimless crime."

Bloomberg adds:

"The four also targeted the British Recorded Music Industry, Ministry of Sound and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, prosecutors said. The attacks cost the companies more than 3.5 million pounds ($5.6 million) in extra staffing, software and sales losses."

The Daily Mail reports that during the trial, Weatherhead portrayed himself as an "ideological dreamer" who agreed with the free-web philosophy of Anonymous.

"I like the freedom of information on that is on the web," he said. "I enjoy spending a lot of time on Wikipedia reading things... When you can't get information I feel abashed by that."

Read more »

Fruit Fly Nose Says Steer Clear Of Deadly Food; Human Nose Not So Reliable

Enlarge image

Now we know why we'll never see a common fruit fly (Drosophila Melanogaster) sitting on a beet.

Jan Polabinski/iStockphoto.com

Now we know why we'll never see a common fruit fly (Drosophila Melanogaster) sitting on a beet.

Jan Polabinski/iStockphoto.com

The earthy smell of a fresh beet may spark delicious thoughts for us, but for a fruit fly, that smell screams danger.

Geosmin, a naturally occurring chemical that gives beets, fresh soil, and corked wine their distinctive smell, is also cranked out by bacteria deadly to fruit flies. And it turns out that the tiny flies have a direct pathway from nose to brain made just to detect that smell â€" and avoid the toxic microbes that produce it.

When Bill Hansson, a professor at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, and his crew blocked the geosmin-detecting pathway in flies, they ate contaminated food and died. With the pathway intact, they steered clear. The fact that the tiny fly is devoting precious neuronal real estate to this shows how important it has been for survival to be able to detect the smell of spoiled food.

"They have one line for their whole nervous system just telling about this," Hansson tells The Salt. "On their nose they have cells only detecting this. We tested 3,000 compounds and only got a response to geosmin. That's an amazing specificity." His article was published in the journal Cell.

This is the first evidence of a special dedicated pathway for food odor, Hansson says. Animals are also very sensitive to smells that are sexual signals. But those are blends of pheromones, rather than a single smell.

People don't have a dedicated pathway to detect geosmin. That may be because those microbes don't pose a threat to us. Also, humans have many times more smell receptors than fruit flies. And we eat a much broader range of foods. Some of us even like beets.

In fact, geosmin can be a pleasant smell: think about a farmer's field being plowed in the spring, or the garden just after it rains. But it's also responsible for the funky smell that sometimes troubles municipal water systems. (Supertasters may be able to smell germs in their sinuses, according to a recent study, but most of us don't have that talent.)

But the poor grad student who worked with the flies picked up a moldy geosmin stink that followed him around the laboratory. "It really doesn't smell nice," Hansson said. "You can smell him down the corridor."

There's no question that humans and other mammals react strongly to the smell of spoiled food. Just opening the office refrigerator is usually enough to prompt an "ugh!" or sometimes, worse. But unfortunately, people don't have the ability to recognize the smell of dangerous bugs like E. coli or Salmonella.

Still, this research could prove useful to humans. If dedicated smell pathways like the fruit fly's geosmin detector could be found in insects that pose a threat to humans â€" mosquitoes, say, or agricultural pests like the corn borer â€" Hansson thinks they could be used to develop repellents that would be safer than pesticides.

What smell screams danger to Hansson? Not geosmin, but the smell of vomit. Hansson remembers a long car trip in his native Sweden. His young son threw up in the back seat. Hansson found the hours spent smelling even the faintest remains of that smell to be excruciating. "It's such a strong stimulus. And it's one we don't adapt to. It's telling us someone has eaten something that made them sick. That's an important evolutionary signal."

Read more »

Good Joke? Australian Leader Says End Of World Is Coming

She's a kidder: Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

Chris Jackson/Getty Images

Oh those wacky Australians.

Wednesday, it was two disc jockeys impersonating Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles to trick a nurse into telling them how the Duchess of Cambridge was coping with her morning sickness.

Now, there's word that Prime Minister Julia Gillard has done a promotional video for another Aussie radio show in which she solemnly says the Mayans were right about Dec. 21 and that, "my dear remaining fellow Australians, the end of the world is coming."

She says the causes are likely to be "flesh eating zombies, demonic hell beasts or from the total triumph of K-Pop."

The Australian reports that "when contacted, the prime minister's office said: 'What Australian doesn't mind a laugh from time to time? Anyway, the world's going to end tomorrow so shouldn't you be writing about that?' "

(H/T to NPR's April Fehling.)

Read more »