TechnoInfo is a collection place for news about technology; specifically cool new things, and how technology and man influence each other.
April 26, 2005
Star Wars to become new TV series
"Two Star Wars TV series will follow the latest movie in the hit film franchise, director George Lucas has said. "
April 25, 2005
Web server attacks 'growing fast'
"More than 2,500 web servers every day are being hacked, reveals a report."
Shuffler: automated file loading without iTunes
"An automated audio file shuffler for MSC-compliant digital audio players (DAP) like the iPod Shuffle, Rio Carbon, and other players."
Dubai hotel is a traveling geek's gilded dream
"The unique aspects of the Emirates Palace are hidden inside its ductwork: nearly a thousand miles of blue, red and green fiber-optic and broadcast cable, and enough other advancements to have convinced the staff that this is the world's most high-tech hotel."
April 22, 2005
Customer Support Emails Way Too Easy To Ignore
"Over the past year study after study has shown that companies are incredibly bad at replying to customer support emails -- even when they're super fast at replying to sales inquiries."
Limiting Free Weather Service? Forecast Bad For Protected Businesses
"... a pending Senate bill ... would strip the federally funded National Weather Service of its weather forecasting."
Judge holds teen’s Playstation during probation
" Manitoba 14-year-old convicted of two counts of assault and theft under $5,000 is receiving an unusual punishment: on top of the more routine counselling he’ll receive, his PlayStation is being held hostage by the judge."
April 20, 2005
Making Others Read YOUR Fine Print -- Turning EULAs Around
"With so many annoying end user license agreements (EULAs) out there with impossible fine print that almost no one reads, it appears that some users are 'fighting back.'"
Target Upgrades the Pill Bottle
"The bottle is ergonomically designed and even has a nice colored ring, one for each member of the family."
Associated Press to Charge Members to Post Content Online
"The Associated Press has announced that, effective Jan. 1 2006, it 'will begin charging newspapers and broadcasters to post its stories, photos and other content online."
Ameritrade says account data missing
"As many as 200,000 current and former customers' personal information is unaccounted for."
April 19, 2005
Security Holes Bite Firefox
Mozilla Foundation patches eight flaws, six of which also affect Mozilla suite.
The Beam in Your Eye - If steroids are cheating, why isn't LASIK?
"A month ago, Mark McGwire was hauled before a congressional hearing and lambasted as a cheater for using a legal, performance-enhancing steroid precursor when he broke baseball's single-season home run record. A week ago, Tiger Woods was celebrated for winning golf's biggest tournament, the Masters, with the help of superior vision he acquired through laser surgery."
April 18, 2005
Making Music More Enjoyable? Not Allowed!
"Among the many clueless things the recording industry has done over the past few years is freak out over people daring to (oh my!) put lyrics online. "
SkyPort Fiber Optic Skylight System
"... light-collecting panels which you install on your roof, allowing them to feed a remote part of your house with the purest of natural light. "
U.S. Military's Elite Hacker Crew
"The U.S. military has assembled the world's most formidable hacker posse: a super-secret, multimillion-dollar weapons program that may be ready to launch bloodless cyberwar against enemy networks -- from electric grids to telephone nets. "
April 15, 2005
Does Security Run In Your Veins?
"Fujitsu's system uses palm vein patterns to identify bank customers in Japan."
Online criminals challenge police
"The net has not just changed the way that businesses work, it has done the same for organised crime too, a leading E-crime police officer has said. "
TweakNow RegCleaner - free
"This excellent, free utility makes the potentially daunting prospect of cleaning your PC's registry safe and simple. "
IBM to police speeders in United Arab Emirates
"If you ingnore the warning, the smart box will wirelessly trasmit the car’s speed, identity and location to the police who will promptly slam you with a ticket."
Europe's new supercomputer booted up
"Europe's fastest supercomputer, which can make 40 trillion calculations per second, booted up for the first time at a research center in Barcelona."
Vatican on lookout for eavesdroppers
"From bugs to lasers to cell phones, the Vatican is on guard for high-tech eavesdropping ahead of Monday's opening of the conclave to elect a new pope to lead the Roman Catholic Church."
FAQ: Wi-Fi alphabet soup
"Sorting out the alphabet soup can be as frustrating as untangling the ball of wires behind your PC that the standards are supposed to help replace. "
Mobile safety at your fingertips
"Some of the viruses will stop a phone working if they are installed, others try to spread from one phone to another via the Bluetooth short-range radio service. "
April 14, 2005
CNET Bandwidth Meter Speed Test
"The CNET Bandwidth Meter speed test will check the bandwidth of your Internet connection against top DSL, cable modem, and other broadband services. The bandwidth test is as easy as 1, 2, 3."
Allowing pop-ups from specific sites
"One of Windows XP SP2's many quirks is that some Web sites may not function properly if they use subsidiary windows. Find out how you can configure Internet Explorer to allow pop-ups from specific sites. "
Net security bug prompts warnings
"Microsoft has issued patches for five critical bugs in its software. "
Surveillance Works Both Ways
"In an attempt to establish equity in the world of surveillance, participants at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in Seattle this week took to the streets to ferret out surveillance cameras and turn the tables on offensive eyes taking their picture."
How Dare You Share The Public Domain! You're Fired!
"It appears that, once again, the entertainment industry's efforts to educate everyone on their distorted view of intellectual property law is causing some problems. "
Laptops Are A Pain In The Neck... And Back... And Shoulders
"With more and more people ditching desktop computers for laptops, people are beginning to realize the ergonomic disaster of laptop computers."
GPS-ified school blazers let parents track kids
"In addition to letting parents track their kids, the terminals also have a panic button that children can push in an emergency, immediately summoning a security agent to their exact location."
Randomly Generated Paper Accepted to Conference
"Some students at MIT wrote a program called SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator."
Tracking Your Taxes
"Apparently Intuit (TurboTax) thinks it's okay to share information about taxes with third paries."
April 13, 2005
North Dakota makes vehicle black box data owner property
"Last month we reported on how automakers are outfitting new vehicles with black boxes without notifying consumers. In a rare case of having something positive to report in the political realm, the North Dakota legislature is the first to set a precedent by making the black box data sole property of the vehicle owner."
Keyboards are Havens for Super Bugs
"This is particularly interesting this time because this research noted that there is a lot of computer use in hospitals and they're finding it really difficult to sterilize them."
Major Aussie ISP Disconnecting Trojaned PCs
""Australia's largest ISP, Telstra BigPond, has started disconnecting customers that it suspects have excess traffic-causing trojans installed on their PCs."
Copyright Reform to Free Orphans?
"... so-called "orphan works" -- items still locked up under copyright but where the owners are unknown or impossible to locate -- are leading the U.S. Copyright Office to try to fix the problem. "
Surprises Lurk in Satellite Snaps
"Notable surprises include a just-erupted volcano, violent scenes from Iraq (a bomb going off in Baghdad and a firefight in Najaf) and even a 747 landing in Tokyo, something difficult to capture given that the satellite is moving at 17,000 mph."
April 12, 2005
LexisNexis Breach Worse Than Believed
"... the results of an internal review showed that in fact the damage was nearly ten times worse than previously thought."
April 11, 2005
The "Top Ten" most inexcusable failures of technology
"Inexcusable failures are the ones where we continue to pay a severe penalty in productivity for everyday tasks while the end game (how it should work) is obvious but the path to it is obstructed for reasons that have nothing to do with science."
What Search Sites Know About You
"You should think about what you put in that search box, because it may not be as anonymous as you think..."
Second Life Teaches Life Lessons
"As a massively multiplayer online game, many people think of Second Life as little more than a virtual playground. But an increasing number of people and organizations are employing the game in applications that are useful for far more than entertainment. "
Judge Knocks EULAs Back A Bit
"Copyfight has noticed that a recent legal ruling may push back on the power of the EULA, as the judge has made it clear that, despite claims to the contrary in the EULA, buyers of software have certain rights as owners."
ChoicePoint Top Big Brother Pick
"Two major data brokers, a California elementary school and Google's Gmail service are leading contenders for the Big Brother Awards -- a dubious prize spotlighting organizations with egregious privacy practices. "
Collar Cultivates Canine Cliques
"If you've ever longed for a way to monitor your dog's social life, map out its buddy network and sense who its true friends really are, you might have been waiting for SNIF. "
Spoofed Web Greeting Cards Pose Real Threat to Users
"PC World reports that some messages appearing to originate from legitimate sources and asking recipients to click on a link to retrieve a virtual greeting card actually send users to Web sites that install malicious Trojan horse software on their computers."
Commercial Exoskeletons
""For those of you with superhuman aspirations, your dream may be a step closer..."
People are More Accepting of Spam
Although this may be a case of incorrectly interpreting statistics: many people have stopped using email beacuse of spam (probably the ones that were bothered by it the most).
Robot jockeys to ride Gulf camels
"The United Arab Emirates says it will use robots as jockeys for camel races from next season. "
April 08, 2005
Wireless USB Demo
"Add to this the fact that existing USB 2.0 products can be converted to Wireless USB products with adapters, and you’re almost ready for obsolete technology."
Inkjets may soon repair fractured arms
"Scientists at the University of Manchester in England think they’ll soon be able to repair fractured arms and help other medical conditions by using inkjet nozzles that spray live human cells onto the patient."
The Egg handles last-minute scheduling changes
"When you (inevitably) need to give yourself a bit of extra time, you turn our egg upside down and shake it to add more light and, consequently, more time. "
Japanese developers create magnetic CPU cooler
"The system will apparently use a hollow magnet and magnetic nanoparticles mixed with oil to draw heat away from the CPU without requiring a pump."
DNS Cache Poisoning Spreads Malware
"The infected DNS servers are re-directing users from popular sites such as Google or American Express to malware infecting advertising sites."
Sony Patents Matrix-Like Game Technology
"Reuters is reporting that Sony has been granted 2 patents, both describing 'Method and system for generating sensory data onto the human neural cortex'."
Teachers leave grading up to the computer
"A computer program developed at the University of Missouri may take some of the tedium out of teaching--it grades papers and offers students writing advice. "
Linux Distro turns PCs into Night-time Clusters
"Dubbed CHAOS, the distro is able to remotely boot a computer and run it on Linux without affecting the local hard disk."
April 06, 2005
Windmills in the Sky
"Australian engineer Bryan Roberts wants to build a power station in the sky -- a cluster of flying windmills soaring 15,000 feet in the air..."
Hikers who carry cellphones take extra risks
"The Honolulu Star-Bulletin has a news story about how hikers in Hawaii are subconsciously taking needless risks and hiking trails they’re not ready for..."
Firm builds internet motor home
"An internet entrepreneur with a taste for the open road is having a hi-tech motor home built for him in north Wales. "
'Geek speak' confuses net users
"The average home computer user is bamboozled by technology jargon which is used to warn people about the most serious security threats online. "
April 05, 2005
The Feds can own your WLAN too
Watch as some FBI d00ds crack a 128-bit WEP network in under 3 minutes.
UL Image Quiz: 'Real or Fake?'
"Test your ability to tell hoax photos from the real thing by taking the UL Image Quiz."
Aided by the Net, hacked-off consumers make their feelings known
But if you get your "information" by email, you'd better do some research first.
April 04, 2005
San Francisco Attempts to Regulate Blogging
"Forget about theocratic Iran or Communist China; today's report of a political entity trying to regulate blogging comes not from The People's Republic of China, but rather The People's Republic of San Francisco."
"Body Talk" Could Control Gadgets
"The BBC reports that we could soon be controlling our gadgets using small movements of the body, such as a nod of the head."
April 01, 2005
Google Doubles Gmail Storage
"E-mail service now offers 2GB of storage, and the company says that will increase."
Brain chip reads man's thoughts
"A paralysed man in the US has become the first person to benefit from a brain chip that reads his mind. "
Frenzy Begins Over Cookie Alternative
"An existing technology offering cookie-like functionality is gaining attention from publishers, marketers and others as a possible replacement for the ubiquitous, but potentially endangered, text files. The technology, based on Macromedia's Flash, is getting attention as awareness spreads of an apparent increase in user deletion of cookies."
What Wal-Mart Knows About Customers' Habits
"By its own count, Wal-Mart has 460 terabytes of data stored ... at its Bentonville headquarters. To put that in perspective, the Internet has less than half as much data, according to experts."
Illinois Speed Cameras Will Take Your License Away
""If you ever happen to drive through Illinois, but skipped any of the Techdirt items about how inaccurate speed cameras can be -- you better go back and read up. "
Scientists develop metallic glass
"The new material is said to be three times stronger than the best industrial steel and ten times springier."
The downside to using a biometric car lock
"Turns out there is a very unfortunate downside to using a biometric fingerprint scanner to lock and unlock your car doors: when thieves want to steal your car they’ll simply cut off the necessary digit and go to town." [some finger readers and other biometric devices account for this, and will check for blood supply as part of the evaluation; I'll be making sure that my next car has this feature, and has a big sticker saying so. - jeff]
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