Sunday, April 27, 2008
Lolcat Web site is hiring; spelling skillz optional
NEW YORK — “I can haz dream Job? My rezumez! let me showz u thm”
That’s the subject line of a cover letter sent by a job applicant to I Can Has Cheezburger, one of the premier sites for so-called Lolcat pictures.
Don’t think the letter will be rejected out of hand — bad spelling is no obstacle to a job in Lolcat world. It may even be an asset.
Lolcats became an Internet craze last year. A typical example shows a picture of a fat and hopeful cat accompanied by a caption in a baby-talklike dialect known as Lolspeak: “I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?”
Apparently, looking at Lolcats all day is an appealing job. Ben Huh, founder of the site and chief executive of Seattle-based Pet Holdings Inc., has received 250 applications since the job was posted on Monday under the headline “Kittehs Want Moar Workerhumans.”
“I got a stack of r sum s that I can’t even go through,” Huh said. “You know how they say, ‘Spell everything correctly because the people reading your r sum will toss it out otherwise?’ Well, we can’t even do that. We won’t knock you out for spelling. ... The traditional r sum screening methods don’t apply here.”
The winning applicant will join three other people who moderate ICHC and a few related Pet Holdings sites (think dogs with funny captions). A big part of the job will be selecting from the 7,000 submissions the company receives every day of captioned photos, plus 2,000 uncaptioned ones.
Hack into Obama site exploited a coding flaw
SAN JOSE, Calif. — A simple flaw in the coding of Sen. Barack Obama’s Web site led to a hacking switcheroo of presidential proportions just days before the important Pennsylvania primary.
Some supporters who tried to visit the community blogs section of Obama’s site started noticing late last week they were being redirected to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s official campaign site.
Security researchers said a hacker exploited a so-called “cross-site scripting” vulnerability in Obama’s Web site to engineer the ruse.
Netcraft Ltd. said the hacker injected code into certain pages in the section — code that was then executed when subsequent visitors tried to view the community blogs section. The vulnerability has since been fixed.
While the hack appears to have been a prank, researchers said the breach underscored that candidates risk exposing their supporters to computer viruses and identity theft if they don’t secure their Web sites. For instance, a similar mechanism could be employed to redirect campaign site users to a site that steals personal information from visitors.
“With people closely watching the heated contest to determine the next U.S. president, you can bet that this won’t be the last time such attacks happen,” Symantec Corp. researcher Zulfikar Ramzan wrote on the company’s official blog.
In Germany, robot players learn soccer
HANNOVER, Germany — They’re not quite the automatons and androids of popular culture, but the small sporting robots on the field in Germany this week are no less entertaining.
Some move about on three wheels; others plod slowly and deliberately on two or four legs. They range from thumb-sized midgets to 2- or 3-foot-tall giants.
Their common aim? To win the annual RoboCup German Open at the Hanover Trade Fair by getting the ball into their opponents’ goal.
And it’s not as complicated as it looks, said Stefan Kohlbrecher, a member of the Technical University of Darmstadt’s Darmstadt Dribblers team.
“It works with this camera, he can see with this regular Web cam,” Kohlbrecher said of his team’s charge. “He can look around, and when he sees the ball these data are processed. We tell him that what is orange and round is the ball.”
The contest, which began Tuesday and concludes Friday, is part of a wider effort to educate the public about how far robot technology has developed and how it is used in everyday life.
The RoboCup — now in its seventh year — is part of the “Mobile Robots Autonomous Systems” showcase. Other robots on display offer everything from security to faster manufacturing.
“Our robots are supporting people in museums and public places, giving them information on certain interesting things. So, this is what we believe will be the applications in the very near future,” Roko Tschakarow of System Solutions Unit Mechatronics told AP Television News.
Associated Press