Resurrection after 5 years.

Now in case of errors program is able to send log file to developer. Also some small bugs are fixed.

New version of Alexf's Wallpaper Rotator. Read more...

Just few small bugfixes.

New homepage for Alexf Dialer! AFD is a dial-up dialer. A very user oriented modem dialer that combines an easy to use interface and powerful abilities.

New website Engine!

Jed Stremel, Director of Mobile at Facebook, just announced at our Mobile Web Wars Roundtable that Facebook’s iPhone/iPod app has reached 1 million users. Facebook is currently ranked as the 6th most popular free application on Apple’s App Store, and has been among the store’s top applications since the store’s launch on July 10.

This week, ISPs agreed to work with the BPI to reduce file-sharing in the UK. When someone gets ‘caught’ the ISPs will send out a warning, 100% based on music industry provided ‘evidence’. Not even the ISPs know if the claims of the BPI are true, so the evidence is totally unchallenged, a perfect position for the music industry.

Since the iPhone was released, reports have surfaced about varying degrees of screen quality. Above we see a comparison of three phones, the original iPhone is on top, with the bottom row both being 3G’s, 8GB on the left, 16 GB on the right. All three are running OS X iPhone, 2.0 (5A347), with brightness turned all the way up.

Last night there was a Digg meet-up in Chicago, and the attending press was particularly interested in getting comment from Digg folk Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson regarding the intense rumors of a $200 million acquisition by Google. Of course, as per usual, they had no comment on the matter.

We're at an interesting point in the development life cycle of third-party programs, those little software applications one can add to gadgets and social pages.Microsoft's approach, confirmed Thursday, is about control. Anyone can create a game, but not everyone will be approved for release on the Xbox Live service.

mcgrof writes "Atheros has released a shiny new Atheros driver for all their 11n devices aimed for inclusion in the Linux kernel. This new driver has no proprietary HAL and is licensed under the ISC license, so the BSD community should be able to benefit as well. Note: no firmware required!"

Since version 2 came out in 2005, Google Desktop for Windows has included a sidebar that users can fill with screen gadgets, but the Linux version (version 1, from June 2007) provided only indexing and search functions, with no eye candy whatsoever. This has finally changed. Google recently released Google Gadgets for Linux (GGL)

Is Flash and Windows Media coming to the Iphone3G? This would fix one of the biggest gripes with the iPhone! Hope you don't spend too much time reading this.

Three years after Google (NSDQ: GOOG) declared that its index was three times larger than any other search engine and then declined to cite a specific number to support that claim, it was widely believed that Google had tired of index one-upmanship and that it would no longer be measuring its index. Well, Google has its yardstick in hand once...

Some Windows users secretly love Linux. They want to use Linux but are too chicken to install it on their hard drive. So, they use a program like Windows Blinds to radically alter the graphical user interface of their Windows desktop and make it look like that of Linux.

3 different ways to download torrents from the terminal.

Under its chief executive and founder Steven P. Jobs, Apple has created a culture of secrecy that has served it well in many ways — from new products to the health of Mr. Jobs.

mjasay writes "At OSCON this year, MySQL's Brian Aker made this bold statement: "Microsoft is irrelevant....We're more worried about Apple." The Free Software Foundation appears to have caught the hint, and has turned its attention to all-things-Apple with a "denial of service" attack on the Apple Genius Bars. The idea is to completely book all Genius Bars and then ask the "geniuses,", over and...

Teancum writes "In an interesting show of the level of regulations private spacecraft designers have to go through, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has demanded that American participants of the Google Lunar X Prize obtain a license if their spacecraft are "capable of actively or passively sensing the Earth's surface, including bodies of water, from space by making us...

An anonymous reader writes "Gizmodo and Filmstalker are showing the Tron 2 (aka Tr2n) teaser from Comic-Con 08. From the Giz article: 'It's a tiny bootleg video, but I don't care. You can see that the 3D looks amazing, the new lightcycles are stunning (and move like real bikes), the world and the whole mood is Batman-like dark. And Jeff Bridges ... well, he is Jeff Bridges. What can I say, he l...

While some people continue to debate whether or not we’re actually in a recession, Apple (AAPL) went a step further in the 10Q it filed yesterday, using stark new language to describe the state of the economy.

A bill introduced Thursday by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) would increase penalties for counterfeiting, empower federal prosecutors to bring civil suits against copyright infringers, create a federal copyright czar to coordinate IP enforcement, and provide for the seizure of property used to violate copyrights and trademarks.

The Google/Digg acquisition negotiations, which had passed the term sheet stage and were in final negotiations, are over, multiple sources close to both companies have confirmed. The deal appears to dead

BhaKi writes "Remember the Tree-View mode in many file management applications? It's shocking to know that this omnipresent feature was patented by Microsoft back in 1995 (granted in 1997). I'm not very sure about the implications, though. The patent is so general that it can be related to many things from tree-mode to virtual filesystems. Check out claim no. 3 of the patent for the most clear ...

An anonymous reader writes "According to reports, there may be a back door built into Skype, which allows connections to be bugged. The company has declined to expressly deny the allegations. At a meeting with representatives of ISPs and the Austrian regulator on lawful interception of IP based services held on 25th June, high-ranking officials at the Austrian interior ministry revealed that it...

I'm sick of this shit. Just look at it.I know the following link (http://tinyurl.com/scoblediggtrolls) is just Scoble, but we are becoming the laughing stock of the internet. Fools, children, LOLkids; idiots. I want to see change with the maturity of this site, and I hope you do too. As a community, we can have fun, but lets keep things mature.

You've probably heard of Journaling Flash File System (JFFS) and Yet Another Flash File System (YAFFS), but do you know what it means to have a file system that assumes an underlying flash device? This article introduces you to flash file systems for Linux®, explores how they care for their underlying consumable devices (flash parts) through wear l

3rd Alpha for Ubuntu 8.10 is out.

Steve Jobs is not a manager who suffers fools, gladly or otherwise. In the early days of Apple, he was famous for categorizing employees by their “bozo bit,� set at either 0 or 1, and for flipping his assessment from one to the other in the space of an elevator ride.

Apple has staked its reputation on tight control of a few carefully-designed, faultlessly-executed products. Now, as Apple expands its reach from computers into music, video, consumer electronics and phones, it's getting harder and harder for the company to make sure all of its products "just work," as its marketing slogan goes.

Paolo writes "A Washington student got a bit of a shock when he received an email from internet service provider Comcast about comments he had made on his blog. Brandon Dilbeck, a student at the University of Washington, writes a blog and used it to complain about the service he was getting from Comcast. Shortly afterwards he got an email message from Comcast apologizing for the problems and su...

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Arlen Specter (R-PA) have just sponsored a new bill, the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008, which would combine the worst parts of the PRO-IP Act and the PIRATE Act. The basic idea is pretty simple: expand the Federal government to create something like the Department of Homeland Security for I...

You think your liquid-cooled rig is pretty snazzy, don't you? After Purdue researchers get their technology on the streets, that stuff will seriously look old

slatterz writes with an excerpt from a brief PC Authority article: "Nasa is to make its huge collection of historic photographs, film and video available to the public for the first time. A partnership with the non-profit Internet Archive will see 21 major Nasa imagery collections merged into a single searchable online resource. The Nasa Images website is expected to go live this week. The cont...

Linux® loadable kernel modules, introduced in version 1.2 of the kernel, are one of the most important innovations in the Linux kernel. They provide a kernel that is both scalable and dynamic. Discover the ideas behind loadable modules, and learn how these independent objects dynamically become part of the Linux kernel.

At OSCON, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical Ltd. said he doubts Microsoft would file a claim against Linux developers.

The Comcast P2P saga has come to its final chapter as a majority of FCC commissioners today voted to sanction the company. The FCC's Internet Policy Statement now sports some unexpectedly sharp teeth.

LifeHacker reviews an early version of Amarok 2.

Donnie takes one from the team.

Multiple readers, including koavf, have written to tell us the FCC has finally approved the Sirius-XM merger that has been in the works for quite a while now. CNN has picked up AP coverage as well. We discussed approval of the merger by the Justice Department a few months ago. From CNN: "The Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 to approve the buyout, with the tiebreaker coming Friday nig...

The Apple rumor mill is at it again, with reports surfacing this week that Steve Jobs and Co. are working on a touchscreen laptop to unveil as soon as the end of 2008. Good thing Glenn Derene dreamed up his own at the beginning of this year. Here's a fresh look at our would-be MacBook Touch.

The Wine development release 1.1.2 is now available.

Is GTA 4 a murder simulator? Probably not, but any game based on Showtime's Dexter damn well better be. According to a tweet by TV squad, a Dexter game is on its way to the iPhone and will be detailed later tonight at the Dexter Comic-con panel.

mytrip points out news that Google's index of unique URLs has reached a milestone: one trillion. Google's blog provides some more information, noting, "The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we've seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. To keep up with this v...

mattnyc99 writes "Over at Popular Mechanics, Glenn Derene has a great new column investigating the lawless lands of broadcast television, where the quality of the picture that ends up on your expensive hi-def set is determined by a bunch of fuzzy math. Quoting: 'In fact, there's no real regulation over high-definition picture quality at all — "none whatsoever," one industry consultant tol...

The Pirate Bay is messing with Hollywood again, as they’ve put up a new logo which links to pirated copies of the blockbuster movie “The Dark Knight�. Although Warner did all it can to protect the film from leaking, a Cam version leaked onto BitTorrent sites soon after it premiered.

Are you tired of seeing all your hard iPhone hacking work go unappreciated? Do you long for a chance to work for Apple while still poking around for flaws in the iPhone OS? Wait no longer, intrepid code ninja, for Apple may have just the job for you.

Consumers generally welcome advertising in online video if it will stay free, but they are more receptive to ads in certain types of video than others. The latest data comes from Ipsos MediaCT's ongoing digital video study, which asked a "representative sample" of US Internet users about their online habits and preferences in February.

More evidence of tampering from Microsoft: In the E-mail, Bill Gates complains Microsoft do the work, and the result is that it works great on Linux! He didn't explicitly say that Microsoft should do this, he seemed to be toying with the idea of making the API's work well with Windows and not with other OS'es.

Deli Korkmaz writes "The Washington Post reports that Sprint-Nextel spin-off Embarq, currently the US's fourth largest DSL provider, monitored Internet activity on some 26,000 customers in Kansas using deep-packet inspection technology NebuAd in order to deliver targeted advertising to users' desktops. CNet provides coverage as well. The House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce...

snydeq writes "The office of San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris has made public close to 150 usernames and passwords used by various departments to connect to the city's VPN. The passwords were filed this week as Exhibit A in a court document arguing against a reduction in $5 million bail in the case against Terry Childs. Though they placed the passwords in the public record, city pr...

Today is SysAdmin Day, otherwise known System Administrator Appreciation Day. This "holiday" was first celebrated in 2000 and takes place annually on the last Friday in July. The goal, according to the SysAdmin Day website at sysadminday.com, it to give the guys and gals who maintain your computer network some love.. and perhaps some nifty gifties!

I'll show you how to speed and not spend.

Virginia Tech's Center for High-End Computing System (CHECS) is famous for building a 1100-node, G5-based supercomputing cluster in 2003 called System X. At the time it was built, it ranked as the third fastest supercomputer in the world with a sustained performance of just over 12 teraflops. The CHECS is building a new cluster, this time using 324

One developer burning the midnight oil has stumbled upon references to copy and paste in the frameworks of Apple's iPhone SDK, potentially offering new hope for one of the most requested and conspicuously absent features the company's mobile software.

Penguinisto writes "According to a somewhat jaw-dropping story in The Register, it appears that Microsoft has performed a trifecta of geek-scaring feats: They have joined the Apache Software Foundation as a Platinum member(at $100K USD a year), submitted LGPL-licensed patches for ADOdb, and have pledged to expand their Open Specifications Promise by adding to the list more than 100 protocols fo...

andrewmin writes "Recently, Gnome's been gaining a lot of ground on its KDE counterpart in the desktop environment wars. The KDE developers were hoping to change this with KDE 4, the new radical release of KDE, but it was not to be. KDE 4.0 was buggy and unstable, leaving everyone except the hard-core KDE lovers. Mainly, this was because it just didn't work most of the time. However, the develo...

agent4256 writes "Barbara Robertson over at Studio Daily put forth this article featuring the technical background for the production of The Dark Knight. With most of the film shot with IMAX cameras (producing a theoretical resolution of 18k), the studios could not handle the size. Instead, they cut the resolution by more than half, down to 8K, the maximum resolution for scanned film. 'A single...

Internet service provider Embarq eavesdropped on the web surfing habits of 26,000 customers in Kansas without notifying them personally, as part of its test of new, controversial advertising technology that profiles users, according to a letter sent to federal lawmakers Wednesday.

These screens were released today by the developers of Installer.app showing Installer 4, the next version that will work with jailbroken iPhones running firmware 2.0. By the slick looks of it, it looks like they're getting close.

The Ubuntu developers are moving very quickly to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the Open Source Community has to offer. The Intrepid Ibex Alpha 3 is the third alpha release of Ubuntu 8.10, and with this new alpha release comes a whole host of excellent new features.

The bodies of "Spam King" Edward "Eddie" Davidson, his wife, and 3-year-old daughter were found in an SUV parked in a farmhouse driveway in a rural part of Bennett, about 25 miles east of Denver. Authorities said Davidson was the apparent gunman. What a horrific ending.

Torrentz.com, the largest BitTorrent meta-search engine, celebrates its 5th anniversary today. The site, one of the oldest torrent sites around, has evolved quite a lot over the years. Let’s take a look at how it all started.

MetaPhyzx writes "According to an article put forth by the Toward Freedom website, the metallic ore known as columbite-tantalite or coltan for short is fueling conflict in central Africa. The relevance to us who read news for geeks: Coltan is in quite a few consumer electronics; the article references the Sony Playstation series."

CWmike writes "The city of San Francisco's IT department is certainly not the exception when it comes to allowing just one person to have unfettered rights to make password and configuration changes to networks and enterprise systems. In fact, it's a situation fairly common in many organizations — especially small to medium-size ones, IT managers and others cautioned in the wake of the re...

Anita Kuno writes "JavaScript: The Good Parts is about the good parts of JavaScript and how to use them. This book takes a realistic look at the strengths and weaknesses of JavaScript and tells you how to use it to its best advantage. The code samples deal with the language and its merits — creating web pages is not discussed. How to understand the language, to execute the operations you ...

sciencehabit writes "For anyone who still believes that boys are better at math than girls, a massive new study published today in Science shows there's no difference. 'Among students with the highest test scores, the team did find that white boys outnumbered white girls by about two to one. Among Asians, however, that result was nearly reversed. Hyde says that suggests that cultural and social...

passionfingers writes "My business users regularly have to tweak large (>32MB text) data files manually. Overlords charged with verifying the aforementioned changes have requested that the little people be provided with a new file editor that will track changes made to a file (as a word processor does). I have scouted around online for such an animal, but to no avail — even commercial ...

On those infrequent occasions when you need to reboot Linux, you may find that the process takes longer than you'd like. We share a number of tricks you can use to reduce boot times. Linux rarely needs to be rebooted. But when it does, it's often slow to boot..Some of these methods are not terribly difficult.

Earlier today Apple seeded iPhone 2.1 firmware to devs, along with a new SDK. Some of the changes include new GPS features. Turn-by-turn app coming soon?

Microsoft's online business(OLB) reported a $1.2bn annual loss thanks to substantial spending on R&D and increased marketing activities to promote Windows Live and Live Search among consumers to whom the internet means Google.Ballmer talked tough, telling analysts to brace for more losses from OLB as it "antes up" in R&D and marketing ...

No, it won't happen.Even the people who are working on ways to make DNA perform calculations cannot see it happening. A Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who said:"I think my general opinion about DNA computing is not 'no' but 'Hell, no'." So, how come some people believe that the future of computing lies in the molecule ...

mi writes "The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts has won a judgment compelling Craigslist to reveal the identity of 'Daniel,' who tried to sell two tickets to the Oscar ceremony recently. The plaintiff's argument against such sales is scary and can be taken very far very quickly: 'If you don't know who's inside the theater, it's very difficult to provide security.' Craigslist's handling of the ca...

Many reader are sending in word that Randy Pausch has died at 47. The charismatic young college professor celebrated life despite a death sentence from pancreatic cancer in a remarkable speech widely known as the "Last Lecture." The video went viral and has been downloaded by over 10 million people.

51mon writes "Austrian CERT used data from one of their authoritative DNS server to measure the rate at which the latest DNS patch (source port randomization) is being rolled out to larger recursive name servers. While about half the traffic (PDF) they receive is now using source port randomization, their data suggest that this is due to ISPs who roll out such fixes immediately. The rate of pat...

Barence sends along PcPro coverage of the second crash of London's Oyster card billing system in two weeks. Transport for London was forced to open the gates and allow free travel for all. "There is currently a technical problem with Oyster readers at London Underground stations which is affecting Oyster pay as you go cards only," explains the TfL website. This follows the first crash two weeks...

The nation's top technology companies hoping to prove to the Federal Communications Commission that the unlicensed airwaves between television stations, known as white spaces, could provide a new form of mobile Internet service.

All thanks to The Ubuntu Comunity and TheAlmightyCthulhu

Despite appearances, today's online world did not spring to life fully formed. Before they were made a major part of our lives, some pioneering computers either had to capture the public's imagination, establish what could be done by computers, or both. Here, we'll look at some computers that played, and sometimes continue to play, a major role.

Lt.Hawkins was one of many readers sending in word thatt he escaped spam king discussed yesterday was found dead in Colorado, after apparently killing his wife and 3-year-old daughter. A teenager was injured, and an infant was found alive in the car.

Noodlenose notes a thread up on the Ubuntu forums, where a user is questioning the practices of hardware manufacturer Foxconn. The user describes how his new Foxconn motherboard caused his Linux install to freeze and fire off weird kernel errors. He disassembles the BIOS and concludes that a faulty DSDT table is responsible for the errors. Even though the user makes Foxconn aware of the problem...

If you're any sort of power user, you've bumped up against the limitations of your operating system's default file manager on countless occasions.

Court documents show that a hacker, hired by the MPAA, offered to reveal the identities of the Pirate Bay founders. The hacker, who also retrieved private information from TorrentSpy, was paid $15.000 for his efforts.

iminplaya writes with a link to an excellent article at Ars Technica, extracting from it a few choice nuggets: "The bad dream of DRM continues. Yahoo e-mailed its Yahoo! Music Store customers yesterday, telling them it will be closing for good — and the company will take its DRM license key servers offline on September 30, 2008. Sure, it's bad news and yet another example of the sheer lob...

daftna writes "The New York Times (registration required) is reporting that NASA researchers 'have identified the trigger for the colorful electrical storms in the polar regions ... Scientists knew two events that occur in the tail of the magnetic field during substorms, but did not know which event acted as the trigger for the auroras.'"

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer on Wednesday issued a company-wide memo outlining his battle plan for the new fiscal year in which he singled out the Apple experience as a benchmark for future success.

The Windows version of Pwnage, the iPhone 2.0 jailbreak and unlock software for iPhone, iPhone 3G, and iPod Touch, is out now!!

Q: "What languages have you used since you started programming?" A: "I guess that depends on what you mean by 'used'. I've written substantial lines of code in C/C++, PHP, Python, Perl, ASM, BASIC, TI-BASIC, JavaScript and BASH. I've also done quite a bit of work in COBOL and MFC."

Jay mentions Digg's developing "sub-Diggs". Kevin outdrinks Jay in chugging contest. Meet the Kevin Rose-lookalike who confused people all night long. Plus a look at the Chicago Tribune's Digg strategy. The best photos, news and links from last night's Town Hall meeting in Chicago.

Microsoft last week traveled to San Francisco, rounding up XP users who had negative impressions of Vista. The subjects were put on video, asked about their Vista impressions, and then shown a "new" operating system, code-named Mojave. More than 90 percent gave positive feedback on what they saw. Then they were told that "Mojave" was actually Vista

MechEMark writes with this excerpt from a hope-inspiring article at the IEEE Spectrum, which says "Researchers from Microsoft say they've built a prototype of a display screen using a technology that essentially mimics the optics in a telescope but at the scale of individual display pixels. The result is a display that is faster and more energy efficient than a liquid crystal display, or LCD, a...

nerdyH writes "The Debian project's maintainer, Luke Claes, announced in an email Saturday that he will freeze the 'testing' or 'Lenny' tree, in preparation for a new stable release of Debian Linux in ... September! The freeze means that open source software developers have only a couple more days to package any applications that they want to be included in the next release of Debian — an...

The bad dream of DRM continues. Yahoo e-mailed its Yahoo! Music Store customers yesterday, tell them it will be closing for good—and the company will take its DRM license key servers offline on September 30, 2008.

The Color Blind Web Page Filter, which was used in this post to demonstrate the different types of colorblindness, allows you to view what you site looks like to people with each type of color blindness.

A small town in Minnesota wants to build its own fiber to the home network. The local telco didn't want to do it, but it doesn't want the city competing with it, either. That means one thing: lawsuit.

creyes123 writes "I run a free website with an online model airplane design calculator. The number of registered users has quickly climbed and I've gotten many compliments. Out of nowhere, a fellow shows up and proceeds to bad mouth the calculator in a posting in one of my forums. After I politely point out that he's mistaken and should have looked at the documentation before posting, he change...

Slatterz links to a story which shows that nowadays, it's sometimes possible to find out whether someone is a dog on the Internet, excerpting: "A freelance photographer is facing a £22,000 bill after setting up a fake Facebook page that libelled a former classmate. Grant Raphael, a freelance photographer, set up a Facebook page in the name of former school friend Mathew Firsht and posted ...

July 24th, 2016. Josef Konsumer, a home-based employee and portfolio manager for ICBC/CiticorpChase, a Chinese-owned multinational investment bank, wakes up to hear his alarm clock go off at 8am, and gets out of bed, his 47-year old body aching from an aggressive personal trainer session from the day before.

Interactive timeline of the best Digg story every day since Digg was born. Search is pretty tight too, try "Dark Knight".

Working with code is one of the most creative jobs one can have.

Brad Templeton writes "I (whom you may know as EFF Chairman, founder of early dot-com Clari.Net and rec.humor.funny) have just released a new series of futurist essays on the amazing future of robot cars, coming to us thanks to the DARPA Grand Challenges. The computer driver is just the beginning — the essays detail how robocars can enable the cheap electric car, save millions of lives an...

Dekortage writes "As today's lawsuit indicates, Hasbro has apparently had enough of Scrabulous, the online word game remarkably similar to Scrabble. Filed in New York, Hasbro's suit is against Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, brothers from Kolkata, India, and asks the court to remove the Scrabulous application from Facebook, disable the Scrabulous.com web site, and grant damages and attorneys fees t...

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Bill Snyder examines what appears to be an open source job market boom, as evidenced by a recent O'Reilly Report. According to the study, 5 to 15 percent of all IT openings call for open source software skills, and with overall IT job cuts expected for 2009, 'the recession may be pushing budget-strapped IT execs to examine low-cost alternatives to commercial software,...

TechFiends32 writes "After years of working with NASA to bring Internet connectivity to deep space, scientists say Vint Cerf's efforts may be nearing completion. To combat the apparent challenges of extending the Internet into space (such as meteors and weighty, high-powered antennas), Cerf and others have made significant efforts, like adjusting satellite-based IP, and working on delay-toleran...

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth (who we interviewed last year) announced that he's out to make Linux a better-looking operating system than Mac OS X—within two years. An ambitious goal! At O'Reilly's OSCON conference this week, Shuttleworth said:

Gadi Singer, Vice President of Intel's Mobility Group, and Doug Davis, Vice President of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, held a conference call today to discuss a brand new product line from Intel targeted at security, storage, communications, and industrial applications, the Intel EP80579 Integrated Processor family.

Now anyone with a Google login will be able to submit an article and, if they choose, have ads displayed through the Internet search leader's marketing system.

According to initial reports, an announcement due later today will state that major ISPs in the UK have reached an agreement to work with the music industry to start mass warning file-sharers. The deal, brokered by the government, will see hundreds of thousands warned but not disconnected.

RevWaldo contributes a link to an AP story carried by Google, according to which "The head of a prominent cancer research institute issued an unprecedented warning to his faculty and staff Wednesday: Limit cell phone use because of the possible risk of cancer. The warning from Dr. Ronald B. Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, is contrary to numerous studies tha...

skeazer writes "Tucked away in a 1,200-page bill now in Congress is a small paragraph that could lead distance-education institutions to require spy cameras in their students' homes. It sounds Orwellian, but the paragraph — part of legislation renewing the Higher Education Act — is all but assured of becoming law by the fall. No one in Congress objects to it."

We were a bit disappointed when we heard the recent two-episode Watchmen series announcement since it was to be set as a brawler. However, it seems that these two games will be set as a prequel with the ability to play either Nite Owl or Rorschach in the days before superheroes were outlawed. "If you're wondering who could possibly replace the much-revered Alan Moore in the scripting department...

Windows iPhone 3G jailbreak tool released

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, calls on Linux developers to make the presentation layer of desktop Linux applications even more attractive to users than Apple’s Mac OS.

We test five new apps that make saving--and restoring--your vital data a lot easier than tools you've tried in the past.

An anonymous reader writes "Former NASA astronaut and moon-walker Dr Edgar Mitchell — a veteran of the Apollo 14 mission — has stunningly claimed aliens exist. And he says extra-terrestrials have visited Earth on several occasions — but the alien contact has been repeatedly covered up by governments for six decades. Dr Mitchell, 77, said during a radio interview that sources a...

xaositects writes "Now I know all of you have your 3D glasses from 1985 still, so don them once again to check out these cool 3D images of Mars's Arctic landscape from the Phoenix Lander's stereoscopic imager. There are also a few close-ups of the parts of Phoenix that are in view and a link to more pictures on the Phoenix Image Gallery."

An anonymous reader writes "The Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents, including pioneering patent claims to such innovators as Google, Inc. In a series of cases including In re Nuijten, In re Comiskey and In re Bilski, the Patent and Trademark Office has argued in favo...

An anonymous reader writes "A group of researchers from the University of Colorado and University of Washington could face both civil and criminal penalties for a research project (pdf) in which they snooped on users of the Tor anonymous proxy network. Should federal prosecutors take interest in the project, the researchers could also face up to 5 years in jail for violating the Wiretap Act.The...

Bobfrankly1 writes "The FBI, IRS, and the Rocky Mountain Safe Streets Task Force are helping the US Marshals search for escaped 'Spam King' Edward 'Eddie' Davidson. He apparently jumped in a car with his wife, changed clothes at home, and hasn't been seen since."

When Digg’s Lead Architect Joe Stump took the stage at the Facebook Developer Conference in San Francisco earlier today, something in one of his screen shots caught our attention. He was there to show how users will soon be able to log in to Digg without an account via their Facebook credentials (the new Facebook Connect product). But also included

Six of the UK's biggest net providers are believed to backed a government plan to tackle music piracy online.

MySpace took another step in cooperating with other Internet services, joining a coalition that allows people to use the same accounts and passwords across the Web. The OpenID coalition now includes Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, Google Inc.'s Blogger, Yahoo Inc. and blogging services Vox, WordPress, LiveJournal.

In early July BT announced that it was going to invest £1.5bn in fibre optic cables, bringing access to faster broadband to up to 10 million UK homes. But there will be large swathes of the country untouched by super-fast broadband and, for some, the answer is a more DIY, community-based approach to fibre.

Barence writes "Britain's six leading internet providers have signed a Government-led agreement to stamp out illegal music file sharing. The six providers — BT, Virgin Media, Orange, Tiscali, Sky and Carphone Warehouse — will implement a series of measures against those found to be file sharing. Offenders may find their internet connection is throttled, or may even have their traffi...

Anonymous writes "More than three-quarters of bank Web sites have design flaws that could expose bank customers to financial loss or identity theft, according to a University of Michigan study that will be presented this week at the Symposium on Usable Security and Privacy. The study, 'Analyzing Web Sites For User-Visible Security Design Flaws,' examined 214 bank Web sites in 2006. It was condu...

Roland Piquepaille writes "Dutch engineers have built the third generation of the DelFly autonomous air vehicle. The DelFly Micro made its first public flight earlier today in Delft. This micro air vehicle weighs only 3 grams and has a wingspan of 10 centimeters. This very small remote-controlled aircraft carries a 0.4 gram camera. The DelFly Micro, which looks like a dragonfly, can fly for 3 m...

According to a new story on Times Online, the bad guys are starting to notice the (bad) computing habits of Mac users. With Apple's market share now around 8.5% -- and growing quickly, with sales of almost 2.5 million Macs in the last quarter -- these Mac newbies are a tempting target for profit-minded criminals.

According to a rumor that's been getting a little traction on the Mac sites, the new iPod nano will be multi-colored. Notice that we said "nano" and not "nanos." Because while the current nano line is offered in multiple colors, 9to5Mac is claiming that the next nano will have more than one color on each model.

oday at the f8 conference Benjamin Ling revealed that Facebook will be releasing a Cocoa framework for the iPhone that will allow application developers to integrate with Facebook Connect. The framework is expected to be released sometime in the fall, and will take the form of an SDK that can be used by developers of iPhone applications. Facebook C

Forget those mass-produced stereos—the road to top-quality sounds begins in your house, not at Best Buy. TONS OF PHOTOS

AT&T said Wednesday that sales of Apple's iPhone 3G during the first twelve days were nearly double that of last year, this despite shortages that have seen backorders stretch one to three weeks at its retail stores.

Sirius and XM radio will be making their way to the iPhone 2.0 firmware via Millard Software's jailbroken apps, uSirius and uXM (Yes, you can listen to Sirius or XM right through your iPhone!). Continue reading for information regarding official Sirius/XM apps for the App Store.

The JAWBONE 2 by Aliph is smart, styled to look like jewellery, and works with your Bluetooth phone, leaving your hands free to drive. If you've already gotten one of those pesky cell phone tickets....no worries, they will discount your purchase.

Rumours that user-driven news website Digg is close to being sold to Google Inc. have resurfaced, with the internet search leader reportedly offering around $200 million US for the social news site.

Pippin writes "Memphis Police Director, Larry Godwin, is suing AOL for the names of the authors of the Enforcer 2.0 blog. The blog is rumored to be authored by a Memphis police officer, and is critical of the department, Godwin, and some procedures. Godwin is actually using taxpayer dollars for this and is interestingly, the complaint is sealed".

Books, CDs, flashcards, classes -- there are a lot of tools to help you learn a foreign language. If you spend much of your time near a computer, software may be one of the better options. Ian McIntosh's Amigo is a friendly language utility for the Linux user, notable for how well it integrates into the desktop.

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Tom Yager takes a closer look at Apple's iPhone SDK confidentiality agreement, which restricts developers from discussing the SDK or exchanging ideas with others, thereby leaving no room for forums, newsgroups, open source projects, tutorials, magazine articles, users' groups, or books. But because anyone is free to obtain the iPhone SDK by signing up for it, Apple is...

Grablets writes "Using a link analysis algorithm similar to Google PageRank, researchers at the SANS Institute and SRI International have created a new Internet network defense service that rethinks the way network blacklists are formulated and distributed. The service, called Highly Predictive Blacklisting, exploits the relationships between networks that have been attacked by similar Internet...

Even the most casual observer of the linux-kernel mailing must have noticed that, in the shadow of the firmware flame war, there is also a heated discussion over the management of security issues. There have also been some attempts to turn this local battle into a multi-list, regional conflict. Finding the right way to deal with security problems i

Apple is finally going to start rolling out a new beta program in the next few days. Details are slim, but it seems like Apple is capping the total number of beta participants at 100 per app. In order to download a beta app, users will need to submit their iPhone's SN to the developer, who will then need to flag its eligibility in the store itself.

Today we’re announcing more details around the new Facebook Connect feature. This feature will allow anyone who currently uses Facebook to seamlessly become a Digg user and start sharing and Digging stuff right away.

About 10 years ago, we didn’t really expect the 1.4mb 3.5 inch floppy to evolve into flash drives 10x smaller with storage capacity as big as 32gb. These concept gadgets you see before you today, have extremely high chance of getting into production anywhere in the future.

We need more than Apple's official app store—we still need jailbreaking, Installer.app and the best unauthorized third-party apps to make the iPhone an ultra-powerful open platform we really want. Here are the roadblocks.

Iddo Genuth writes "Researchers at Purdue University are developing a miniature refrigeration system, small enough to fit inside laptop computers. According to the researchers, the implementation of miniature refrigeration systems in computers can dramatically increase the amount of heat removed from the microchips, therefore boosting performance while simultaneously shrinking the size of compu...

get_Rootin writes "That didn't take long. ZDNet is reporting that HD Moore has released exploit code for Dan Kaminsky's DNS cache poisioning vulnerability into the point-and-click Metasploit attack tool. From the article: 'This exploit caches a single malicious host entry into the target nameserver. By causing the target nameserver to query for random hostnames at the target domain, the attacke...

You can’t really turn a Linux system to a Mac, but you definitely can make your Ubuntu Hardy looks like a Mac OSX Leopard.

Comcast is facing a nationwide class action lawsuit for cutting off the BitTorrent traffic of their subscribers. The lawsuit aims to stop the misleading advertising used by Comcast, and to compensate BitTorrent users for the disruption to their service.

Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer's talk of "future product transitions" during the recent earnings call has opened the way for a lot of speculation. MacBooks under $1,000 for back-to-school seems like a pretty good bet.

The 2008 International Design Excellence Awards are in, and they come loaded with tons of weird and wonderful gadgets. We have picked the best, the weirdest, and the most wonderful, from laser liners that look like evil bots, to Star Trek-ish wall-mounted home server enclosures, to self-propelled sprayers, and NYC condom dispensers.

Billionaire, cosmonaut and founder of the fast-growing Ubuntu Linux distro Mark Shuttleworth dreams impossible dreams. That dream? To produce a desktop more beautiful to ordinary users than legions of Apple programmers supping on the milk of chief exec Steve Jobs' alleged brilliance are capable of producing.

That was the million-dollar question on our minds when we heard that Verizon was commemorating the launch of its Nokia 6205 and the latest Batman flick with a tied-in version of the low end flip. Turns out it's all good, though -- a look through the custom packaging revealed a grand total of two battery covers.

Yes, there's a tablet coming, but that's not Apple's big secret. But I know what is and it's pretty unbelievable. Click for all the details.

Brian Jordan and other readers sent in word that Google has taken the wraps off Knol, its expert-written challenger to Wikipedia. (We discussed Knol when it was announced last year.) Wired has an in-depth look. Knol's distinctions from Wikipedia are that authors are identified by their real names (and verified), and that they can share in ad revenue if they choose to. The service initially feat...

ruphus13 writes "Ubuntu and Canonical have been very active at OSCON this year. They showcased a new distro, announced improvements to their code-hosting platform, and made Mark Shuttleworth available for a couple of talks and panel sessions. Quoting: 'Ubuntu Netbook Remix, a complete distribution designed to run on Atom-based Netbook PCs. The main difference that sets it apart from its big bro...

ydrol writes "After building my new Core 2 Quad Q6600 PC, I was ready to unleash video conversion activity the likes of which I had not seen before. However, I was disappointed to discover that a lot of the conversion tools either don't use SMP at all, or don't balance the workload evenly across processors, or require ugly hacks to use SMP (e.g. invoking distributed encoding options). I get the...

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner delves into the ill-defined realm of 'cloud computing,' providing a deeper look at four shared services: Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, GoGrid, and AppNexus. Offering wildly divergent amounts of hand-holding at various layers in the stack, the services simplify your workload but force you into a set, 'ball-and-chain-computing' routine that you may not pre...

Beyond the basic methods, there are concepts that good software engineers know about. These transcend programming languages and projects - they are not design patterns, but rather broad areas that you need to be familiar with. The top 10 concepts are:

Another company is throwing its hat into the Mac clone ring, but this time with a twist. Open Tech claims to sell Mac OS X-compatible PCs, but doesn't actually intend on installing the OS for you.

A virtual tactile keyboard could hold the key to making the iPhone easier to use. Researchers are using tiny vibrations to imitate the feel of a button when a user touches the keypad. The user will be able to feel the edges of each key so will be able to identify where each key is without checking visually.

This is the story of how one blogger, uncle_benji, managed to convince HP representatives that he was entitled to a refund because he did not want to agree to Windows Vista's EULA. His reward? A $200 check.

Barence writes "Google's Blogger service is responsible for 2% of the world's malware hosted on the Web, according to a new report from security firm Sophos. The company claims hackers are setting up pages on the free blogging service to host malicious code, or simply posting links to infected websites in other bloggers' comments. 'Blogger accounts for around 2% of malware,' according to Sophos...

Chromodromic writes "Apress's newest Django offering, Practical Django Projects by James Bennett, weighs in lightly at 224 pages of actual tutorial content, but trust me, they're dense pages. Filled with pragmatic examples which directly address the kinds of development issues you will encounter when first starting out with Django, this book makes an important addition to the aspiring Django de...

KentuckyFC writes "Earlier this year, Paris-based Aldebaran-Robotics picked up $8 million in venture capital funding to help commercialize its NAO humanoid robot. The target market for this device is research labs working on the next generation of robotic hardware and software. Today, the company has posted a detailed spec of NAO on the arXiv saying that it expects the robot to cost about $15,0...

bigsmoke writes "So, all your servers run on RAID. You back up religiously. You're even sure that your backups are recoverable. But do you also need a UPS? According to Halfgaar (on Slashdot before to promote better Linux backup practices), yes, usually you do. He argues that despite technological advancements such as file system journaling, power failures can still cause data loss in most setu...

Engadget has obtained a handful of stats regarding number ports in and out of T-Mobile USA handled by a national wholesaler

The FCC needs to take steps to keep the Internet free of interference from broadband providers, such as the slowing of peer-to-peer traffic and the tracking of subscribers' Web habits, several witnesses told the FCC at a hearing in Pittsburgh.

Microsoft this week offered a window into the first phase of a mega million dollar advertising campaign designed to clear up 'misconceptions' about the quality of its Windows Vista operating system exacerbated by in-your-face marketing efforts on the part of longtime rival Apple.

When analysts pressed Apple's CFO Peter Oppenheimer to shed more light on Steve Jobs' current health condition during the company's quarterly conference call on Monday, he said, "Steve's health is a private matter." Apple's shares tumbled nearly $18, or 10.75 percent.

Now that the EU plan to retroactively add 45 years of copyright protection to old sound recordings looks set to keep the work of the 50s and 60s locked up for another half century, resistance is solidifying.

AT&T and DIRECTV tell the FCC to let Hollywood have its selectable output control waiver. Electronics manufacturers, theater owners, and indie studios call the plan a threat to consumers.

Ignoring action just taken against Psystar, a new company known as Open Tech says it's making Mac OS X-compatible PCs, and believes it has found a loophole that prevents legal action from Apple.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs' appearance at WWDC in June prompted all sorts of speculation that his cancer had returned... but is it any of our business?

How to be a more productive Linux systems administrator

chareverie writes "A law just passed in New York now requires labels for violent content in video games that are already rated, as well as having parent-controlled lockout features installed in consoles by 2010. The law has caused an uproar with civil rights groups who claim that such a law is unconstitutional. A legal challenge is already in the works by the New York Civil Liberties Union who ...

snydeq writes "Jailed IT admin Terry Childs relinquished his hold over San Francisco's multimillion-dollar FiberWAN, handing his administrative passwords over to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who was 'the only person he felt he could trust.' Childs is still being held on $5 million bail for his lockout of the city's FiberWAN, a case that has been called into question since an insider came f...

the4thdimension writes "MySpace has joined a coalition of other big-name e-services in support of OpenID. If you aren't familiar with the OpenID coalition, they are a group that seeks to allow users to create a single account/password set to be used on a number of services. Such services already signed up include: Google's Blogger, Wordpress, AOL, Yahoo, Vox, LiveJournal, and others." Reader gb...

What should each of these companies do with Digg if it bought the social media and user-chosen content powerhouse? Where would the integration points be and what would be the long-term strategy and direction for Digg under new overlords? And how would an acquisition affect the Internet landscape?

We literally have no further information other than what you see in the image above, but either way, it's a very interesting photo even if it might be a fake. It makes sense that whatever huge display is running off a Windows XP machine—many giant displays do.

You might think that installing XP in place of Vista would be easier than installing Linux. You'd be wrong.

Paramount to any other features of the iPhone, the lack-of-keypad is what distinguished it from the rest of the market. This feature, however, brought much criticism to the iPhone, for many believed it would be far more difficult to type.

Incon writes "Builder AU reports that Brian Aker, MySQL's director of architecture, has unveiled Drizzle, a database project aimed at powering websites with massive concurrency as well as trimming superfluous functionality from MySQL. Drizzle will have a micro-kernel architecture with code being removed from the Drizzle core and moved through interfaces into modules. Akers has already selected ...

David Barrett writes "If you sell three billion ads a month and can't break even, what do you do? Drop prices by 40% and switch business models, apparently. Is this an isolated incident, or does it contribute to the growing pile of evidence that ad inventory is overpriced industry-wide, with Google being the worst offender due to its policy of requiring minimum bids on keywords that would other...

Business week article on how Data Centers Scramble for Energy Efficiency.

A Japanese software company is stepping up international promotion of its Web browser in the hope of carving out a 5% share over the next few years of a market dominated by Internet Explorer and Firefox.The Sleipnir browser is well-known among Japanese technophiles, many of whom value the high level of customization that the browser allows.

More MobileMe problems were reported over the weekend, this time with e-mail.

After the earnings call last night I talked with a source who is close to Apple and who who has in the past proven very well informed on the concerns of Apple senior management. This source told me with near-certainty that Jobs’ cancer has not returned.

Life would be a lot easier if we could live in a Linux-only world and if applications never required data from other sources. However, the need to get data from Windows, MS-DOS, or old Macintosh systems is all too common. This kind of import process requires some conversions to solve file format differences; otherwise, it would be impossible

99luftballon writes "The British Museum is putting online the remaining fragments of the world's oldest Bible. The Codex Sinaiticus dates to the fourth century BCE and was discovered in the 19th century. Very few people have seen it due to its fragile state — that and the fact that parts of it are in collections scattered across the globe. It'll give scholars and those interested their fi...

PoliTech notes in a journal entry that "Vista is the gift that just keeps on giving." "Speaking during SanDisk's second-quarter earnings conference call, Chairman and [CEO] Eli Harari said that Windows Vista will present a special challenge for solid state drive makers. 'As soon as you get into Vista applications in notebook and desktop, you start running into very demanding applications becaus...

You want to watch my new movie on that digital TV you bought a few years ago? No, sorry, I don't like your TV (perhaps because I'm afraid of the analog component inputs it uses). You want to space-shift using your Slingbox (which lacks DRM-enabling controls on its outputs)? Oh, no, I don't think that's a good idea.

Thinking of buying a new macbook, you might want to hold off for a while, because apple may be releasing new macbooks in the future, and the macbooks may also be getting a lot cheaper.

TV shows are by far the most wanted files via BitTorrent, and according to some, it’s fast becoming the modern day TiVo. But what are all those people downloading?

"[He will] be leaving Engadget in the immensely talented hands of Josh Topolsky, whose vision and voice will ensure the site lives up to its legacy as gadget publication nonpareil."

Ah, I love those days. You know, the days where you hear that a big hardware parts manufacturer, such as Intel, AMD, ATI, Nvidia, etc, announces price cuts. That alone makes my day!Yes, it’s official, Intel are cutting prices on some of their cpu this week and it’s already in effect, with stores such as NewEgg who already lowered their prices!

Concerns for the health of popular Apple executive Steve Jobs and a worse than expected forecast for fourth quarter earnings and revenue shot down Apple's stock after the market closed. The company's shares fell US$16.79, or 10.1 percent, in after-market trading of Nasdaq stocks.