This is truly amazing. Timball showed this to me last night... All I could think of were our future robot masters, who will force us to worship the machine gods, or devour us and turn our flesh into electrical energy. I can make out this fuzzy future with shocking clarity while watching this video.
After you watch this, be sure to watch the spoof. All class-a stuff...
Hackers Publish German Minister's Fingerprint | Threat Level from Wired.com
Topic: Technology
2:36 pm EDT, Apr 1, 2008
To demonstrate why using fingerprints to secure passports is a bad idea, the German hacker group Chaos Computer Club has published what it says is the fingerprint of Wolfgang Schauble, Germany's interior minister.
According to CCC, the print of Schauble's index finger was lifted from a water glass that he used during a panel discussion that he participated in last year at a German university. CCC published the print on a piece of plastic inside 4,000 copies of its magazine Die Datenschleuder that readers can use to impersonate the minister to biometric readers.
Cuba lifts ban on computer and DVD sales | Reuters
Topic: Technology
1:59 pm EDT, Mar 13, 2008
Communist Cuba has authorized the unrestricted sale of computers and DVD and video players in the first sign that President Raul Castro is moving to improve Cubans' access to consumer goods.
An internal government memo seen by Reuters on Thursday said the appliances long desired by Cubans can go on sale immediately, although air conditioners will not be available until next year and toasters until 2010 due to limited power supplies.
It listed 19-inch (48-cm) and 24-inch (61-cm) television sets, electric pressure cookers and rice cookers, electric bicycles, car alarms and microwaves.
Many Cubans expect the state to soon allow them to buy cellular telephones. While they will now be able to buy computers, access to the Internet remains controlled by the government.
A new web service that lets users rate and comment on the uniformed police officers in their community is scrambling to restore service Tuesday, after hosting company GoDaddy unceremonious pulled-the-plug on the site in the wake of outrage from criticism-leery cops.
Regardless of what you think of sites like "RateMyCop" the bottom line is that it is not appropriate for GoDaddy to pull a domain name without contacting the administrator. This is not a phishing site. Following this and a number of recent takedowns by ENOM; we need new regulation at the ICANN level that prohibits this sort of shoot first and ask questions later behavior. While the fact that GoDaddy personally contacted me in response to my complaints when they shut down seclists, this incident demonstrates that a year later their policies haven't changed. Actions speak louder than words.
This really does bother me. All my domain names are hosted at godaddy.com. As renewals come up, I am seriously going to consider moving to another registrar, even if it is more expensive.
Three propose wind farms off Jersey Shore | Philadelphia Inquirer | 03/05/2008
Topic: Technology
8:48 am EST, Mar 5, 2008
An established utility, a wind-farm developer, and a consortium of commercial fishermen each have proposed building giant turbine-driven power plants off the Jersey Shore, hoping to demonstrate the viability of the ocean breeze as a clean source of electricity.
The three proposals vary widely - locations, for example, are between three and 16 miles off Atlantic or Cape May County - and timelines are iffy. Theoretically, however, within five years 100 spinning turbines could be generating 350 megawatts, enough to power 125,000 homes.
This is the first I've heard of this. Pretty cool..
Google on Monday released programming tools for its Android mobile-phone alliance for download, giving developers the ability to start writing software for phones due to start shipping in 2008 and $10 million in prizes to lure them.
The software development kit (SDK), an open-source package available for download for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X machines, shows that Java is indeed the programming language for software running on the Linux-based phones.
Accompanying the SDK is a raft of details that wasn't available when Google and its partners announced the Open Handset Alliance a week ago. The Android software includes the Google-created Dalvik virtual machine for running Java programs, a browser based on the WebKit engine, and support for many media and image file formats. (Note: I clarified that the browser is only based on the WebKit engine.)
And hardware abilities permitting, it also supports wireless communications using GSM mobile-phone technology, 3G, Edge, 802.11 Wi-Fi networks. Conspicuously missing from the list is the widely used CDMA mobile-phone technology developed by Qualcomm.
To jump-start the Android programming effort, Google is offering $10 million total in prizes, each ranging from $25,000 to $275,000, to programmers picked by a panel of judges.
Memestreams enabled phone for real world (live) social blogging?
A new technique shows resizing of images while keeping the important features of the image undistorted, also allows you to protect or remove part of the image with anything removed being automagically and seamlessly filled in.
This is making the rounds in technical circles today. The technique simple and very effective! Apparently Adobe has hired this guy so hopefully we'll see commercial availability soon.
See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign
Topic: Technology
11:50 am EDT, Aug 14, 2007
Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of CalTech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.
I, Cringely . The Pulpit . The $200 Billion Rip-Off | PBS
Topic: Technology
12:47 pm EDT, Aug 12, 2007
This is part three of my explanation of how America went from having the fastest and cheapest Internet service in the world to what we have today -- not very fast, not very cheap Internet service that is hurting our ability to compete economically with the rest of the world. Part one detailed expected improvements in U.S. broadband based on emerging competitive factors, yet decried that it was too little too late. Part two explained how U.S. broadband ISPs are different from most overseas ISPs and how those differences make it unlikely that we'll ever regain leadership in this space. And this week's final part explains that this all came about because Americans were deceived and defrauded by many of their telephone companies to the tune of $200 billion -- money that was supposed to have gone to pay for a broadband future we don't -- and never will -- have.
