The Balkan Chronicle

From hackers to security experts, the Balkan IT sector is booming

After hacking the Pentagon, NASA and Britain's Royal Navy for fun, TinKode got a real job as a computer security expert for a Romanian cyber safety consultancy.

TinKode was the name used by Romanian Razvan Cernaianu when he revealed security holes in government and corporate systems across the world, earning him a two-year suspended prison sentence.

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Antimatter: The Mirror We Didn’t Look At

Science always taught us to think outside the box, get out of templates, step out of the crowd and put restrictions aside. Last January NASA's Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope surprised the entire world with an unexpected finding: "Thunderstorms make antimatter," a bombshell which hit the world and especially scientists. Fermi telescope observed that Gamma rays shot by lightning interact with atoms in the atmosphere to form electrons as well as positrons.

Antimatter is believed to be the opposite of the "matter", with matter making up everything we see around us in the universe from rocks to the stars. It was first thought about during the last decades of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, and theoretical thinking about it revolved around believing that antimatter became a non-existing form a few seconds after the start of the Big Bang.

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How to get rid of the bedbugs?

Bedbugs have become a growing problem around the world, with epidemics New york and other world cities.

However, researchers have found an unlikely solution - kidney bean leaves.

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Getlokal.ro and transporturban.ro: the route is as important as the destination!

Getlokal.ro and transporturban.ro became friends for the good of the locals and tourists in Bucharest that want to move efficiently through the city and decide fast and informed where to spend their free time.

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Eastern European site offers tools for adopting the suspendedcoffee movement in any party of the world

Suspended coffee. Caffe sospeso. Pin a cup. Pay it forward. A good deed that has more than one version – random generosity meets cozy coffee shop and friendly customers or small charity gesture flows in local tribes.

How did the suspended coffee movement start in Romania?

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Growth as the main theme of the SE European regional telematics conference

The telematics industry, with its rapid growth, is a bright exception in this time of economic crisis in Europe. How to keep the sales of telematics systems for vehicle monitoring and fleet management at a high level and use development potentials in Southeast Europe were key themes of the second regional event Telematics Conference, which was held in Ljubljana, Slovenia. 

One after the other presentations showed how the number of vehicles equipped with tracking devices continues to grow, as well as "machine-to-machine" communications which are expected to surpass communication among people by 2020. Visitors were able to learn about more applications of the telemetic systems in various industires. For example there are new trends in vehicle insurance known as  'pay as you drive', where data sent by the vehicle is analyzed by insurance companies and customers are then charged according to individual driving habits. Others spoke about further growth of mapping devices which utilize data sent by the customers, which is also used fro dynamic navigation which helps avoid traffic congestion. All of this and more is to show that future is much about the applications of telemtic systems and 'machine-to-machine' communication.

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Sisters reunite 72 years later with the help of Facebook

Two Bosnian sisters who lost track of each other almost 72 years ago met for the first time with the help of Facebook although they lived only 200 kilometres apart, local media reported.

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DuckDuckGo's searches are the anti-Google

Google's tiny, pugnacious search rival DuckDuckGo is using advertising to warn people about advertising. It bought a billboard in L.A. for a cool $7,000 and posted this anatidaephobic ad that says, "Google tracks you. We don't."

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The Pirate Bay is the World's Most Efficient Public Library

The way "media piracy" works is that one person or group purchases a work, and then shares it with millions of other people. This supposedly deprives the author or artist of those millions of people's money. One group has acquired over 50 million media items, and makes each of them available to approximately 20 million people — which must be a tremendous hit to creative professionals' wallets. This notorious institution is called the New York Public Library.

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Is your office computer mouse spying on you?

Employers are taking to gadgets like the spy mouse to monitor their staff and even listen in on their conversations.

A report in The Sunday Times said there is a healthy market for these spyware devices, according to sellers.

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