It looks like Motorola is investing in a company that develops fuel cell technology for small devices.
According to the article the cells provide…
Category: General Web/Tech
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Microsoft taking a name…
Slashdot has an interesting story up about the background of the selection of Windows Defender. It seems that an Australian software developer had a product called Windows Defender which protected Windows users from malicious websites. Well a short while back he got a call from lawyers associated with Microsoft about trademark infringement over the use of Windows. As part of the deal he would quit using that name and turn over all rights to that name to Microsoft.
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Interesting problem
In doing a routine Google for my name… I ran across a website which has my email address and too many others to count in a plain text file. The site is configured to allow browsing of all files/folders and the text file claims to be 1 of 2, and has reference to the name 1 million (1 million addresses?) The file is 9.8MB large. I haven’t done a wc -l to see how many entries there really are in this one. But the question came to mind what the best way to deal with this is? I guess my first step is contacting the site owner to have this removed? Ok – just did a cat | wc -l and there are exactly 500,000 email address in this file, what’s more I’ve stumbled across a directory that seems to have more email address information. MASSIVE AMOUNTS more for bulk mailing purposes in zipped text files categorized by service provider. (A directory for Bigfoot, hotmail, etc. for example.)
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Automated phone support lines – find a human
One of many people’s pet peeves these days is the automated phone systems that have you go through several trees worth of options to find tech support. These are called Integrated Voice Response systems (IVR) and sometimes getting to a “real person” is next to impossible. (Let alone getting to a person with which there is no language barrier.) Someone has made a list of ways to get a REAL LIVE person through these call systems and it was something I thought I’d have to link to.
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Cheap Linux desktop deployment in Brazil
I found this interesting article over at the KDE dot. Starting next week the Brazilian government is promoting a program to sell relatively cheap computers based on Linux (with KDE as the Desktop Environment.) They are hoping to sell over a half a million machines in the next 4 to 6 months. It looks as though Mandriva may be the base distribution. (24 month low interest loans are one way the idea is being promoted..)
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Sony’s DRM song sounding worse by the day
Well, let’s see…. I didn’t cover the original story since I was covered up with other work, but let me take a stab at starting from the beginning before I tell you how it’s gotten worse. It seems that SONY is concerned about piracy and computers being the tools of pirates (of course, everyone that uses a computer to listen to music is a pirate right?…) they came up with a clever way to put a stop to the piracy of their music. There would be a piece of software on every sony music cd that would install and run quietly in the background invisible EVEN TO WINDOWS that would prevent the inevitable. It would prevent the user from copying the disc and sending it out en masse.
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Ultimate Christmas gift for the tech that has everything (else), a satellite?
The story about the linux satellite that can be yours for a mere $10 million dollars caught my eye as I was skimming news this afternoon. Apparently a company called SpaceDev has launched the product called “SpaceDev Modular Microsat Busâ„¢”, which is a 220 pound satellite based on plug-n-play standard interfaces (ethernet, usb). It includes realtime linux as the OS, CORBA based object oriented control of subsystems and internet remote control.
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Google Adsense changes
As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I use Google adsense on these pages. Now obviously I can’t give statistics on how it does, but frankly what I’ve seen in the short time I’ve used it beats any other affiliate-type program I’ve used before. Yes, I’ve received checks from Amazon’s associates program before, but initially there you had to have a different account for each site, so I’ve got several dollars there in each of 8-10 different profiles left over from the “dark ages”…
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XML-RPC for PHP vulnerability attack attempts
Incidents.org is reporting on attacks against a recent XML-RPC vulnerability in PHP. This would affect users of PostNuke, Drupal, b2evolution, Xoops, WordPress, PHPGroupWare and TikiWiki. As far as I know there are fixes for each of these in the most recent versions of the software.
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Low power, small, wall mountable pc
This is something neat I found at the sunbeltblog. Usually I see spyware/security related bits there, but this was different and worth a mention. It appears to be a wall mountable pc around 4-5″ square.