› added 9 years ago

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TIL hacker Samy Kamkar created a Myspace virus, which made anyone that looked at his profile automatically become his Myspace friend. It spread at a rate of 1000 accounts becoming his friend every second, resulting in over 1 million friends. Samy was raided by the Secret Service and got probation.

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xVwo1 TIL Peter Weller was awarded a PhD from UCLA in Italian Renaissance Art History in 2014 at the age of 67
WGLA TIL Pound town is a town in Wisconsin
GYo1 TIL In 2007, an unmanned yacht was discoverd drifting off the coast of Australia. The engine was running, a laptop was running, the radio and GPS were working and a meal was set to eat, but the three-man crew were not on board.
ADveg TIL of the euphemism treadmill, the concept of language being phased out and replaced due to offensive connections. For example, moron and idiot were legitimate medical terms, but were phased out due to people using them as insults. They were replaced with retarded, which has also been phased out.
6EMd8 Hong Kong-based students, Sum Ming Wong and Kin Pong Li designed a door handle that uses light to always keep itself sterilized. The students were inspired by the SARS outbreak in the 2000s and figured that a self-sanitizing door handle is more effective than the chemical-based cleaning processes we are using right now. The handle is made of a glass tube with aluminum caps at each end and the entire handle is covered in a powdered photocatalytic coating made from a mineral called titanium dioxide. The bacteria is decomposed through a chemical reaction that is activated by UV light reacting with the thin coating on the glass tube.