Hasta La Gadget!

It’s been a weird year in the tech world. We kicked things off with the on-going Crunchpad/JooJoo saga, Google had a surprising number of misfires (including Buzz and Wave), some of Hollywood’s finest released a movie based on the life of a social network CEO, and Julian Assange leaked the entire world’s dirty laundry.

In fact, when I asked my coworkers at PCMag to help me come up with some of the weirdest stories of the year, I received too many responses to fit into a single post. So, in honor of the weird year that was, I present the first of a two-part roundup of some of the strangest tech stories we followed this calendar year. 

According to a new Gallup poll, four out of every 10 Americans agrees with the statement “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.”

That’s creationism. And for the record, these folks vote in the same elections as you and I.

As for the concept that humans have, in fact, evolved over millions of years, but with God’s guiding hand–that captures around 38% of responses.

And for those who throw their lot in purely with science and facts, an anemic (though rising) 16% of responders agreed with the statement “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, [and] God had no part in this process.”

Personally, I find this poll disparaging, if not expected. But there are some reasons for hope. Of the three groups, the creationists are the largest. However, the gap between those who believe in a millennial-long process of godly evolution vs straight creation is the smallest in the poll’s near 30-year history (38% vs. 40% respectively). Also, those who believe in the wholly secular process of biodiversity reach their (comparatively) best showing in the poll’s history, and their numbers have been marching upwards over the past decade.

As you might expect, the percentage of those who accept evolution (in some form) rises with the amount of education (creationists makeup 22% of postgraduates, but 47% of those who only reached high school or less), while it is inversely related with church attendance (of those who attend church weekly, 60% are creationists, but they only make 24% of those who attend church seldom/never).

As for party affiliation, a majority of Republicans (52%) are fine with the not true idea that humans have only been around for 10,000 years. However, the largest percentage of people who believe in a science-driven understanding of our species actually identify as Independents (21%, a full percentage point over those who identify as Democrats).

What a country!  

Well, I guess this was inevitable.

Last week, we reported that spam-tracking outfit Spamhaus had put out a bulletin warning visitors to beware of wikileaks.info, a WikiLeaks mirror site not officially affiliated with Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks organization.

Somehow, the dot-info site is where visitors are automatically sent to if they type in WikiLeak’s original domain: www.wikileaks.org (the exact way that switch happened remains somewhat murky–WikiLeaks.info claims they had no part in it).

Wikileaks.info is hosted by an organization that Spamhaus categorizes a Russian cybercriminal outfit that is breeding ground for spam, malware, and other assorted digital underbelliness.

WikiLeaks.info has denied any malware exists on their site. The site had even put out a “press release” on their site claiming the allegation against their site’s host are “false” and “none of our business” and went on to call for people to contact Spamhaus and “voice your opinion.”

This past weekend, Spamhaus site was the victim of a DDoS attack from AnonOps, the cyber vigilantes who fight on the side of all things leaked and wiki. In response, Steve Linford of Spamhaus sent out the following plea on behalf of his organization to say, in part (full text here):

Because they are using a Wikileaks logo, many people thought that the
“press release” was issued “by Wikileaks”. In fact there has been no
press release about this by Wikileaks and none of the official Wikileaks
mirrors sites even recognise the wikileaks.info mirror. We wonder how
long it will be before Wikileaks supporters wake up and start to
question why wikileaks.info is not on the list of real Wikileaks mirrors
at wikileaks.ch.

Currently wikileaks.info is serving highly sensitive leaked documents
to the world, from a server fully controlled by Russian malware
cybercriminals, to an audience that faithfully believes anything with a
‘Wikileaks’ logo on it.

Spamhaus continues to warn Wikileaks readers to make sure they are
viewing and downloading documents only from an official Wikileaks mirror
site. We’re not saying “don’t go to Wikileaks” we’re saying “Use the
wikileaks.ch server instead”.

For those of us that still have a heap of holiday shopping to do and are fearfully watching the clock tick down on the the little time that is left, Amazon is gifting us a little holiday miracle: free (Yes, FREE) expedited shipping on selected products now through 11:59pm (PST) on December 22.

The offer is good for selected jewelery, cameras, photo products, video games, computers and accessories, movies, cellphones, audio and video equipment, software, and much more, including jewelery and personal care products. To check which products qualify, go to amazon.com. When you add a qualifying product to your Shopping Cart, select One-Day Shipping, and the discount will be applied at checkout. The offer only applies to products shipped within the continental U.S..

So you can stop stressing (at least a little bit) because you can order gifts today and you can get the relief that it will be here in time with one-day shipping without breaking the bank. But you still need to figure out what to get dreadful Uncle Arnold and what food to buy (that you’ll pretend like you slaved over) to take to the holiday party. Good Luck.