‘Two years ago, Russell Tavares was a clean-cut 25-year-old entrusted with “very high clearance” in missile and fire control in the U.S. Navy, officials say.
Now he’s the subject of a bizarre, tragic story — one that McLennan County investigators say would be a fitting plot for a television crime drama about short tempers, long-distance vendettas and the Internet’s ability to bring various personalities into conflict.
Tavares was involved in an Internet chat room squabble with John Anderson, a 59-year-old Elm Mott resident. Anderson said he called Tavares “a nerd.”
Tavares’ response: He took a leave of absence from the Navy. Drove from Virginia to Waco. Set fire to Anderson’s trailer home.’
It’s funny because it’s true.
(25.2meg Flash video)
see it here »
‘If you ever wanted to be Nevada’s governor for a day, it doesn’t seem to be that hard.
In what could be a whopping security hole, Nevada has posted the password to the gubernatorial e-mail account on its official state Web site. It appears in a Microsoft Word file giving step-by-step instructions on how aides should send out the governor’s weekly e-mail updates, which has, as a second file shows, 13,105 subscribers.
The Outlook username is, by the way, “governor” and the password is “kennyc”. We should note at this point that the former Nevada governor, a Republican, is Kenny C. Guinn, which hardly says much about password security.’
‘Nigerian schoolchildren who received laptops from a U.S. aid organisation have used them to explore pornographic sites on the Internet, the official News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reported on Thursday.
NAN said its reporter had seen pornographic images stored on several of the children’s laptops.
“Efforts to promote learning with laptops in a primary school in Abuja have gone awry as the pupils freely browse adult sites with explicit sexual materials,” NAN said.
A representative of the One Laptop Per Child aid group was quoted as saying that the computers, part of a pilot scheme, would now be fitted with filters.’
I signed up for something that apparently turns the posts on the site into mp3s that are suitable for podcasting, for those who don’t like to read I s’pose. 🙂
Anyways, I’m not really sure how well it works, but you can allegedly get to it via this little button:
Alternatively, if you sign up you can view it on the web here.
‘We get to see a lot of new products and services at TechCrunch, many of them bad; usually it’s a case that they won’t get a run. Then there are those that are so bad they a worthy of mention. Crunchgear’s John Biggs summed it up well in an email to me (see their very brief coverage here): “I was so disgusted that I couldn’t write anymore”. 3D Mailbox has also received attention from the press; Michael Parsons at The Times Online described 3D Mailbox as “The worst software application I have ever seen…a waste of valuable processing power,” Richard Bartle in the Guardian notes “When I first saw the trailer, I thought it was a parody.” Sadly Richard, it’s not.’
(2.5meg Flash video)
see it here »
This is a video made in 1994 by Digital talking about the wonders of the internet.
I remember those days. All I needed was a bash shell and telnet. 🙂
(6.3meg Flash video)
see it here »
‘A 75 year old woman from Karlstad in central Sweden has been thrust into the IT history books – with the world’s fastest internet connection.
Sigbritt Löthberg’s home has been supplied with a blistering 40 Gigabits per second connection, many thousands of times faster than the average residential link and the first time ever that a home user has experienced such a high speed.
But Sigbritt, who had never had a computer until now, is no ordinary 75 year old. She is the mother of Swedish internet legend Peter Löthberg who, along with Karlstad Stadsnät, the local council’s network arm, has arranged the connection.’
‘A sports car enthusiast who suffered a mini stroke while restoring a Lotus Esprit was amazed when online friends finished the work for him in secret.
Simon Pritchard, 36, from Abergavenny, had been in the process of rebuilding the 25-year-old car when he fell ill.
When members of the Lotus Esprit online forum website heard, they donated money and time to fix it. [..]
“I was so overwhelmed, I cried like a baby and then passed out. [..]’
A tip for burglars: do the Google search for “how to open a safe” _before_ you begin your robbery.
(3.4meg Flash video)
see it here »
This video shows a few different easter eggs hidden in Google.
(4.4meg Flash video)
see it here »
‘The first publicly available pictures have emerged of China’s new Jin-class nuclear-powered submarine, which is capable of firing intercontinental ballistic missiles against the US.
Hans Kristensen, a nuclear weapons analyst for the Federation of American Scientists, spotted the new submarine while reviewing photos of north-eastern China that had been snapped by a commercial satellite for Google Earth.
The photos taken late last year show the submarine alongside a pier at the Xiaopingdao Submarine Base south of the city of Dalian.’
‘Optus will release new broadband/phone bundles this week, but will make a dramatic shift in the way it counts broadband usage.
According to Optus sources, the new “Optus Fusion Plans” will now count uploaded data as well as downloaded data, which can significantly reduce value for money. Optus’ existing broadband plans (with free uploads) will still be available for those that want them. [..]
Most ISPs do not count upload data, as it typically doesn’t cost them anything. This is because ISPs purchase bandwidth pipes that are capable of the same speed in both directions. Traditionally, download usage always exceeds upload usage, making upload usage irrelevant to the buying equation.’
‘Start by addressing the envelope below then write a letter to a friend or relative.
We will print, envelope, stamp, and send your letter via regular U.S. postal mail 100% free of charge. You pay nothing!’
If only I knew someone in the US to send a letter to.
‘This Friday, it became known that the Swedish Police Board will shut down The Pirate Bay, the popular file sharing site, by classifying it as a child pornography site in the blocklist that Swedish Internet Providers respect. Some time next week, an update to the blacklist will include The Pirate Bay.
This means that anyone from Sweden visiting the well-known file sharing site The Pirate Bay will be greeted by a block page from the Police Board saying they’re not allowed to visit child pornography sites.
“This is a devastatingly ignorant abuse of the trust relationship between the Internet world and the Police that was created in order to stop child pornography”, says Rick Falkvinge, leader of the Pirate Party. “Once given the means to shut down unwanted sites, the Police uses the filter to shut down the Pirate Bay after the failed attempt last year. And just like last year, through abuse of procedure.”‘
‘A political battle is raging in Russian cyberspace. Opposition parties and independent media say murky forces have committed vast resources to hacking and crippling their Web sites in attacks similar to those that hit tech-savvy Estonia as the Baltic nation sparred with Russia over a Soviet war memorial.
While they offer no proof, the groups all point the finger at the Kremlin, calling the electronic siege an attempt to stifle Russia’s last source of free, unfiltered information.
The victims, who range from liberal democrats to ultranationalists, allege their hacker adversaries hope to harass the opposition with the approach of parliamentary elections in December and presidential elections in next March.
Some independent experts agree.’
Followup to Russia accused of unleashing cyberwar to disable Estonia.
‘An Adelaide woman has been arrested in the United States for allegedly trying to kidnap a 17-year-old boy she had met playing role-playing game World of Warcraft on the Internet.
Police say 31-year-old Tamara Broome encouraged the boy to leave his home in North Carolina to join her in Australia.
The chief of detectives in the city of Greenville, Lee Moore, says the pair began a relationship while playing World of Warcraft.
“The best that we can discover is that they wanted to meet,” he said.’
Updates are going to be a bit scarce for the rest of the month. I’ve managed to exceed my home download quota way too early in the month, so finding good news and web sites is a bit tricky at the moment.
Tho, I mean tricky in the sense that I’m capped to 64kbps and can’t be fucked sitting around all day and waiting for web pages to load. 🙂
I’ll see how it goes an try to make a few posts. Otherwise, I expect things will be back to normal as soon as July arrives.
In the mean time, if you’re bored, check out some of the archives. There’s whole bunches of hilarity and amusion around the site. 🙂
‘I was working on a video player for Nuvu.tv and they referenced something on YouTube.com so I went to check it out. I had a FireFox extension add-on (FlashTracer) running – it outputs Flash debug statements in a FireFox sidebar. As I was watching this YouTube video I noticed debug statements coming out of the YouTube player (which is pretty common if you surf to any website with flash content – more on this bad practice later). 99% of these statements were typical, but there were a couple that irked me; look at the two lines of text I highlighted in the left column of this screenshot [..]’
We got meta, fuck yeah. 🙂
‘A 17-year-old Livermore boy was seriously injured Monday night in Mt. Diablo State Park when he tried to fake a fall for a camera and then actually fell 75 feet onto rocks, a park ranger said Tuesday.
The teenager was on Sentinel Rock, a vertical formation near Rock City popular for its views, when he moved outside the handrail, lost his footing and fell into a crevice and became wedged between rocks, San Ramon Valley Fire District Battalion Chief Mike Brown said.
Friends of the boy, who is hospitalized with multiple traumatic injuries, told rescuers he had been trying to stage a photo of a fake fall for a MySpace Web site when he slipped and fell for real, said Dan Stefanisko, supervising ranger at Mt. Diablo State Park.’
‘Everybody is using it, but (almost) nobody really knows how it works. Google PageRank is probably one of the most important algorithms ever developed for the Web. With billions of existing pages and millions of pages generated every day, the search issue in the Web is more complex than you probably think it is. PageRank, only one of hundreds of factors used by Google to determine best search results, helps to keep our search clean and efficient. But how is it actually done? How does Google PageRank work, which factors do have an impact on it and which don’t? And what do we really know about PageRank?
In this article we put the facts straight.’
‘A new report puts Google in last place when it comes to privacy protection. Despite recent moves to anonymize server logs and other pro-privacy gestures, Privacy International called the company “an endemic threat to privacy.”
Only Google earned the dismal “black” color bar from the group, which has just issued a report on Internet privacy that took six months to assemble [..]. The current report is preliminary; final results will be released in September.
The report rated top Internet companies on privacy issues and distilled the various results into a single color bar. Microsoft was two ranks up from Google, earning a curry-colored “serious lapses” rating. Amazon scored one level higher with its yellow “notable lapses” rank, and eBay did even better, earning a coveted blue bar. No company earned a top mark, however.’
‘MyFreeImplants.com is an online community. Through this website and our street team, we bring together two groups of people:
* Women that have a strong desire to enhance their physical appearance through cosmetic surgery
* Benefactors who wish to help these women improve their self esteem and confidence through cosmetic surgery’
‘A court decision reached last month but under seal until Friday could force Web sites to track visitors if the sites become defendants in a lawsuit.
TorrentSpy, a popular BitTorrent search engine, was ordered on May 29 by a federal judge in the Central District of California in Los Angeles to create logs detailing users’ activities on the site. The judge, Jacqueline Chooljian, however, granted a stay of the order on Friday to allow TorrentSpy to file an appeal.
The appeal must be filed by June 12, according to Ira Rothken, TorrentSpy’s attorney.
TorrentSpy has promised in its privacy policy never to track visitors without their consent.’
‘They say they have built a prototype high-speed quantum key distribution (QKD) system that can perform a theoretically unbreakable “one-time pad” encryption, transmission and decryption of a video signal in real-time over a distance of at least 10 kilometers. [..]
One important requirement for any candidate system is that it be compatible with existing fiber-optic telecom networks that transmit at wavelengths of either 1550 or 1310 nanometers (nm) to reach the greatest distance. Another requirement is a highly efficient photon detector that can detect single photons reliably without introducing significant amounts of “noise.” One of the best low-noise detectors, a silicon-based avalanche photo diode (Si-APD), does not function at the telecom wavelengths. Instead, it operates best at much shorter wavelengths around 700 nm. To take advantage of the Si-APD, the NIST group designed a sub-system to “up-convert” single photons from a transmission wavelength of 1310 nm to 710 nm for high-efficiency detection.’
‘A judge has granted a new trial to Julie Amero, a former substitute teacher in Norwich, Connecticut who was convicted in January on four felony counts of risking injury to minors after she was unable to prevent pornographic pop-ups from showing up on a computer in a classroom in 2004. [..]
Despite testimony that the monitor did not face the children, that Amero asked for help from other teachers and a vice principal, and that the schools IT administrator allowed the school’s filtering software to expire, Amero was found guilty.
Security experts around the internet have rallied to Amero’s defense, arguing that it is clear that the computer Amero was using was infested with pop-up software, but the school’s IT administrator told the jury he’d never heard of such software.’
Followup to Protect the Children From Porn.
‘A virtual land dispute in Second Life will be resolved in federal court after a judge’s ruling. A lawsuit filed in May of 2006 by Pennsylvania attorney Marc Bragg accused Linden Lab and its CEO Philip Rosedale of wrongfully seizing his virtual land and unilaterally shutting down his Second Life account—intellectual property that Bragg says is worth thousands of (real-life) dollars. Linden Lab filed two motions to dismiss the suit, arguing that Bragg came into possession of his land wrongfully, but the Pennsylvania judge denied those motions.
Linden Lab has long maintained that virtual “property” owned by its residents in Second Life belongs to the players. Therefore, things like virtual clothing, buildings, and land all legitimately belong to the residents who created or purchased them, and the burgeoning trade of such is legitimate. Linden Lab sells “land” to residents directly—which translates in real life to server space for the land and things that are built on it—and does so through online auctions. Bragg purchased the land in question through an auction offered by the company, which he argues is the company’s fault for selling it to him if he wasn’t supposed to have it.’
‘Detailed plans for the new U.S. Embassy under construction in Baghdad appeared online Thursday in a breach of the tight security surrounding the sensitive project.
Computer-generated projections of the soon-to-be completed, heavily fortified compound were posted on the Web site of the Kansas City, Mo.-based architectural firm that was contracted to design the massive facility in the Iraqi capital.
The images were removed by Berger Devine Yaeger Inc. shortly after the company was contacted by the State Department.
“We work very hard to ensure the safety and security of our employees overseas,” said Gonzalo Gallegos, a department spokesman. “This kind of information out in the public domain detracts from that effort.”‘
Here’s a funny complaint letter someone sent regarding embedded images in HTML.
