• The last good restore point was only a couple of days old.
• Since I just got back into town i have worked on the pc very very little since then.
• I also had a full backup before my trip out of town that I could (still can) restore from if need be.
• None of my important documents are actually in my C drive user profile so not end of world.
• I have online backup of my user profile stuff (crashplan).

• A severe HD crash and/or loss of data can happen at ANY TIME with NO WARNING.  Backup, and do it redundantly.

• I still have no idea why this happened -- that scares me.  Normally I replace the hd on first hint of HD corruption, but this is an expensive SSD and i still don't know if this was an HD issue or not.

Deathspawner writes:
Despite all of its competition, Valve's Steam service remains the most popular digital PC game store around. While Steam does do a lot of things right, it can sometimes stumble in the worst of ways. Look no further than April's Skyrim mod debacle as a good example. Well, just as Valve fixed up that issue, it's gone ahead and fixed another: it's making refunds dead simple. While refunds have been possible in the past, it's required gamers to jump through hoops to get them. Now, Valve has set certain criteria for granting a refund, no questions asked: if you've bought the game within the past two weeks and played it for two hours or less, your refund is guaranteed.
The changes are being welcomed by most, but not all: some developers of smaller games that take less time to play through are worried that this will lead to abuse, and the system may enable more risk-free review-bombing as well.

DSLR sim controls:
Lighting

Lighting is the single biggest determinant of how your camera needs to be set. With only a few exceptions, you can never have too much light. Use this slider to experiment with different indoor and outdoor lighting conditions.

Distance

Use this slider to simulate how close or far you are in relation to the subject.

Focal length

Moving this slider is the same as zooming in and out with your lens. A wide, zoomed out setting creates the greatest depth of field (more things are in focus) while zooming in creates a shallower depth-of-field (typically just the subject will be in focus).

Mode

The exposure modes of an SLR let you control one setting while the camera automatically adjusts the others. In Shutter Priority mode, you to set the shutter speed while the camera sets the aperture/f-stop. In Aperture Priority mode, you set the aperture/f-stop while the camera sets the shutter speed. Manual mode is fully manual—you’re on your own! Refer to the camera’s light meter to help get the proper exposure. Although every real SLR camera has a “fully automatic” mode, there is not one here—what’s the fun in that?

HTTPS exploit ready to terrorise thousands of websites and mail servers
By Jamie Hinks http://www.techradar...mail-servers-1294458

Diffie-Hellman downgrade weakness allows hackers in.

Almost 100,000 HTTPS websites are under threat from a new vulnerability born out of attempts by the US in the early 1990s to break the encryption used by foreign entities.

First reported by Ars Technica, the 'Logjam' vulnerability affects 8.4% of the world's top one million websites in addition to a slightly higher percentage of the mail servers in the IPv4 address space, according to researchers.

"Logjam shows us once again why it's a terrible idea to deliberately weaken cryptography, as the FBI and some in law enforcement are now calling for," J. Alex Halderman, one of the scientists behind the research, told Ars Technica in an email. "That's exactly what the US did in the 1990s with crypto export restrictions, and today that backdoor is wide open, threatening the security of a large part of the web."

The exploit lets eavesdroppers view data passing over encrypted connections and then modify it to successfully perform man-in-the-middle attacks. It is born out of a flaw in the transport layer security (TLS) protocol that allows websites and mail servers to set up encrypted connections with end users, and the Diffie-Hellman key exchange is where the weakness lies.

Attackers are using Logjam to take advantage of a subset of servers supporting Diffie-Hellman, which allows two parties that have never met to set up a special key even if they are communicating over an unsecured connection.

To take advantage of vulnerable connections, attackers have to use the number sieve algorithm to precompute data. After doing that they can successfully perform man-in-the-middle attacks against the same vulnerable connection.


Keep your browser updated
Only Internet Explorer has been updated to protect against the exploit, although the researchers have been in touch with the developers of Chrome, Firefox and Safari to ensure that a fix will be implemented that rejects encrypted connections under a minimum of 1024 bits.

Researchers are advising server administrators to switch off support for the DHE_EXPORT ciphersuites that permit Diffie-Hellman connections to be downgraded and they have even provided a guide on how to do so securely. For end users, make sure your browser or email client is kept completely up-to-date with the very latest version.

-TechRadar

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