September 2008
71 posts
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Why Android Will Soon Kick @ss →
When the T-Mobile G1 was shown off in NYC last week, it didn’t have the gusto of a Stevenote. There was no “boom!”—no “one more thing!” And as a result, many (including us) felt a bit underwhelmed, and were quick to interpret the device’s inconsistent GUI as an indicator that the lack of attention to detail would doom it.
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Adobe, Amazon point fingers over video ripping... →
The proliferation of online content distribution systems has meant big business for Adobe; the company’s Flash technology powers the likes of YouTube, Amazon’s Video on Demand, and Hulu. Protecting the data streaming off these last two sites is a major concern of Big Content; Adobe’s market share is partially built on a perception that it can offer the necessary levels of...
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The diskette that blew Trixter’s mind →
As an IBM PC historian, one aspect of my hobby is archiving gaming software. (You can take that statement to mean anything you want — whatever you think of, you’re probably right.) At the 2008 ECCC this past Saturday, a vendor wanted to offload his entire PC stock on me for $5, which I happily accepted since there was at least one title in there (Martian Memorandum) worth that much. When I got...
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Safe Stem Cells Produced From Adult Cells →
Wired, citing a paper published in Science magazine, reports that Harvard scientists may have found a safer way of giving a flake of skin the biologically alchemical powers of embryonic stem cells by turning adult cells into versatile, embryonic-like cells without causing permanent damage. The technique involves ‘adding cell-reprogramming genes to adenoviruses, a type of virus that infects...
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New clickjacking affects all browsers; cause... →
Jeremiah Grossman and Robert “Rsnake” Hansen initially planned to reveal details on a new browser-agnostic clickjacking exploit at the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) in New York City this week, but voluntarily pulled the presentation after discovering that the 0-day flaw affected an Adobe product. The term “clickjacking” refers to a process by which a user is...
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Larry Page blasts white space FUD on Capitol Hill →
Google co-founder Larry Page says the time for delays has passed: he wants the Federal Communications Commission to open up fallow “white space” in the TV broadcast spectrum for unlicensed use, and to do it before November’s presidential election. Page, who spoke at a Capitol Hill event Wednesday, blasted incumbent broadcasters for lobbying “against the public...
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MIT solves 100-year-old engineering problem →
As a car accelerates up and down a hill then slows to follow a hairpin turn, the airflow around it cannot keep up and detaches from the vehicle. This aerodynamic separation creates additional drag that slows the car and forces the engine to work harder. The same phenomenon affects airplanes, boats, submarines, and even your golf ball. Now, in work that could lead to ways of controlling the effect...
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Britain will make foreigners carry RFID identity... →
Earlier this year, I married my British fiancee and switched my visa status from “Highly Skilled Migrant” to “Spouse.” This wasn’t optional: Jacqui Smith, the British Home Secretary, had unilaterally (and on 24 hours’ notice) changed the rules for Highly Skilled Migrants to require a university degree, sending hundreds of long-term, productive residents of the...
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Senate boldly advances to 2005 with updated Web... →
At long last, John McCain and Barack Obama can pantomime lightsaber duels or get their Numa Numa on like any other red-blooded American. In a move that a spokesperson for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) called “a major step into the future,” the Senate Rules and Administration Committee has deigned to permit links to third-party sites like YouTube and Flickr from Senators’ official...
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Judge: Microsoft documentation unfit for US... →
Microsoft may have made a big push to settle many of the antitrust actions facing it around the globe, but those efforts have run up against a major stumbling block: the company’s inability to document the protocols need to interoperate with its own software. Documentation problems got Microsoft in hot water with the EU, and they’re now the only reason it continues to be under court...
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Google’s End Run Around the Wireless Carriers →
In a recently published patent, Google describes a vision for an open wireless world, one in which mobile devices (and smartphones in particular) are no longer married to particular cellular service providers. When you buy a phone in the United States today, you typical have to sign a contract that prevents you from using that phone with more than one provider for a predetermined amount of time....
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Jack Thompson loses boss battle with Florida Bar →
Jack Thompson is a master of self-promotion. The Florida resident has made a career out of talking to anyone who will listen about the evils of video gaming, the violent ideas and passions that gaming puts into the minds and hearts of children, and the soulless industry that cranks out these terrible games. Whenever there is a tragedy he’s there to jump in front of the camera and find a...
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Thomas verdict overturned, making available theory... →
Jammie Thomas is off the hook—at least for the time being. Judge Michael J. Davis has overturned a federal jury’s copyright infringement verdict and award of $222,000 in damages to the RIAA. The verdict was handed down last October after a three-day trial and a few hours of deliberations.
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A biologist reviews an evolution textbook from the... →
Ars book reviews typically focus on works for the general public that we consider significant and insightful. But today we’re making an exception: the work in question is meant for school children, and it’s an atrociously bad book. So why review it? Because, unfortunately, it may well turn out to be very significant. The leading lights of the Intelligent Design Movement, the Discovery...
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Audi Puts More 'Go' Into Stop-and-Go →
If police officers in Ingolstadt notice a decrease in luxury car drivers running red lights these days, we suspect it’s because of a new project piloted by Audi that lets drivers know exactly how long before a traffic light turns. According to Audi’s press release, the system is meant to prevent “frustrating, fuel-sapping stops at red traffic lights.” After all, the last...
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Hacking FriendFeed with Metafeeds →
I did a search in FriendFeed and noticed that at the bottom it had a feed icon. This gave me the idea of creating an imaginary friend out of the search results so that I could get everything about “meta”, for example, in my FriendFeed home page. This could be really useful; kind of like Google Alerts but streamed into my FriendFeed.
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Android's 10 Most Exciting Apps →
Amid the iPhone 3G launch hysteria, we made a pronouncement that, looking back now long after the dust has settled, pretty well nailed it: forget hardware, it’s code that counts. Code via the juggernaut that is the App Store, which allowed the iPhone to truly came into its own as a mobile platform.
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As Android approaches, carriers embrace change →
Mobile operators, long the arbiters of content and services on cell phones in the U.S., are now giving up some ground to other players as the industry is rocked by the success of the iPhone and the emergence of new players on the tiny screen.
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From Physics to Security →
Wietse Venema started out as a physicist, but became interested in the security of the programs he wrote to control his physics experiments. He went on to create several well-known network and security tools, including the Security Administrator’s Tool for Analyzing Networks (SATAN) and The Coroner’s Toolkit with Dan Farmer. He is also the creator of the popular MTA Postfix and TCP...
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GACL →
Until Chrome came along, Google’s Master Mobile Plan didn’t quite add up. Now it does. Chrome — Google’s new superbrowser — is cream on the top of a new mobile software stack. Let’s call it GACL, for Gears, Android and Chrome on Linux. Gears is a way to run Web apps on desktops and store data locally as well as in the cloud. Android is a development framework...
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Changing what time a process thinks it is with... →
With libfaketime you can tell a process that the current time is something different from the machine’s system clock. This fake time setting affects not only the functions directly related to reading the system time, but also file timestamps such as modification times. With libfaketime you can test how a program will respond when it is running in the future or in a different timezone without...
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The Politics of Fear →
Why do people have the attitudes they do toward social issues such as welfare, abortion, immigration, gay rights, school prayer, and capital punishment? The conventional explanations have to do with their economic circumstances, families, friends, and educations. But new research suggests that people with radically different social attitudes also differ in certain automatic fear responses....
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Hack of Palin e-mail makes case for sticking with... →
A hacker claiming affiliation with the group Anonymous has broken into GOP vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s Yahoo e-mail account, subsequently posting the account password to an online chat forum. Information from the hacked account, including screenshots of several individual e-mails, a pair of family photographs, Palin’s contact list, and header information from her inbox,...
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GAO report slams US cybersecurity, US-CERT, and... →
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) is finalizing its report on the country’s capability to protect and defend itself from cyber-attack, and its words are not kind. The primary responsibility for monitoring and securing the country’s networks and digital assets falls to the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, or US-CERT, a partnership organization between the...
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Apple wants to tie your shoes to your clothes with... →
If you’re a Nike+iPod Sport Kit fan, you may eventually find yourself being restricted to using it with Nike-branded sportswear, thanks to a recently-published Apple patent application. The patent, filed for in March of 2007 and published last week, describes a “Smart Garment” that would allow a gadget to authenticate to a specific garment—whether that garment is shoes, pants, or...
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In acquiring Merrill Lynch, must Bank of America... →
Lost in the rubble of the teetering titans of finance is an open question: what will happen to the open-source software that they have heavily modified and upon which many have built core business applications?
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A Year of Heavy Losses - Interactive Graphic →
A year ago, financial companies were flying high. But as problems in the mortgage and credit markets have grown, the stocks of many Wall Street firms have been hard hit. Some of the biggest companies have been bought out, taken over by the government or gone bankrupt.
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Beating keyloggers with screen flickering and... →
The German company PMC Ciphers claims to have invented a software utility capable of defeating even the most determined software keylogger, but some may find the cure to be worse than the (risk) of the disease. According to TurboCrypt’s creators, keylogging and screen capture programs are two of the most difficult attack vectors to protect against, as these utilities will function perfectly...
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FBI: ex-Intel worker tried to take trade secrets... →
A former Intel engineer, Biswahoman Pani, stands accused of stealing multiple confidential documents from that company. Pani voluntarily resigned from Intel on May 29, 2008, and claimed he intended to begin work with a hedge fund. Per the terms of his resignation, Pani remained with Intel (though on vacation) through June 11, but actually began work at AMD on June 2, putting him on both...
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How Dropbox ended my search for seamless sync on... →
A few months ago, our own Jon Stokes bemoaned the frustration of managing and accessing data strewn across a multitude of personal computing devices. His description of the challenges of syncing and saving resonated with many of us on the Ars staff and with quite a few readers, too. As you can see by looking at the comments that some of you posted in response to Jon’s synchronization...
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Can America Invent Its Way Back? →
Will 2009 be the year of innovation economics? Pessimism about America’s future is growing. People worry about the long-term impact of the housing crisis, global competition, and expensive energy. And the policy solutions offered by Republicans and Democrats—mainly tax cuts and government spending programs—seem insufficient.
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Everyone but Apple joins new "buy once, play... →
Buying a movie online is simple; it’s watching it on the device you want that’s hard. The movie studios have been reluctant to allow DVD burning from online stores (and when they do, it doesn’t always work), spawning a whole cottage industry of creative solutions for getting digital downloads onto the TV set. And slapping that newly-purchased Sopranos episode onto your iPod or...
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Why Gnip Will Displace Google →
Whether search is 90% solved or whether the last 10% will take 90% of the effort, - either or both according to Marissa Meyer - there is a lot of improvement to be had in search. If you honestly want to find authoritative information about a topic that’s been over-SEOed like ‘ring tones’ or ‘mortgages’ – or you’re searching for a semantically challenging term like ‘bush’ - or you’re looking for...
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Microsoft: It’s time to consummate the marriage... →
The relationship between Microsoft and Citrix is much like that of a man who has been serially dating the same woman for 15 years, but never seems to be able to consummate the deal. He’s afraid of commitment, or perhaps like that old expression goes, why would he buy the cow when he can have the milk for free?
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Spam king to walk after state supreme court voids... →
Jeremy Jaynes may have the name of a porn star, but he has the heart of a spammer. Jaynes filled his Raleigh, North Carolina home with multiple computers, routers, and some dedicated servers, then started blasting AOL subscribers with spam. He sent 12,197 pieces of spam (complete with falsified headers) on July 16, 2003, then 24,172 on July 19, and then another 19,104 on July 26, all of them...
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IPhone Takes Screenshots of Everything You Do →
Your iPhone is watching you. If you’ve got an iPhone, pretty much everything you have done on your handset has been temporarily stored as a screenshot that hackers or forensics experts could eventually recover, according to a renowned iPhone hacker who exposed the security flaw in a webcast Thursday.
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An inside look at Apple’s sneaky iTunes 8 upgrade →
I’m reading lots of complaints about the new iTunes 8 update causing horrific problems on Windows machines, including widespread reports of STOP errors, aka the Blue Screen of Death. My colleague Adrian Kingsley-Hughes has asked readers for reports and Gizmodo has a sketchy post as well. How can this be happening? Assuming that the underlying hardware is working correctly, STOP errors can only be...
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How the DoD learned to stop worrying and love open... →
The House draft of the annual defense budget reauthorization bill prominently lists open source software (OSS) among the objectives that should be considered in the procurement strategy for aerial vehicle technology and veteran health systems. If the bill passes in the House, it would be the first time that the National Defense Authorization Act explicitly expresses a preference for OSS.
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If you don’t “get” Facebook and Twitter, read this... →
The NY Times is often considered the US newspaper of record, and it lives up to its reputation with an excellent article in today’s Sunday NY Times Magazine about the ambient awareness enabled by Facebook status updates, Twitter and other microblogging tools.
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HOWTO forward Hotmail to another email address
I don’t really use my Hotmail address for anything other than occasional testing, but I’ve always wanted to forward it to my GMail account. Searching the Internet on occasion didn’t yield any acceptable results. It seemed that some people were simply able to set this up via the “Forward mail to another e-mail account” option, while others couldn’t. It never...
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Excitement and Fear Abound Over Super Collider →
Scientists are getting ready to flip the switch on the largest science experiment ever conducted on Earth — the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN.
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History of the browser user-agent string →
In the beginning there was NCSA Mosaic, and Mosaic called itself NCSA_Mosaic/2.0 (Windows 3.1), and Mosaic displayed pictures along with text, and there was much rejoicing.
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Gamers fight back against lackluster Spore... →
Spore, after more than 10 years of development time, is finally available for the PC and Mac. The game comes from the mind of the talented Will Wright, the man who gave us The Sims and the original SimCity titles. No matter what people think about the actual game play, the story now centers around the DRM scheme EA built into the title, and a grassroots movement has begun to tell gamers just how...
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New satellite to give Google Maps unprecedented... →
Google has taken the war over exclusive web content into space. Not directly, of course—the satellite that was recently launched into space on a rocket bearing the Google logo was the result of a joint venture between a commercial satellite imaging provider and the department of defense. In return for undisclosed terms, Google got two considerations: its logo on the side of the launch vehicle, and...
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Intelligently designed? Ars reviews Spore →
With Spore, Will Wright intends to make you an Intergalactic Galactic ruler who begins life as a bottom-feeding primordial soup dweller. When I first saw the game back in early 2006, I wondered if Wright and his team over at Maxis be able to pull this off? I didn’t mean “pull it off” in the technical sense, but in the gaming sense of making it fun. I’ve waited a long time...
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Scientists get death threats over Large Hadron... →
Really people, enough is enough. Death threats? Seriously? According to a fresh report from the Telegraph, gurus working on the mysterious Large Hadron Collider are receiving all sorts of strange messages, e-mails and faxes as the go-live date (this Wednesday, supposedly) draws ever closer. For those curious about why some folks are up in arms over this thing, we’ll simply point you to this...
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Meet the PayPal mafia →
A door opens, and a blond man appears in a white jacket with large buttons. “Good morning,” he says. “Peter’s in back. Make yourself comfortable in the dining room. I’ll be serving breakfast shortly.”
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