Hackers steal US govt, corporate data from PCs  
  
BOSTON, July 17 (Reuters) - Hackers stole information from the U.S. Department of Transportation and several U.S. companies by seducing employees with fake job-listings on advertisements and e-mail, a computer security firm said.

This article is great. It’s thorough, and complete, but you incorrectly lable the perpetrators as ‘hackers’ instead of ‘crackers’.

Bill E.

We heard from a number of readers on this one, and we are aware that this is a sore subject among insiders who distinguish between hacking  and cracking. 

However, it seems the battle to protect the H-word was lost some time ago. For example, American Heritage Dictionary offers this as a definition of hacker: “One who uses programming skills to gain illegal access to a computer network or file.”

And, to borrow from our competition, the Associated Press Stylebook says: “In common usage, the term has evolved to mean one who uses computer skills to unlawfully penetrate proprietary computer systems.”

GBU Editor

Readers, who do you think get more sex?  Chiseled, muscular guys, or wimps? Go ahead, take your time and think about it carefully. Wow, you got it right on the first guess?  Me, too. 

Researchers at UCLA actually did a study on this, and came to the mind-boggling conclusion that women are “predisposed to prefer muscularity in men. I hope they didn’t spend more than $10 on the study, because that would have bought them a seat at Oceans Thirteen and answered all their questions.

But what I found most fascinating is that a noticeable number of stories about the study used the same phrase, which probably means it was in the press release. They referred to the muscular men’s “less-chiseled peers,” which has to be the euphemism of the month. As a spokesman for LCPs, thank you, UCLA! Here’s the story:

More Oddly Enough Blog

Roman Sebrle of the Czech Republic flexes his muscles for photographers after wining the decathlon at the European athletics championships in Gothenburg (Goteborg) August 11, 2006.      REUTERS/Phil Noble