Logitech Pocket Digital Review on Hardward Central reviews the new Logitech digital camera. It’s only 1.3 megapixel, but if you’re looking for a snapshot camera, this one has other statistics that make it more attractive than other alternatives, like the popular Intel Pocket Camera. “[I]t’s no larger than a laptop’s PC Card, half an inch thick and 1.8 ounces … Battery life is ample; controls, including a self-timer, are simple … the Logitech is almost an impulse buy at $130.”.

The battery is... [More]

IBM Research News has recently announced their latest new ‘world record’ for storage density. IBM’s ‘Millipede’ Project Demonstrates Trillion-Bit Data Storage Density says:

“Using an innovative nanotechnology, IBM scientists have demonstrated a data storage density of a trillion bits per square inch — 20 times higher than the densest magnetic storage available today.”

The breakthrough involves a return to mechanical storage, reminiscent of the punchcards of old, but this time, the card is “a... [More]”

Xentex Technologies has developed a dual screen laptop called the Xentex Flip-Pad Voyager. Each screen is 13.3" diagonal, but each is also aligned in portrait mode. For presentations, the screens can be swiveled around to face the 180° the other direction (JPG). The start of the tour shows it all folded up and mentions that it sits at 3" high, so it’s more of a slim briefcase than the laptops you’ve become used to. It looks pretty high-tech though, like something out of James Bond or Mission... [More]

Lawmeme has posted the Top Ten New Copyright Crimes, which has coverage of a recent interview “with Jamie Kellner, chairman and CEO of Turner Broadcasting (an AOL Time Warner company)”. He recently made news for this interview for the rather remarkable claim that:

“[Ad skips are] theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you’re going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn’t get the show on an ad- supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you’re... [More]”

The Register ran MS in Peruvian open-source nightmare. Peru is considering a bill to require that all public offices use only open-source software. Once Microsoft got wind of this, Señor Juan Alberto González, General Manager of Microsoft in Perú issued a stern warning against doing so and provided the usual raft of logic.

In an extremely well-written reply, and possibly the most eloquent and accessible defense of Open Source software I’ve seen, “[Peruvian Congressman... [More]”

The Apple Developer’s Conference is full of cool announcements. First, and most importantly, is the impending release of OS X 10.2, called Jaguar. Apple has a A Look Inside Jaguar covering the major points. The most exciting is Quartz Extreme:

“Jaguar dramatically improves the performance of Mac OS X with Quartz Extreme hardware-based graphics acceleration. Quartz Extreme takes advantage of the OpenGL 3D graphics engine to make the entire desktop a fully accelerated OpenGL scene. A supported*... [More]”

The Mac Expo last week announced the latest IMac. I think Mark Morford summed it up best in Please Lick This iMac:

<q>It looks like a big vanity mirror stuck atop a large scoop of white rice. It’s utterly annoying in that whole getting-it-right sort of way. It forces you to justify instant feelings of rabid consumerism. It makes you want one. Immediately.</q>

The New York Times had an equally delirious article, For Apple, to Be Flat Is a Virtue.

<q>In other words, Apple’s new design manages... [More]

If you’re in the market for a new display system, there’s an extensive review of the latest and greatest video cards on the Tech Report called ATI vs. NVIDIA: The next generation…. The first 4 pages are just geeky pictures of the video cards themselves (though, being a geek, I think the cards look pretty nice). The ‘contest’ begins on page 5, with basic system specs for the test harness and raw throughput numbers for each of the cards. The cards compared are the “Radeon 7500 vs. GeForce4 MX 440... [More]”

Quantum Picture develops image-recognition technology. Their proof-of-concept is an ingenious automated cat-flap that prevents kitty from bringing in any unwelcome guests (as cats are wont to do). It’s called the Flo Control Project. You can see a picture of Flo standing in front of her high-tech door, which is commercially available as Cat Mate, to the left.

Basically, the setup has a digital camera and a lamp, the lamp projects a silhouette of the cat’s head onto a screen, then the camera... [More]

Back in January, Microsoft announced that their next version of Windows would consolidate their multifarious data-stores into one package. Currently, they have NTFS, SQL-Server and the Exchange format to house and index data. This was reported and covered in detail by the Register in XP successor Longhorn goes SQL….

Recently, the Register ran an interview with Benoit Schillings and Dominic Giampaolo, both of BeOS fame, called Windows on a database…. The BeOS probably came the closest to... [More]

The Register is covering the ongoing Microsoft trial, which has entered the penalty phase. As a bit of background, the states are basically proposing that Microsoft make Windows more modular, so that OEMs can distribute versions of Windows with other vendor applications replacing Microsoft versions. This seems to make sense and at least begins to address Microsoft’s crippling monopoly on the desktop by allowing even the possibility that, upon purchasing a computer from a major vendor, one might... [More]

Having watched the music recording industry go through digital growing pains, the movie industry is taking a decidedly more legislative angle on piracy. The recording industry may have the DMCA, but that only prevents people from cracking encryption standards that copy-protect music. Hollywood has its sights set on hardware, not software. While the DMCA protects even horrible encryption standards from being cracked legally…by Americans anyway, the SSSCA is an industry plan to enforce... [More]

The Hologram Revolution in the February 2002 Discover Magazine (halfway down the page) reports on a new technique pioneered by a Frenchman, Yves Gentet, that produces the most stunning, realistic, high-resolution holograms you’ve ever seen.

It’s a pity they included only the small picture, because the larger one in the magazine is impressive. In the smaller one here, you can, to some degree, see the depth that is represented in the hologram, and you can kind of see that the frame is no... [More]

Here are two pieces of news from The Register that dovetail nicely. Three new MS security holes − two nasty describes 3 new bugs in Microsoft’s products.

The first bug affects all recent versions of SQL Server 2000, Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6 and could give access to the local hard drive to an attacker. The attacker would have to know the name of the file and would receive only read privileges. This is a relatively mild attack, but since most people install to default folders, it... [More]

The U.S. Justice Department settled their case with Microsoft, in which they found that while Microsoft is a monopoly and has been for over a decade, the U.S. unfortunately has too much growth and economy riding on their stock (recall that the announcement of the finding of fact against Microsoft in 2000 precipitated the bursting of the dot-com bubble), so they decided to let them keep doing what they’re doing, with nary a nod to the thousands of companies either gobbled up, run out of business... [More]

It seems granting full partner trading status to China isn’t going to be the boon Microsoft expected. As a provision of gaining status, China has agreed to crack down on piracy, and, in particular, to stop using pirated software and operating systems in government agencies. Microsoft saw this as an opening for massive profits from newly-licensed software from a large established user base. The Register published Red Flag Linux beats out Windows in Beijing, pointing out a Gartner Group document, ... [More]

Dmitry Sklyarov has escaped sacrifice on the altar of the DMCA. He is the programmer for the Russian software firm Elcomsoft that cracked the pitiful copy-protection on the Adobe E-Book Reader in order to allow users to make backups of books they bought. After an initial outcry, Adobe dropped the case, but the U.S. Attorney’s office pursued the first case to prosecute for violating the DMCA.

He was eventually released 5 months later and spent the holidays at home, in Russia. However, the O’Reilly... [More]

Cryptome published Coming Soon: Hollywood Versus the Internet recently, detailing the players involved in the Hollings bill (also called the SSSCA), which has been submitted to Congress. The bill basically involves making it a felony to produce an information device that does not have government-approved hardware DRM (Digital Rights Management) built into it.

A few years ago, Napster scared the hell out of the recording industry and Hollywood is moving to ensure that they get a jump on the... [More]

CNN has Gates Orders ‘Trustworthy Computing’ announcing yet another Microsoft initiative that claims to put user’s security concerns first. After the spate of problems reported in Microsoft software (Windows Update, Windows Media Player, numerous IE security holes and the UP&P XP hole), its not surprising to see Gates himself come forward to say he’s going to put a stop to it. But is it more than just lip service this time? Probably not.

Counterpane’s latest Crypto-Gram (January 15, 2002)... [More]

Common Dreams published New Turbine Can Extract Energy from Flowing Water. Alexander Gorlov, who worked on the Aswan Dam in Egypt is currently testing the new design that could provide a cheaper, less invasive form of hydro-power than that provided by dams.

<q> … Gorlov’s turbines have other advantages, proponents say: When they generate electricity, you can’t see them, you can’t hear them, and they’re virtually disruption-free.</q>
 

Have you ever seen those ASCII pictures that look like they took forever to create? There’s a tool called MosASCII that makes it easy to construct them in HTML, in full color.

I made the earthli globe into ASCII art. It’s easy.

In other ASCII art news, The Register reports in Ever wanted to see Star Wars in Telnet? that a “whacked Dutch hardware geek” called Sten has converted Star Wars into 13,935 frames of Telnet action. As the title of the article suggests, you simply must check it out if... [More]

Security Focus ran a longish article called Lamo’s Adventures in WorldCom about a lone 20 year old hacker who finds holes in corporate web sites not by hacking, but just by looking for them. He has no home and often spends all night in a Kinko’s with his old laptop jacked into a free connection. He doesn’t take advantage of the information he finds and, once he’s finished, usually turns it over to the company he ransacked, along with a map of all of the holes in their Net.

Bruce Sterling, a science fiction writer, gave an interesting talk recently about the state of cryptography today. He talks about what we all thought the net would be like today and how it’s ended up where it is. Where did all of that ‘geeks’ will rule the world stuff go? Well, he says:

“So where are these imaginary earthshaking geek outlaws who laugh in derision at mere government? Well, they do exist, and they’re in Redmond. The big time in modern outlaw geekdom is definitely Microsoft. ... [More]”

The most complete history of UseNet, an enormous news archive has been resurrected and indexed at Google Groups. The announcement mentions the historical aspects of this archive:

<q>We are compiling some especially memorable articles and threads in the timeline below. For example, read Tim Berners-Lee’s announcement of what became the World Wide Web or Linus Torvalds’ post about his “pet project”.</q>

Slashdot is reporting a newly discovered security hole in Internet Explorer in Another Gaping Microsoft Security Hole Goes Unpatched.

Basically, it’s possible to create a link that will cause explorer to issue a download dialog asking whether you want to save the file or open it. The link would claim that the file was a text file or a PDF file, for example, leading you to possibly click to open it. However, once you tell IE to open it, it uses a different set of standards that would notice... [More]

This news is somewhat old, but several people I’ve talked to recently had never heard of it, so I’ve collected the unfolding(ed) story. On November 20, 2001, MSNBC reported that FBI software cracks encryption wall. The title is misleading, since the FBI hasn’t cracked any encryption schemes. The article deals with the ‘Magic Lantern’, which is the FBI’s cutesy name for a computer virus they wrote that installs key-logging software onto a suspect’s computer.

Key-logging software runs in the... [More]

There are two announcements from the last couple of days that nicely dovetail. The first is form Microsoft:

Microsoft has admitted (though not very publicly) that IE has another easily-exploitable hole in its cookie security that allows:

<q>A malicious web site with a malformed URL could read the contents of a user’s cookie which might contain personal information. In addition, it is possible to alter the contents of the cookie. This URL could be hosted on a web page or contained in an... [More]

Wired reports that there’s a relatively gaping hole in the Microsoft’s Passport service. This service holds all of a user’s personal information and can also hold credit card and financial information. It’s being touted as a keyring for the Internet, kept secure by Microsoft. If you have a HotMail account, you have a PassPort (it may or may not have your credit card information, though). However:

<q>In a demonstration of the exploit earlier this week, Slemko sent Wired News a specially crafted... [More]

There are a lot of rumors floating around. Attorney General John Ashcroft and the FBI tell us that they use high-encryption programs, so the government needs access to all of those. Others claim that they are using steganography (information embedded in images) and are communicating through web porn. Phil Zimmermann, the inventor of PGP (an encryption package) was quoted by the Washington Post as expressing “regret” for inventing PGP.

All not true. Most of it deliberately misinterpreted to... [More]

There’s a lot of people who just look at the speed of a chip; even people who should know better. Higher equals faster. If I’ve got an Athlon 1.4GHz, then how much faster could I be going with a P4 2.0 GHz. I mean, 2.0 GHz! Intel broke the 2 GHz barrier! Wow!

Settle down.

Here’s some good benchmarks from HardOCP showing that the Athlon 1.4 chip is faster in some tests and slower in some tests (about 50/50) on this page, but only by small margins either way. Statistically, they’re... [More]