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 a jacket. When the garment is authenticated, however, unapproved garments would be blocked from being able to use the device.
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 hawking a “penny stock picker,” a FedEx refund product, or a “history eraser.” When police raided his home, they found CDs stuffed with 176 million e-mail address and another 1.3 billion e-mail user names, many of them AOL usernames that had been stolen by a former AOL employee.
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 bad the DRM sucks. The method? Bombing the comments on Amazon.com.
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 very informational rap video; for those opposed to nerdy hip-hop, let’s just say its primary goal is to “seek out new particles including the long-awaited Higgs boson responsible for making things weigh what they do and the possible source of gravity called dark matter.” Somehow or another, the paranoid among us think that carrying out those tasks will rip the world wide open or leave you stuck in 1990 with nothing in your CD player but Ice Ice Baby. Okay, so maybe that last scenario is worth getting worked up about.
Federal Communications Commission Chair Kevin Martin said today that he was “disappointed” by Comcast’s decision to sue the FCC over its move to sanction the company for P2P throttling. But Martin said he’s glad that the cable giant says it will still comply with the Commission’s Order requiring the company to reveal its Internet management policies, because the agency has lots of questions.
Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales scrupulously guarded details of the National Security Agency’s secret warrantless wiretapping activities from inquisitive members of Congress. When it came to securing classified documents pertaining to the NSA program, however, a report released by the Office of the Inspector General today finds that Gonzales was not always so careful.
An internal memo suggests that the White House will be unable to recover thousands of missing White House e-mails by the end of George W. Bush’s term in office. According to a document dated June 20 and leaked to the Associated Press, the White House IT shop has been soliciting bids from contractors to perform the recovery project, but the document estimates the work will not be completed until April 2009, three months after either Barack Obama or John McCain will have moved into the Oval Office.
There has “always been a requirement for network management,” said Verizon CTO Richard Lynch Tuesday at the Progress & Freedom Foundation’s annual Aspen conference on tech policy, even in the analog age. In the wake of the FCC’s recent Comcast decision, debates over “network management” have escaped the engineers’ offices and now take place even among skeptical consumers who worry about what such management will do to their Internet connections. Lynch laid out Verizon’s view on the matter: time-sensitive packets like VoIP should be prioritized over less-sensitive packets like P2P, but the company remains committed to “deliver any and all data requested by our customers.”
The demise of touch-screen voting has produced a graveyard of expensive corpses: Warehouses stacked with thousands of carefully wrapped voting machines that have been shelved because of doubts about vanishing votes and vulnerability to hackers.
