The XO laptop I received last week as part of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project’s “Give One Get One” (G1G1) promotion is unlike any other laptop I’ve ever used, both in appearance and functionality. It’s smaller, for one thing. The XO weighs only 3.13 pounds, is 9 inches wide, and approximately an inch [...]
Browsing Posts published in December, 2007
The loss or theft of personal data such as credit card and Social Security numbers is soaring to unprecedented levels, and the trend isn’t expected to turn around anytime soon as hackers stay a step ahead of security and laptops disappear with sensitive information. [From Data Theft Soars to Unprecedented Levels]
An MIT initiative called “OpenCourseWare” makes virtually all the school’s courses available online for free, and more than 100 universities worldwide, including Johns Hopkins, Tufts and Notre Dame, are joining MIT in a consortium of schools promoting their own open courseware. [From Ivy League Universities Open Courses to All Online]
24C3: Barcode systems susceptible to serious hacker attacks [From 24C3: Barcode systems susceptible to serious hacker attacks]
Today Microsoft launched a blog about the internals of their IT security research and patch development process. There are already some posts that you will not find in the official security bulletins or KB articles. One of the posts says, ‘We periodically identify workarounds or mitigations like this that we can’t use for official guidance [...]
However, those users won’t see any difference in service from the U-Verse being delivered to VDSL users (6Mbps max speed, single HD stream), despite having all that potential capacity.
…This user in our U-Verse forum is one of those lucky (unlucky) FTTH customers in Oklahoma who decided to give the service a spin anyway, and ultimately decided it wasn’t quite ready for prime time:
“The FBI today said it wants to install 150 digital billboards in 20 major U.S. cities in the next few weeks to show fugitive mug shots, missing people and high-priority security messages from the big bureau. The billboards will let the FBI highlight those people it is looking for the most: violent criminals, kidnap victims, [...]
Airlines around the world are gearing up to offer in-flight broadband for passengers, but overblown fears could make it less sweet than it should be. The fears, and why we don’t buy them. Read More… [From Airlines planning to filter, censor in-flight 'Net access]
A pair of AP stories addresses Boeing’s Connexion failure and in-flight etiquette for Internet access: The AP’s Anick Jesdanun, who has written a series of detailed articles about the bloom in upcoming in-flight broadband and mobile services, files these two articles on specific aspects of the issue. He writes about Connexion by Boeing, a service [...]
AppScout directs your attention to a new database that’s part of a SEC effort to transparently track executive compensation. According to the database, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts takes home a $2.5 yearly million salary–but with bonuses, stock awards and other assorted perks, that number jumps to $26 million annually. Departed AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre last [...]
Motorola has issued a press release summarizing the WiMax achievements that they accomplished in 2007. The company s most prized achievement was the demonstration of the historic first live mobile WiMAX 802.16e handoffs between continuous WiMAX cells supporting voice, data and multimedia applications at the World WiMax Conference held in Chicago in in September. They [...]
With 120 countries now in the cyber arms race, intelligence agencies around the world are working to assess their offensive and defensive cyber capabilities. Developing cyber weapons does not require the massive infrastructure usually associated with conventional arms. A couple of PCs and a couple of smart programmers and you have all you need to [...]
From an alert DT reader… Russian Sub Test Fires Ballistic Missile: Navy Spokesman By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, MOSCOW Dec 17, 2007 A Russian submarine on December 17 successfully test-fired a new ballistic missile from the Barents Sea to the far east of the country, a navy spokesman said. The Sineva missile was launched from the submerged [...]
Russia’s Sevmash shipyard at the Arctic city of Severodvinsk has completed a hybrid submarine powered by a diesel-electric plant and a small nuclear reactor. Designated B-90 and named Sarov, the submarine was completed on 17 December. The submarine is known as Project 20120 in Russian design terminology. She apparently employs the small nuclear reactor — [...]
No royalties to pay in interop deal? The Samba team has reached an agreement with Microsoft, with the software giant agreeing to disclose technical and legal information to the software libre project. Samba is by far the most widely-used software stack that allows non-Microsoft computer to talk to Windows machines, and use proprietary Microsoft network [...]
‘Next Generation Identification’ awaits you “If someone steals and spoofs your iris image, you can’t just get a new eyeball.” Paul Saffo, technology industry observer… [From FBI preps $1bn biometric database]
According to CSO Magazine. [From "The Top 10 Data Breaches of 2007" ]
A Vermont federal judge has ruled that a person cannot be compelled by police to divulge his PGP key. This is by no means the end of the legal debate (Orin Kerr comments), but it’s certainly good news. [From PGP and the 5th Amendment]
The software maker creates a single business unit, called Connected TV, to handle its Internet Protocol television, Media Center PC, and HD DVD efforts. [From Microsoft quietly combines TV efforts]
An international venture called the Universal Library Project has made more than one million books freely available in digitized format. The joint project of researchers from China, India, Egypt, and the US has the eventual aim of digitizing all published works of man, freeing the availability of information from geographic and socioeconomic boundaries, providing a [...]
