Worlds News

Mashable: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been under fire from world leaders to step down this week. He’s also under fire from hacktivist group Anonymous, who leaked hundreds of his office’s emails on Monday. While Anonymous is infamous for its hacking know-how, it doesn’t take a genius computer programmer to guess one of the passwords commonly used by Assad’s office accounts: 12345. The string of consecutive numbers is the second-weakest password according to a 2011 study. ...

The Russian government is no longer comfortable being dependent on the Windows operating system, and has thus decided to create its own flavor of Linux for internal use. 150 million rubles (€3.55 million or nearly $4.89 million) has been put aside for the project. That’s a huge amount of money to invest into something that isn’t certain (what if Russia gives up and goes back to using Windows 7?). “We will become independent of Windows … but it risks becoming an unthinking implantation of Linux [that was probably supposed to be translated as “implementation”],” Russian deputy and computer expert Ilia Ponomarev told the AFP. Nevertheless, he admitted that it will be difficult to create and implement an operating system secure enough for government use, conceding that “the devil is in the details.” Those details will be hashed out during a December meeting headed by Vice Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov. ...

A volcano in Iceland with probably the coolest and most formidable name ever, Eyjafjallajokull, erupted this Wednesday, April 14. As we wrote earlier, European travelers have since been stranded around the world — including the Norwegian prime minister, whose trusty iPad is thankfully keeping his country’s government afloat. NASA’s Terra satellite captured the above image depicting the enormous ash cloud migrating from the Eyjafjallajokull Volcano into Northern Europe yesterday. It’s unknown how long it will take the hazardous cloud to disperse, but estimates start at 48 hours — leaving much of Europe grounded in the volcano’s wake. ...