Snip nets

HERE are some bits and bytes from the Internet for your consumption:

Internet explorer 5 bug

Microsoft acknowledged a security problem with its Web browser that could let a malicious Web site operator rifle through visitors’ files, CNET News reported on Wednesday. Like many browser security problems, this one has to do with scripting technology, which lets a Web site execute actions on a user’s computer without the user’s interaction. Scripting languages like Netscape Communications’ JavaScript or Microsoft’s VBScript and JScript give the visiting computer a "script" to follow, instructing it to launch a new window or scroll text across the screen.

Pending a solution, Microsoft is recommending that users disable Active Scripting in IE 5’s Internet Zone, a categorisation within the browser’s security system that includes most Web sites. Users should add sites they trust not to execute malicious content on their computers to the Trusted Zone, Microsoft said, adding that Microsoft should be among these sites if users want to download the patch when it becomes available.

Microsoft stressed that someone exploiting this attack could only read files, not change or delete them.

Video games get physical

In their continuing quest for realism, game-makers are upgrading and designing new 3-D simulation games by injecting a heavy dose of real-world physics, says Technology Review. "Game developers always need to find new things to innovate and for many today that means better physics," notes Chris Hecker, a technical developer at Definition Six, a Seattle-based game company that organises talks on physics at developers’ conventions.

With more computer power and proper skills, developers are able to design games in which the underlying properties of many game objects — not just a few — conform to the laws of physics. Weapons, bridges and vehicles need no longer follow scripted patterns. Instead, objects can be programmed with an underlying set of rules that let them fall, stack, slide and sink in an intuitive manner, displaying the variety we experience in everyday life. For players of motor racing, flight simulations, and all manner of action and shoot-em-up games, this means far more lifelike and unpredictable explosions, collapses and collisions.

Game worlds will now be enhanced with rippling waves, pouring rain, sinewy smoke and flickering fires.

Thanks to enhanced game physics, players will be able to smash through windows, pick up manhole covers and feel the heft and weight of different weapons. They will experience massive explosions where particles and shrapnel spin wildly out of control, exerting a force on everything in their course of flight. This will be a vast improvement, developers say, over today’s typical action game, in which an explosion may result in a static cartoon graphic that says "Kaboom."

Know your English

If you are interested in the English language, here is something interesting that our reader, Ajay Manchanda, who lives in the USA, has sent:

No word in the English language rhymes with month.

"Dreamt" is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt".

The word "set" has more definitions than any other word in the English language.

"Underground" is the only word in the English language that begins and ends with the letters "und."

The longest one-syllable word in the English language is "screeched."

There are only four words in the English language which end in"-dous": tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.

The longest word in the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.

The only other word with the same amount of letters is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconioses, its plural.

There is a seven letter word in the English language that contains ten words without rearranging any of its letters, "therein": the, there, he, in, rein, her, here, here, ere, therein, herein.

No words in the English language rhyme with orange, silver or purple. ‘Stewardesses’ is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand.

The combination "ough" can be pronounced in nine different ways. The following sentence contains them all: "A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed."

The verb "cleave" is the only English word with two synonyms which are antonyms of each other: adhere and separate.

The only 15-letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.

Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels in the correct order, as does arsenious, meaning "containing arsenic."

— Compiled by Roopinder Singh