Friday Fun Blog: Happy Birthday, Hubble

It’s time once again for the world’s greatest Friday afternoon link dump—the Friday Fun Blog! You go around telling everyone you’re the greatest link dump, but this…THIS…is the only blog that can call itself the greatest link dump in the world. To be the man, you’ve got to beat the man. It’s our turn now, and you’ll all pay homage to THE MAN!

On to the links!

-File this under “Stuff I Should’ve Written About for ‘This Week in Getting Hacked’”: About 25,000 apps on the iOS App Store are open to attacks due to a vulnerability in the AFNetworking code that leaves the protections of an HTTPS site in ruins. You’re probably like, “Only 25,000 apps? It’s probably not any of the good ones,” and you’d be WRONG. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo all use AFNetworking code in their apps. Guess it’s time to throw your phone in a lake, because nothing is safe anymore.

-A Swiss scientist is using lasers to control the weather, using a form of cloud seeding—essentially releasing chemicals into the clouds to control the weather. China did it to prevent rain for the Olympics opening ceremony in 2008. I feel like this goes without saying, but a SCIENTIST WITH AN ACCENT using LASERS to CONTROL THE WEATHER is the perfect Evil Villain Mad Lib. We really should be monitoring this guy closer before hurricane start showing up in Wisconsin or something.

-The great Google vs. Apple wars may have just gotten its Archduke Ferdinand moment as…well…just look.

In honor of the Hubble Telescope’s 25 Year Anniversary, here’s the Obligatory Space Post Section of the Week:

-Here’s a lovely little background on the history of the Hubble telescope, for those of you who I don’t want to associate with anymore.

-Check out these photographs of Hubble’s construction where everyone is dressed up like a surgeon. God, the 80’s looked like so much fun. Too bad I was a baby, otherwise I probably would’ve had a mustache.

-Here’s 5 discoveries that the Hubble telescope has made in its time in orbit, the most amazing (to me) being that discovery of the age of the universe. The average human life is like, 70-something years? That’s milliseconds of time in the age of the universe.

And finally…

-Here’s a 3D fly-through of the Gum 29 Nebula made from composite images taken from Hubble. If you could see x-rays, gamma rays, every spectrum of light, and fly at the speed of light, this is what you’d see.

Enjoy your weekend!