geekosystem

Doting Dad Mike Mika couldn't bear to see his daughter's disappointment at not being able to play as a princess in Donkey Kong the way she had in Super Mario Brothers 2. Rather than explain to her why Mario was always the hero and Pauline always needed saving, though, Mika changed the game, putting together a patch that turns let his daughter get her game on as video gaming's original damsel in distress. Check out the video, which really should earn Mika a "#1 Dad" mug for ensuring his daughter knows that girls can save the day just as well as boys, below.

Hackers have seized control of the official @BurgerKing Twitter account, and are running wild with it. The running joke of the hack is that Burger King has been sold to McDonald's, but there are also a fair number of nonsensical tweets and links to rap songs thrown in for good measure. We've got screen shots for you, since we're assuming this thing won't last long.

What do a diamond and a picture of your naughty bits have in common? If you answered "They're both romantic things to give to your sweetheart," you are wrong. If you said "They will be around forever," though -- you're right! That's because a new workaround for SnapChat -- the mobile service that lets you send a photo message that will delete itself, Mission Impossible-style, just seconds after being received and has thus become a great way to send photographs of your genitals to other people -- makes it way easier for recipients to save those photos until the end of time, or at least until the person who sent it to them in sophomore year tries to run for Congress.

Technology is an almost inseparable part of our lives at this point. For those with medical implants, like pacemakers, this is even more true. The unfortunate side effect of this dependence is the disappointing fact that just about anything technological is susceptible to hacking. At the BreakPoint security conference in Australia, IOActive researcher Barnaby Jack demonstrated that he could deliver a series of 830 volt shocks to a nearby pacemaker via his laptop.

Every so often, a glitch or exploit will be discovered that causes massive amounts of World of Warcraft folks to die. This typically has something to do with incorrectly set flags, or similar circumstances, that then cause a chain reaction as more folks exacerbate the problem. It wasn't that long ago that Death Knights found they could cast their plagues on friendly units and caused a mass extinction of their own. Yesterday, an exploit was used to fly around killing everyone in range, thus nuking entire cities across multiple servers.

Millions of hotel rooms around the world are protected by Onity locks. Unfortunately for hotel guests, these locks aren't exactly secure. Each lock includes a port on the bottom that's meant to allow access the hotel staff in order to set master keys, but it can be spoofed to reveal all the juicy information needed to pop the door open. This much we knew back in July, when hacker Cody Brocious demonstrated a version of it. However, we now know that a device capable of reliably performing this trick can be made small enough to fit in a dry erase marker.

I'm not a coward or anything (I swear!), but I will level with you -- being a parent looks utterly daunting and terrifying. One day someone just hands you a tiny little human that is incapable of doing anything but producing noise and goo, and for the next several years, you are responsible for making sure it thrives. Luckily, there's help, and no, I'm not talking about spouses or your own, seasoned parents -- I'm talking about good old never-let-you-down or lead-you-astray technology. Before his daughter was even born, hacker and blogger Gjoci was hard at work cobbling together a breath detector from a Wiimote and a trio of 1 milliwatt lasers. Positioned above the crib, this neat hack sets off an alarm anytime the breathing seems to stop or becomes irregular.

Only a little over a week ago, Dropbox and their outside experts were claiming that there was no evidence of a hack. As it happens, they were wrong. They've now confirmed that some users did see unauthorized activity on a small number of accounts due to the recent slew of passwords being leaked across the Internet. On top of that, one of their employees had their account -- which included a document with user email addresses -- accessed as well. Oops.

The developer behind the exploit that lets users bypass Apple's authentication servers with in-app purchases, Alexey Borodin, has revealed that the same weakness can be utilized with OS X applications. This comes on the heels of Apple letting developers know that iOS 6 would plug the hole but that they could put in place measures to prevent it as well. Guess they didn't bother checking to see if their other similar programs had, y'know, similar issues.

Nothing's ever as secure as we think it is. Dropbox, having not so long ago accidentally dropped password protection on user accounts, has been receiving reports of folks receiving spam in their emails. Normally this wouldn't be an issue -- most email accounts get spam. The complicate things, the users have claimed that these accounts were unique to Dropbox; the only way for someone to be spamming them would be due to having somehow gotten the accounts from Dropbox.

Have you had to change your login information in a paranoid fever after discovering that a major online service provider has been hacked in the last few weeks? Well, if you have a Yahoo! account, you might have some worrying to do. A hacker group called D33DS Company has apparently dumped 453,492 usernames and passwords obtained in plaintext from a Yahoo! service.

If you've been worried about the number of law enforcement agencies that want to use drones to surveil the domestic populace, then here's one more thing to freak out about: They are pathetically easy to hijack. In fact, a determined individual can do it with less than $1,000 worth of equipment.

Steam, the online gaming distribution system we know and love, announced back in November that they'd been the victim of a security breach. At the time, it was reported that the hacker had accessed the Steam user database, but that no information appeared to have been compromised. However, the ongoing investigation seems to indicate that it might be worse than originally thought.

Hey, remember those clever image combinations that particularly festidious Facebook users put in place during the last major overhaul to the social networking site? Well, because of Timeline, all of those are going to be completely messed up. Thankfully, the new enormous "cover" image at the top of the redesigned user pages has ample opportunities for image shenanigans. If you're keen to try something like you see above, check out the instructions after the break.

The location-aware all-male dating service Grindr seems to have been the target of a major cyber attack, taking advantage of flaws in the mobile app's security. An as-yet unidentified hacker was able to use these flaws to access the service's user accounts, and posted account information online. Though the attack primarily targeted the Australian users, it took advantage of flaws which affect all users and users of the heterosexual targeted version of the service called Blendr.