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walktalker · 19-01-02, 03:07 PM

Abandonware: Dead Games Live On
Sarinee Achavanuntakul is a keeper of dead games. She runs The Underdogs, a website with 2,600 computer games no longer commercially available. The site draws 30,000 people on peak days, but she pays hosting and bandwidth costs out of her own pocket. Traffic is so high she instituted a download limit to keep overhead low since the site isn't a money-making venture.
http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,49723,00.html

Zero to Safety in 30 Milliseconds
traffic, may look tough as hell, but in reality motorcycle riders are a particularly vulnerable bunch. If a rider falls off his motorcycle, there's very little to protect him from hard asphalt. Air-bag jackets for motorcycle riders, which have been around for a few years, have attempted to cushion this fall, but they have had drawbacks. Namely a rip cord that attached the rider to the bike.
http://www.wired.com/news/gizmos/0,1452,49610,00.html

U.S. Ends Afghan Image Contract
A U.S. agency has terminated an agreement with a commercial satellite firm that had given the federal government exclusive rights to its high-resolution images of Afghanistan. On Friday, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), a support agency for the U.S. Department of Defense, confirmed that it decided not to renew a contract originally signed in October with Denver-based Space Imaging.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,49863,00.html

Ban Human Cloning, Panel Urges
Cloning human beings for the purpose of reproduction is medically unsafe and should be banned, a panel of the National Academy of Sciences concluded Friday. The report comes even as White House bioethics advisers are weighing the benefits of medical advances against the moral hazards of human cloning. On Thursday, President Bush challenged the ethics group to be the "conscience of the country." The academy's report said: "Human reproductive cloning should not now be practiced. It is dangerous and likely to fail."
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,49843,00.html

China Tightens Web Controls
China has issued its most intrusive Internet controls to date, ordering service providers to screen private e-mail for political content and holding them responsible for subversive postings on their websites. The new rules, posted earlier this week on the website of the Ministry of Information Industry, represent Beijing's latest efforts to tighten its grip on the only major medium in China not already under state control. The regulations also create new difficulties for a competitive industry trying to attract more overseas investment.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,49855,00.html

FBI Advises Security Review Of Web Content
The FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center on Thursday advised providers of water, energy, transportation, finance and other critical infrastructures to evaluate the content of their Web sites from a security perspective. According to the NIPC advisory, "details on critical infrastructures, emergency response plans and other data of potential use to persons with criminal intent" are currently available on the Internet.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/173770.html

Weakened encryption lays bare al-Qaeda files
Relatively weak encryption appears to have been used to protect files recovered from two computers believed to have belonged to al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan. The files were found on a laptop and desktop computer bought by Wall Street Journal reporters from looters in Kabul a few days after it was captured by Northern Alliance forces on 13 November. The files provide information about reconnaissance missions to Europe and the Middle East.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991804

Distributed computing case ends with probation
A sys admin who installed distributed computing software on computers at an American college has been sentenced to probation. This may seem harsh but David McOwen, the former BOFH at the state run DeKalb Technical College in Georgia, can consider himself fortunate - since the authorities brought charges against him that might have sent him to jail. McOwen has been given a year of probation and a $2,100 fine for linking up college PCs to Distributed.net, a communal code breaking network that takes advantage of spare computing cycles to crack codes.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23737.html

Laser pointer project tilts at windmills in the sky
Anyone who has fired up a laser pointer in the presence of Fido or feline knows the hunt-and-chase instincts the ruby-red beam can awaken in even the haughtiest of household pets. A recent online experiment suggests that these "keychain" technologies can inspire a similar enthusiasm in people. It was while James Downey's cats, Eleanor and Hillary, were chasing his pointer's beam around the house that the Columbia, Mo., writer and old-book restorer was struck by two ideas: Millions worldwide own laser pointers, and wouldn't it be great if a large number aimed them at the moon at once, possibly creating a red dot on its surface that would be visible from Earth?
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/2...t-interest.htm

Pulsars' beat could reveal gravity waves
Forget multimillion-dollar spacecraft and elaborate underground labs - the simplest way to detect gravity waves directly could be to listen to flutters in the regular bursts of radio waves from distant pulsars. Any accelerating mass is believed to create ripples in space-time called gravity waves. They were predicted by Einstein as part of his general theory of relativity, and people have been trying to pick up these weak and elusive undulations ever since.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991797

A judge has ruled that fingerprint evidence is scientifically unreliable
For nearly a century, suspects have lived in fear that matches to their prints will turn up at the scene of the crime. Such fears have now been reduced a little. In a ruling on January 7th, Louis Pollak, a federal judge in Pennsylvania, decided that fingerprint evidence was unreliable. He declared that he will no longer allow fingerprint examiners testifying in his courtroom to tell juries point blank whether prints from defendants and those collected at crime scenes do or do not match. Instead, they will have to present evidence to persuade a jury that they are the same or, as the case may be, are not.
http://www.economist.com/science/dis...tory_ID=939896

Interactive TV Finally Ready To Take Off
Consumers finally appear to be ready to use interactive television features, according to a new study by Cahners In-Stat/MDR. The research firm said interactive TV, also known as iTV, has endured several years of "hype and false starts." Perhaps the biggest problem for those trying to make money in this space is, consumers do not know exactly what iTV entails. Mike Paxton, a senior analyst with In-Stat/MDR, said the firm surveyed 900 "TV households" in the U.S. last November.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/173792.html

Arrest Thwarts Hacker Kimble's Threatened Suicide
Just days before he claimed he would commit suicide, self-proclaimed millionaire hacker Kim Schmitz was arrested by police in Thailand today, according to German media reports. Die Teleboerse, which operates CNN.de, CNN's German-language news and information site, reported today that a spokesperson for the District Court in Munich confirmed Schmitz's arrest on Germany's extradition request.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/173778.html

Spammers Near Top Of Would-Be Hackers List
Out-of-control Internet worms such as Code Red and Nimda may have heightened awareness of the automated tools hackers use to uncover and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. But the people behind some of the most-common probes on the Net aren't looking to break into your computer. They may, however, want to send you some e-mail. San Mateo, Calif.-based SecurityFocus, whose Aris Analyzer service logs suspicious traffic from across the Internet, says automated probes for a simple program that is nearly ubiquitous on small Web sites is the fifth-most common "attack" on the Internet these days.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/173797.html

More news later on

19-01-02, 03:07 PM	#2
walktalker The local newspaper man Join Date: Aug 2000 Location: Montreal Posts: 2,036	Abandonware: Dead Games Live On Sarinee Achavanuntakul is a keeper of dead games. She runs The Underdogs, a website with 2,600 computer games no longer commercially available. The site draws 30,000 people on peak days, but she pays hosting and bandwidth costs out of her own pocket. Traffic is so high she instituted a download limit to keep overhead low since the site isn't a money-making venture. http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,49723,00.html Zero to Safety in 30 Milliseconds traffic, may look tough as hell, but in reality motorcycle riders are a particularly vulnerable bunch. If a rider falls off his motorcycle, there's very little to protect him from hard asphalt. Air-bag jackets for motorcycle riders, which have been around for a few years, have attempted to cushion this fall, but they have had drawbacks. Namely a rip cord that attached the rider to the bike. http://www.wired.com/news/gizmos/0,1452,49610,00.html U.S. Ends Afghan Image Contract A U.S. agency has terminated an agreement with a commercial satellite firm that had given the federal government exclusive rights to its high-resolution images of Afghanistan. On Friday, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), a support agency for the U.S. Department of Defense, confirmed that it decided not to renew a contract originally signed in October with Denver-based Space Imaging. http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,49863,00.html Ban Human Cloning, Panel Urges Cloning human beings for the purpose of reproduction is medically unsafe and should be banned, a panel of the National Academy of Sciences concluded Friday. The report comes even as White House bioethics advisers are weighing the benefits of medical advances against the moral hazards of human cloning. On Thursday, President Bush challenged the ethics group to be the "conscience of the country." The academy's report said: "Human reproductive cloning should not now be practiced. It is dangerous and likely to fail." http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,49843,00.html China Tightens Web Controls China has issued its most intrusive Internet controls to date, ordering service providers to screen private e-mail for political content and holding them responsible for subversive postings on their websites. The new rules, posted earlier this week on the website of the Ministry of Information Industry, represent Beijing's latest efforts to tighten its grip on the only major medium in China not already under state control. The regulations also create new difficulties for a competitive industry trying to attract more overseas investment. http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,49855,00.html FBI Advises Security Review Of Web Content The FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center on Thursday advised providers of water, energy, transportation, finance and other critical infrastructures to evaluate the content of their Web sites from a security perspective. According to the NIPC advisory, "details on critical infrastructures, emergency response plans and other data of potential use to persons with criminal intent" are currently available on the Internet. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/173770.html Weakened encryption lays bare al-Qaeda files Relatively weak encryption appears to have been used to protect files recovered from two computers believed to have belonged to al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan. The files were found on a laptop and desktop computer bought by Wall Street Journal reporters from looters in Kabul a few days after it was captured by Northern Alliance forces on 13 November. The files provide information about reconnaissance missions to Europe and the Middle East. http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991804 Distributed computing case ends with probation A sys admin who installed distributed computing software on computers at an American college has been sentenced to probation. This may seem harsh but David McOwen, the former BOFH at the state run DeKalb Technical College in Georgia, can consider himself fortunate - since the authorities brought charges against him that might have sent him to jail. McOwen has been given a year of probation and a $2,100 fine for linking up college PCs to Distributed.net, a communal code breaking network that takes advantage of spare computing cycles to crack codes. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23737.html Laser pointer project tilts at windmills in the sky Anyone who has fired up a laser pointer in the presence of Fido or feline knows the hunt-and-chase instincts the ruby-red beam can awaken in even the haughtiest of household pets. A recent online experiment suggests that these "keychain" technologies can inspire a similar enthusiasm in people. It was while James Downey's cats, Eleanor and Hillary, were chasing his pointer's beam around the house that the Columbia, Mo., writer and old-book restorer was struck by two ideas: Millions worldwide own laser pointers, and wouldn't it be great if a large number aimed them at the moon at once, possibly creating a red dot on its surface that would be visible from Earth? http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/2...t-interest.htm Pulsars' beat could reveal gravity waves Forget multimillion-dollar spacecraft and elaborate underground labs - the simplest way to detect gravity waves directly could be to listen to flutters in the regular bursts of radio waves from distant pulsars. Any accelerating mass is believed to create ripples in space-time called gravity waves. They were predicted by Einstein as part of his general theory of relativity, and people have been trying to pick up these weak and elusive undulations ever since. http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991797 A judge has ruled that fingerprint evidence is scientifically unreliable For nearly a century, suspects have lived in fear that matches to their prints will turn up at the scene of the crime. Such fears have now been reduced a little. In a ruling on January 7th, Louis Pollak, a federal judge in Pennsylvania, decided that fingerprint evidence was unreliable. He declared that he will no longer allow fingerprint examiners testifying in his courtroom to tell juries point blank whether prints from defendants and those collected at crime scenes do or do not match. Instead, they will have to present evidence to persuade a jury that they are the same or, as the case may be, are not. http://www.economist.com/science/dis...tory_ID=939896 Interactive TV Finally Ready To Take Off Consumers finally appear to be ready to use interactive television features, according to a new study by Cahners In-Stat/MDR. The research firm said interactive TV, also known as iTV, has endured several years of "hype and false starts." Perhaps the biggest problem for those trying to make money in this space is, consumers do not know exactly what iTV entails. Mike Paxton, a senior analyst with In-Stat/MDR, said the firm surveyed 900 "TV households" in the U.S. last November. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/173792.html Arrest Thwarts Hacker Kimble's Threatened Suicide Just days before he claimed he would commit suicide, self-proclaimed millionaire hacker Kim Schmitz was arrested by police in Thailand today, according to German media reports. Die Teleboerse, which operates CNN.de, CNN's German-language news and information site, reported today that a spokesperson for the District Court in Munich confirmed Schmitz's arrest on Germany's extradition request. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/173778.html Spammers Near Top Of Would-Be Hackers List Out-of-control Internet worms such as Code Red and Nimda may have heightened awareness of the automated tools hackers use to uncover and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. But the people behind some of the most-common probes on the Net aren't looking to break into your computer. They may, however, want to send you some e-mail. San Mateo, Calif.-based SecurityFocus, whose Aris Analyzer service logs suspicious traffic from across the Internet, says automated probes for a simple program that is nearly ubiquitous on small Web sites is the fifth-most common "attack" on the Internet these days. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/173797.html More news later on __________________ This post was sponsored by Netcoco, who wants cookies, cookies, cookies and, you guessed it, more cookies