Today on how it's made..... French Fries
Google doodle celebrates London Olympics opening ceremony
The stage is set and the athletes are primed as the seven-year countdown to the London 2012 Olympics reaches its finale with Friday's much-anticipated opening ceremony.
The three-hour spectacle, expected to be watched by a global television audience of up to one billion, will mark the beginning of 17 days of athletic endeavour which will create heroes, shatter dreams and fire national pride.
But London is preparing for its own intense examination as questions over the city's creaking transport system and the ever-present security threat hang over the event, ready to overshadow on-track achievements.
Sneak previews of the £27 million ($42 million, 35 million euros) opening ceremony - filmed at Wednesday's final rehearsal - suggest it will be a grand but quirky production, reflecting the philosophy of director Danny Boyle.
The Slumdog Millionaire Oscar-winner has promised to create a "picture of us as a nation" and revealed the eccentric show will feature live sheep and dancing surgeons from the National Health Service.
In depicting Britain, warts and all, Boyle has drawn from William Shakespeare, British pop culture, literature and music, and other sources of inspiration that will speak not just to Anglophiles but to people across the globe. One segment involves actor Daniel Craig's James Bond, and former Beatle Paul McCartney will lead a sing-along.
Boyle's Isles of Wonder show will celebrate the green and pleasant land of meadows, farms, cottages, village cricket matches and bird song, but also dwell on Britain's darker industrial past. That's not a surprise from a movie director who depicted Scottish heroin addicts in "Trainspotting" and Indian poor in Slumdog Millionaire.
As well as thousands of athletes and performers, some 60,000 spectators will pack the Olympic Stadium. Political leaders from around the world, U.S. first lady Michelle Obama and her daughters, and a sprinkling of European and celebrity royalty will also attend.
According to the Sunday Times, one section will feature characters from children's fiction classics including Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan - and a showdown between Lord Voldemort, the villain of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, and a horde of flying magical nannies based on Mary Poppins.
Many of the juiciest and most significant details from the three-hour show, including the identity of the person or people who will light the Olympic cauldron - if, indeed, there is one - remain secret. That is, in itself, remarkable for the first social media Olympics, where the urge to tweet anything and everything is putting more scrutiny than ever on organisers and the 10,902 athletes from 204 countries.
Thousands of VIPs including some 120 national leaders are in town for the event, with guests ranging from Angelina Jolie and US First Lady Michelle Obama to the king of Swaziland.
Germany's Angela Merkel and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda are among the leaders set to attend while Michelle Obama will head the US delegation.
Google Celebrated Gustav Klimt's 150th Birth Anniversary with an Attractive Doodle.
Search engine giant Google on Saturday celebrated Gustav Klimt's 150th birth anniversary with an attractive doodle.
Gustav Klimt (July 14, 1862 - February 6, 1918), an Austrian symbolist painter whose prominent works created much controversy as it celebrated frank eroticism. But in the contemporary times, his works are recognized as one of the highly expensive artworks. The subject of his works was female body and his works include art objects, paintings, murals and murals.
Born to a gold engraver in Baumgarten in 1862, near Vienna, he spent most of his childhood in poverty.
However, because of his interest and passion towards artwork, Klimt was awarded a scholarship to the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts in 1876.
Most of his paintings were created using gold leaf which received much appreciation and criticism worldwide.
Google paid tribute to Klimt with a doodle displaying one of his artwork ' The Kiss ' (In German: Der Kuss) painted between 1907-08 which is known 'Golden Period' of his life, the highpoint of his creativity. The canvas depicted a couple embracing each other and their bodies entwined in decorated robes. It is an oil paint artwork that gives a strikingly modern theme.
Moreover, several of his works were destroyed and the remains are preserved at various galleries across the world. Also, many of his paintings were left unfinished.
On February 6, 1918, Klimt died of a stroke and pneumonia and was buried at the Hietzing Cemetery in Vienna.
Yahoo! HaCkEd.....time to change your password...
(CNN) -- Hackers posted online what they say is login information for more than 450,000 Yahoo users.
The hack, which of course was conducted anonymously, was meant to be a warning, according to the Web page where the documents were dumped.
"We hope that the parties responsible for managing the security of this subdomain will take this as a wake-up call, and not as a threat," a note on the page said. "There have been many security holes exploited in Web servers belonging to Yahoo! Inc. that have caused far greater damage than our disclosure. Please do not take them lightly."
The statement adds that the "subdomain and vulnerable parameters" that were used to hack the site were not posted "to avoid further damage."
Yahoo investigating CEO's record
The Web page where the data was dumped was offline for much of Thursday morning.
Yahoo confirmed on Thursday the hack of Yahoo Voices, part of its news service, saying "approximately 400,000" usernames and passwords were stolen. But in a written statement, the company said that less than 5% of the breached Yahoo accounts had valid passwords.
"At Yahoo! we take security very seriously and invest heavily in protective measures to ensure the security of our users and their data across all our products," the statement said. "We are fixing the vulnerability that led to the disclosure of this data, changing the passwords of the affected Yahoo! users and notifying the companies whose users accounts may have been compromised."
Yahoo apologized in the statement and urged users to change their passwords on a regular basis.
Voices is an online publishing tool. Formerly known as Associated Content, it was acquired by Yahoo in 2010. Starting in its days as an independent company, many have criticized it as a "content farm," a website that cranks out low-quality content designed to game search engines like Google to get page views and sell advertising.
Perhaps due to the similarity of the names, some early reports from security analysts and others identified the hack as impacting users of Yahoo Voice, the site's Web phone service.
As it has after previous hacks, tech blog CNET broke down the list to find the most frequently used passwords. Many of them were embarrassingly easy to crack.
Sequential lists of numbers, like "12345," were used 2,295 times, and "password" was used 780 times, out of the 450,000 passwords.
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