Monday, January 31, 2005
Saturday, January 29, 2005
Friday, January 28, 2005
BBC NEWS | England | London | Tsunami fund 'hacking' is probed
BBC NEWS | England | London | Tsunami fund 'hacking' is probed: "Tsunami fund 'hacking' is probed
An attempt to hack into the website of the Disasters and Emergency Committee (DEC) that was set up after the Asian tsunami, is being investigated.
Officers from the Metropolitan Police's Computer Crime Unit have begun an inquiry after BT blocked the attempt on New Year's Eve.
A 28-year-old man from east London was arrested and released on bail in connection with alleged offences.
Police are examining computer equipment seized during a search.
The bailed man, who was arrested under the Computer Misuse Act at an address in London's Bishopsgate on Thursday, is due to return to a police station in February.
A spokesman for the Met said the DEC website continued to be secure and the systems in place meant the attempted breach was identified and blocked very quickly.
The DEC, which estimates to raise ?200m to help tsunami victims, said it was alerted by BT staff.
Chief executive Brendan Gormley reassured the public that 'every penny' donated over the internet was safe and had reached the DEC. "
Boing Boing: Jailed for using a nonstandard browser
Boing Boing: Jailed for using a nonstandard browser: "ailed for using a nonstandard browser
A Londonder made a tsnuami-relief donation using lynx -- a text-based browser used by the blind, Unix-users and others -- on Sun's Solaris operating system. The site-operator decided that this 'unusual' event in the system log indicated a hack-attempt, and the police broke down the donor's door and arrested him. From a mailing list:"
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
High-Tech Spacesuits Eyed for ‘Extreme ExplorationFuture explorers on the Moon and Mars could be outfitted in lightweight, high-tech spacesuits that offer far more flexibility than the bulky suits that have been used for spacewalks in the 1960s.
Research is under way at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on a Bio-Suit System that incorporates a suit designed to augment a person’s biological skin by providing mechanical counter-pressure. The “epidermis” of such a second skin could be applied in spray-on fashion in the form of an organic, biodegradable layer.
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Saturday, January 22, 2005
Friday, January 21, 2005
Researchers report bubble fusion results replicated
Researchers report bubble fusion results replicated: "BOFFINS FROM the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Purdue University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and the Russian Academy of Science (RAS) have managed to replicate controversial cold fusion experiments.
A March 2002 an article in Science (Vol. 295, March 2002), indicated that boffins had managed to use bubble fusion successfully, but this data was questioned because it was made with imprecise instrumentation."
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
A Whole Lotta Nothing: The point that I lost all respect for Bill Gates
A Whole Lotta Nothing: The point that I lost all respect for Bill Gates: "I've heard a lot of criticism of MS and specifically Bill Gates, but I've often defended both the corporation and the man. But my time as a microsoft apologist is over.
After ridiculous comments this week at CES, where Gates equated the last three years of my work with Creative Commons as some sort of Red Menace that needs to be stopped, it's clear he's off his rocker. Bill's spouting lines that make him sound like the new Jack Valenti. From the first Gizmodo interview:
'There's always a tricky issue when you get into stolen material or pornography...if you get notified that it's stolen materials or pornography or things like that...The laws for online publishing the same as for print-based publishing.'
Translated: Bill Gates has a talking points team that wants him to equate potential copyright violators with pornographers so he's sure to mention it twice. The term 'potentional copyright violators' while correct, isn't as forceful as 'stolen material' so he repeats that as often as possible too. His last statement makes clear that to him online publishing = print publishing. In other words, intellectual property = physical property and should be treated as such in the eyes of the law, a concept so fraught with problems I won't even go into the ridiculousness of it all."
Fencers
Fencers
By Col. Gary Tocchet
Army Fencing Team OIC
Army’s women fencers broke new ground and set new team records Sunday at the National Intercollegiate Women’s Fencing Association Christmas Open held at Drew University in Madison, N.J.
Eight USMA women competed in the day-long tournament. Freshman Michelle Weinbaum established herself as one of the best fencers at the tournament and impressed the field by remaining a determined and poised rookie collegiate fencer under great pressures all day from experienced and more senior opponents. She earned the gold medal by placing first out of 53 women saber fencers. She also took home the NIWFA Saber Trophy Cup to hold for a year and will have her name inscribed on it. No Army fencer has ever won a gold medal at this competition before.
STUFF : TECHNOLOGY - STORY : New Zealand's leading news and information website
STUFF : TECHNOLOGY - STORY : New Zealand's leading news and information website: "Whisper Tech makes household combined heat and power systems that use gas to produce hot water and electricity for domestic use."
CVD Single-Crystal, Gem Diamonds Produced at Carnegie - Carnegie/DOE Alliance Center - CDAC
CVD Single-Crystal, Gem Diamonds Produced at Carnegie - Carnegie/DOE Alliance Center - CDAC: "The Carnegie group has mounted a major initiative to create the next generation high-pressure devices based on large single-crystal diamond anvils grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD). The above photograph shows a synthetic brilliant cut single-crystal diamond grown by CVD. About 2.5 mm high, this crystal was grown in about 1 day at Carnegie. The very bottom (table) of the crystal is a type 1b seed; hence the yellow tint which is due to internal reflection (the CVD diamond is transparent). These CVD diamonds are capable of easily generating ultrahigh pressures up to 200 GPa [W. Mao, et al., Appl. Phys. Lett. 83, 5190 (2003)].Our CVD technique has now been combined with a high-pressure/high temperature annealing process to produce material that is significantly harder than any other diamond-based material. "
Compressed Carbon Nanotubes - Carnegie/DOE Alliance Center - CDAC
Compressed Carbon Nanotubes - Carnegie/DOE Alliance Center - CDAC: "Cold compression of carbon nanotubes at 75 GPa results in the formation of a superhard hexagonal carbon polymorph that has a different structure than hexagonal diamond [Wang, et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci 101, 38, 13699 (2004]. This new phase is quenchable to ambient pressure and has an experimentally determined bulk modulus of 447 GPa, slightly higher than that of cubic diamond (440-442 GPa). As illustrated in the micrograph above, formation of the superhard material cracks the diamond anvils used in the synthesis, and leaves a 3 micron indentation in the surface of the anvil (smaller circle)."
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Saturday, January 15, 2005
Quieter, cleaner airplane landings on the way | Science Blog
Quieter, cleaner airplane landings on the way | Science Blog: "The new procedure, called a continuous descent approach or CDA, keeps aircraft at cruise altitude until they are relatively close to an airport. At this point, the aircraft make an even, continuous descent to the runway. The result is an average noise reduction of four to six decibels. A three-decibel difference is appreciably noticeable to the human ear while a 10-decibel reduction equates to 50 percent less noise. Side benefits include reduced fuel burn and emissions, and slightly shorter flights, as aircraft operate at lower power settings, stay at higher altitudes, maintain higher speeds, and take more direct--and thus shorter--paths to the runway."
Virologists Coax HIV Out of Hiding | Science Blog
Virologists Coax HIV Out of Hiding | Science Blog:
"Now, virologists at Jefferson Medical College, led by Roger J. Pomerantz, M.D., professor of medicine, biochemistry and molecular pharmacology and director of the Division of Infectious Diseases and Environmental Medicine at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, may have found a way to bring HIV out of hiding. They have shown that an immune cell protein called interleukin-7 (IL-7) can rouse the virus better than previously tried agents, making it vulnerable to drugs and the body's immune system. If the new technique proves its mettle, the work could lead to improved treatments for HIV infection, and might be a step toward complete viral eradication."
Friday, January 14, 2005
tech:knowledge
tech:knowledge: "It's been a week since I installed a hidden software trap for those who illegally harvest Web sites for e-mail addresses that are then used by spammers."
Thursday, January 13, 2005
Newsday.com - Long Island News
Newsday.com - Long Island News: "'How do you tell when a lawyer is lying?' Harvey Kash, 69, of Bethpage, said to Carl Lanzisera, 65, of Huntington, as the queue wound into the court. 'His lips are moving,' they said in unison, completing one of what may be thousands of standard lawyer jokes."
But while that rib and several others on barristers got some giggles from the crowd, the attorney standing in line about five people ahead wasn't laughing.
" 'Shut up,' the man shouted," Lanzisera said. "'I'm a lawyer.'"
The attorney reported Kash and Lanzisera to court personnel, who arrested the men and charged them with engaging in disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor.
"They put the handcuffs on us, brought us into a room, frisked us, sat us down and checked our driver's licenses to see if there were any warrants out for our arrest," Lanzisera said yesterday. "They were very nasty, extremely nasty."
The men are founders of Americans for Legal Reform, a group of outspoken advocates who use confrontational tactics to push for greater access to courts for the public and to monitor how well courts serve the public. One tactic is driving a truck around the Huntington area emblazoned with the slogan "Stop The Lawyer Disease." They said their rights to free speech were violated Monday.
But Dan Bagnuola, a spokesman for the Nassau courts, said the men were causing a stir and that their exercise of their First Amendment rights to free speech was impeding the rights of others at the court.
"They were being abusive and they were causing a disturbance," Bagnuola said. "They were making general comments to the people on line, referring to them as 'peasants,' and they were causing a disturbance. And they were asked on several occasions to act in an orderly manner, not to interfere with the operation of the court."
Sudhian Media
Sudhian Media: "Trying to transmit audio data with uncompressed audio or video is not the easiest task. After all, even an audio CD contains data that transmits at 1400kb/s, a fairly large chunk of data, more than many compressed DivX movies. The ability to stream that kind of data is one reason why there has been an increase in the bandwidth of wireless networks within homes, or the addition of things like gigabit LAN to many new motherboards as a standard feature. The joy of digital audio is that there are many different ways to decrease the amount of space required to store it, depending how signals are represented."
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
SecurityFocus HOME News: Hacker penetrates T-Mobile systems
SecurityFocus HOME News: Hacker penetrates T-Mobile systems: "Twenty-one year-old Nicolas Jacobsen was quietly charged with the intrusions last October, after a Secret Service informant helped investigators link him to sensitive agency documents that were circulating in underground IRC chat rooms. The informant also produced evidence that Jacobsen was behind an offer to provide T-Mobile customers' personal information to identity thieves through an Internet bulletin board, according to court records.
Jacobsen could access information on any of the Bellevue, Washington-based company's 16.3 million customers, including many customers' Social Security numbers and dates of birth, according to government filings in the case. He could also obtain voicemail PINs, and the passwords providing customers with Web access to their T-Mobile e-mail accounts. He did not have access to credit card numbers."
The government is handling the case well away from the spotlight. The U.S. Secret Service, which played the dual role of investigator and victim in the drama, said Tuesday it couldn't comment on Jacobsen because the agency doesn't discuss ongoing cases-- a claim that's perhaps undermined by the 19 other Operation Firewall defendants discussed in a Secret Service press release last fall.
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
Monday, January 10, 2005
Cassini-Huygens: News-Press Releases-2005
Cassini-Huygens: News-Press Releases-2005: "Images returned by NASA's Cassini spacecraft cameras during a New Year's Eve flyby of Saturn's moon Iapetus (eye-APP-eh-tuss) show startling surface features that are fueling heated scientific discussions about their origin.
One of these features is a long narrow ridge that lies almost exactly on the equator of Iapetus, bisects its entire dark hemisphere and reaches 20 kilometers high (12 miles). It extends over 1,300 kilometers (808 miles)"
Saturday, January 08, 2005
Friday, January 07, 2005
Thursday, January 06, 2005
Geekzone, mobile forums
Geekzone, mobile forums: "ARCHOS adds Wireless access and expand Linux support with Pocket Media Assistant PMA400"
TinyP2P
TinyP2P: "TinyP2P is a functional peer-to-peer file sharing application, written in fifteen lines of code, in the Python programming language. I wrote TinyP2P to illustrate the difficulty of regulating peer-to-peer applications. Peer-to-peer apps can be very simple, and any moderately skilled programmer can write one, so attempts to ban their creation would be fruitless."
FMD ROM
FMD ROM: "It appeared that this technology will never become available since C3D's links and whereabouts were untracable from the 2nd halve of august 2002. The editors presumed that the sharp economic downturn in 2002 also cut off the funding for this promising development. However a few firms did take licences so we might see the FMD back in some form or another.
In a way this might be a perfect example of the so called 'Vaporware': hardware that is promised but never comes to the market."
Tuesday, January 04, 2005
Ancient DNA helps solve the legend of giant eagles | Science Blog
Ancient DNA helps solve the legend of giant eagles | Science Blog: "McMaster University anthropologist Michael Bunce has shed new light on the evolution of the extinct Haast's eagle, the giant bird that once ruled the skies over New Zealand. Weighing between 20 and 30 pounds, the enormous Haast's Eagle dominated its environment. "
Monday, January 03, 2005
Sunday, January 02, 2005
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• Key Players in the Plame Affair