News
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Ballmer: 'I've never thrown a chair in my life' - headline in The Register
September 23, 2005
See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/13/ballmer_chair_denial/...
Gates (again) leads Forbes top ten moneybags list
The Forbes Top Ten William H. Gates Warren E. Buffett Paul G. Allen Michael Dell Lawrence Ellison Christy Walton Jim C. Walton S. Robson Walton Alice L. Walton Helen R. Walton...
New Cisco IOS bug ... and nobody got fired!
September 07, 2005
According to a Cisco Advisory: "The Cisco IOS Firewall Authentication Proxy for FTP and/or Telnet Sessions feature in specific versions of Cisco IOS software is vulnerable to a remotely-exploitable buffer overflow condition." Affected IOS version are 12.2ZH and 12.2ZL based...
Gearblog News for week 35
August 26, 2005
Headline: Man Smarter than Woman, Dumb to Say So "A study to be published later this year in the British Journal of Psychology says that men are on average five points ahead on IQ tests." reports BBC News. The difference...
Banks change customer logins and Cisco IDS flaw
August 23, 2005
Two interesting items from Netcraft: Banks Shifting Logins to Non-SSL Pages: "After years of training customers to trust only SSL-enabled sites, banks are shifting their online banking logins to the unencrypted home pages of their websites. Although the data is...
First Intel dual core chip a hack
August 19, 2005
"Intel's first dual-core chip was a hastily concocted design that was rushed out the door in hopes of beating rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) to the punch, an Intel engineer told attendees at the Hot Chips conference today." -- from...
The soul of a virtual machine and watching Linux
August 11, 2005
IBM researchers in New York have been working on the SoulPad, a way of making computing portable by using virtual machines that are loaded with user data that is stored on a portable device (perhaps as small as a ring)....
Linux, OSS, and Microsoft
if you are tracking the state of Linux and the Open Source Software movement you have got to read "LinuxWorld: Reporter's notebook" and "Microsoft open source exec: Not the loneliest guy in Redmond". We were intrigued by the comments of...
Truth or fiction with fMRI
There's a really thought provoking book titled "The Truth Machine" by James Halperin. In the story a scientist develops a machine that can tell with near perfect accuracy if you are telling the truth or not. The book's strength lies...
Gearblog News for week 33
August 09, 2005
Top News Item: "The SCO Group believes it will still have a viable business even if the company loses its courtroom battles, according to the vendor's CEO. In support of that claim, he said that SCO's Unix business is profitable...
Prohibiting fraternizing among co-workers is legal!
August 03, 2005
"It is a regular pastime for co-workers to chat during a coffee break, at a union hall, or over a beer about workplace issues, good grilling recipes, and celebrity gossip. Yet a recent ruling by the National Labor Relations Board...
BitTorrent grows up ...
August 02, 2005
now that MGM vs. Grokster is out of the way BitTorrent is looking to become more legit (see the article on Yahoo! from Mercury News). Interesting that the pivotal issue of their newfound respectability is that BitTorrent's creator, Bram Cohen,...
Space Oddities
July 29, 2005
Ice lake found on Mars (great photo) and the solar system apparently has a new planet (no, not that one, this one). But what to call the new planet? Our favorite comment from a Slashdot thread on that topic: How...
More on Lynn and Cisco
Settlement reached in Cisco flaw dispute (The Register) ... but ... Whistleblower Faces FBI Probe (Wired News)...
EFF wants your output as input
July 27, 2005
"Imagine that every time you printed a document, it automatically included a secret code that could be used to identify the printer -- and potentially, the person who used it. Sounds like something from an episode of "Alias," right? ......
Artists simulate a nuclear explosion
July 19, 2005
From the Simnuke Project: As an act of protest and commemoration, we will mark the 60-year anniversary of the Trinity test, somewhere in the desert. This simulation is much more than a big flame effect. It is a somber memorial,...
Wayback Machine being sued
July 14, 2005
In the process of defending Healthcare Advocate (a healthcare advocacy firm, natch) in a trademark dispute with the similarly named Health Care Advocates the Philladelphia law firm of Harding Earley Follmer & Frailey used the Wayback Machine (operated by the...
Google Maps API launched!
June 30, 2005
"The Google Maps API lets developers embed Google Maps in their own web pages with JavaScript. You can add overlays to the map (including markers and polylines) and display shadowed "info windows" just like Google Maps." At last! No more...
Hotel Lost Liberty!
June 28, 2005
If you’ve been following the furor following the decision in the "Kelo vs. City of New London" case with as much disgust as we have this will crack you up. We want to invest!...
The world of phishers and what it tells us about on-line crime
June 20, 2005
"The typical phisher ... isn't a movie-style villain but a Romanian teenager, albeit one who belongs to a social and economic infrastructure that is both remarkably sophisticated and utterly ragtag." An interesting story in the Wall Street Journal discusses the...
Air France wins AirFranceSucks.com
June 08, 2005
According to a story on out-law.com a company named Virtual Dates Inc. registered the domain name AirFranceSucks.com (which actually redirects to an Epinions.com web site). Virtual Dates contends that the domain was "a freedom of expression site for the registration...
Intel inside Apple? We were wrong.
June 07, 2005
Boy, were we wrong. In a previous Gearblog entry on 5/26/05 we wrote: Ignore the talk of Apple considering using Intel chips instead of PowerPC processors. It just ain't gonna happen. Then yesterday Steve Jobs told the audience at Apple's...
Credit reporting companies to be held accountable
June 01, 2005
According to an article in the Washington Post a large number of states are pushing for laws to punish "companies that maintain sensitive customer data when they hide a security breach". Much of this push follows from a recent California...
Classified ads in outer space
May 30, 2005
We wonder whether the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI (small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel [Douglas Adams])...
Intel inside Apple? Not likely.
May 26, 2005
Ignore the talk of Apple considering using Intel chips instead of PowerPC processors. It just ain't gonna happen....
Update: Only slightly off-shoring
May 25, 2005
In our recent Gearblog entry "Only slightly off-shoring" we discussed SeaCode, a curious venture intended to combine a luxury cruise ship with the tax advantages of being 3 miles of San Diego to create a unique off-shoring opportunity. A recent...
Stand and deliver! Your money or your files!
It had to happen. It seems like a story that should be old news but it turns out that for the first time hackers have attempted to extort money not by destroying data or denying communications service but by encrypting...
Paris hacked by social engineering
May 19, 2005
According to a story in the Washingtonpost.com the widely publicized theft of the contents of Paris Hilton's cell phone was just another example of hackers using social engineering rather than high-tech means to get at their target....
Phigilantes attack phishers!
According to an item on Netcraft's blog phishing has created a subculture of vigilantes who are going after phishing sites and disabling them. The only thing missing is a catchy name for these good guys with gray hats -- might...
Sunbelt software gets a Cease & Desist letter from Hotbar
May 14, 2005
In case you don't know of them, Sunbelt are in the anti-spyware business and we just noticed the following item in their blog: "Hotbar sent us a Cease and Desist letter yesterday ... Of course, we won’t remove them from...
The iPod is doomed ...
May 12, 2005
In a interview with the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published on Thursday Bill Gates was reported to have said that: "I don't think the success of the iPod can continue in the long term, however good Apple may be."...
Only slightly off-shoring
May 05, 2005
In the on-going debate over off-shoring there's usually the assumption that such activities are carried out in other countries but a recent article in the Boston Globe puts an interesting twist on the idea. According to the article, Roger Green,...
Sticks and stones and Apple
April 29, 2005
We have admired Steve Jobs for years. Clever guy. Brilliant marketer. Excellent CEO. But the recent news that Apple has taken an aggressive and punitive stand against a biography written about Jobs just shows that maturity doesn't necessarily go hand...
Exploding toads
We are not making this up: Animal experts are baffled since 1,000 toads have exploded without warning in the German city of Hamburg. Eyewitnesses say they've seen the amphibians swell to up to four times their normal size, before bursting....
Approaching a media singularity
April 27, 2005
First there were radio broadcasts, then there was podcasting, then podcasts of radio shows and the latest? Radio shows from podcasts ......
Camel racing robots. Honest.
April 21, 2005
Out there in the Gulf of Arabia there's a country called Qatar where one of the favorite sports is camel racing. But camel racing has a dark side which involves children being forced into being camel jockeys. According to uaeprison.com,...
Web analysis and the 2005 Emetrics Summit
April 08, 2005
"Web analysis is statistics, not accounting. Absolute precision is impossible. The problems listed above are an inevitable consequence of the nature of internet technology, not because we don’t care or because analytics software is shoddy." So concludes a useful article...
Careful what you e-mail if you're going to lie ...
April 06, 2005
We just heard a news item on NPR's "All Things Considered" regarding a scandal over the science behind the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump in Nevada. Turns out that some of the scientists studying the site's safety "may have doctored...
Will the the Anti-Phishing Act make a difference?
March 18, 2005
Under the proposed Anti-Phishing Act of 2005, introduced on February 28th, 2005, by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), phishers and pharmers would face fines up to $250,000 along with up to five years in the slammer. Leahy's introduction in the bill...
Amazon patent gets the usual suspects riled
March 16, 2005
An article in New Scientist dated March 15th reports on a patent awarded to Amazon on March 8th that "describes software that automatically guesses when a gift is being purchased by extracting key words such as "birthday" or "anniversary" from...
Fedora, fastest growing Linux distribution
"Fedora, the community-driven Linux distribution started by RedHat, is the fastest growing Linux distribution in the [Netcraft March 2005] web server survey. Based on distribution names contained in the server banner, Fedora has outpaced all its rivals over the last...
Power grid risk makes Wood wish for Depends
March 11, 2005
According to a piece in the Washington Post, Officials at the Energy Department's Idaho National Laboratory showed Patrick H. Wood III, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, how a skilled hacker could cause serious problems in the national...
Pew Report "A decade of adoption: How the internet has woven itself into American life"
March 07, 2005
A recent report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that "the Web has become the “new normal” in the American way of life." The report summary begins: "A decade after browsers came into popular use, the Internet...
Spyware company on federal privacy advisory board
March 03, 2005
Claria (Gator) VP appointed to the Homeland Security privacy board. Honest.
Welcome to Gearblog!
February 25, 2005
Welcome.
