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Rick Santorum’s Most Controversial Statements, Stephen Hawking’s Birthday, and Ramnit Worm Steals Facebook Logins

Rick Santorum is enjoying quite the surge in interest. The conservative, and former Pennsylvania senator, has received a bump in the polls after a nail-biter caucus in Iowa that he might have actually won.

But he’s also getting new scrutiny on some of his socially conservative statements on the campaign trail—many of which don’t really fit the GOP plan of beating Obama in 2012 by pointing toward a hurting economy. Among his greatest (or worst) hits: saying he’s a proponent of income inequality, comparing homosexuality with “man-on-dog” sex, and calling contraception dangerous. Thursday, Santorum called himself “a Jesus candidate.”

That last statement suggests it’s unlikely Stephen Hawking would get along with the ultra-religious Santorum.

Hawking, who turns 70 Sunday, made the argument in 2010 that God wasn’t necessary for creating the universe. But the planet’s most famous physicist has made plenty of other bold arguments in his time on earth. He’s being recognized this weekend by a large group of other scientists gathering to celebrate his birthday at Cambridge University.

In the tech world, social media users are discovering it may be time to change their passwords. A 2-year-old virus has been redesigned by hackers, and recently stole login information for nearly fifty thousand Facebook accounts in France and the U.K.

Retooled malware worm Ramnit, first discovered in 2010, stole passwords for the accounts through users’ desktop computer browsers, not by using Facebook itself, a representative from the social media giant told website ZDNet. Nearly one-half the accounts hacked were also out of date, said the representative, making the number of active accounts compromised closer to 20,000.

Still the Ramnit worm, which attaches itself to certain file types and spreads via removable drives, isn’t going anywhere just yet. Tech security firm Seculert says nearly a million computers were infected with the malware between September and December of 2011.

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