October 2003

Posted on October 28, 2003 by

Giant Solar Flare on its way

At 6AM et, the Sun kicked out the third largest solar flare in recorded history. The sunspot that kicked it out also happened to be pointing right at the earth at the time. Scientists have been watching some unusual activity on the sun in the past few weeks as sunspot and flare activity has unexpectedly Read More

Posted on October 20, 2003 by

X10 to pay $4.3M

Three tech-saavy brothers in their parents home created the pop-up and pop-under technology and business model and entered into a contract with the now-well-known X10 wireless company. X10 refused to pay them for it. “These were young guys who had a dream to start a successful company, but X10 looked at their youth and thought Read More

Posted on October 20, 2003 by

Build it and they will come

The recording industry has refused to believe that online music sales could work; that piracy was inevitable. Not so. Many people were pirating songs because they weren’t given a viable legal alternative. The recording industry’s assault on the P2P networks have made these services difficult to use. They have been flooding the networks with corrupted Read More

  • Category: Law
Posted on October 20, 2003 by

Turning a problem into a solution

Forcing water through tiny channels has always been difficult because of an electrical effect that takes place. The surface of the channel becomes electrically charged which hinders the flow of charged ions through the channel. Larry Kostiuk took that lemon and investigating ways of making lemonade. He is attempting to harness that charge to create Read More

Posted on October 15, 2003 by

China Launches First Astronaut

China became only the third nation to successfully launch a manned space mission today. Lt. Col Yang Liwei safely landed at 6:23am Thursday Morning, after 21 hours in orbit, circling the Earth 14 times in the Shenzhou V spacecraft. Today’s mission marks the success of an 11-year manned space program, which some foriegn experts estimate Read More

Posted on October 7, 2003 by

Shifting around CD copy protection

John Halderman has found a way around BMG’s CD copy protection — hold down the Shift key. Its fitting of a Sandra Bullock movie. According to Halderman, the copy protection, provided by SunnComm Technologies, works as the CD is inserted into a PC, and the CD’s “Autorun” loads software preventing the CD from being copied. Read More

  • Category: Law
Posted on October 6, 2003 by

Verisign shuts down SiteFinder

The controvertial SiteFinder service run by Verisign has been shut down. Verisign has been given authority to administer the popular .com, .net and .org top level domains (TLD), and last month, they launched a so-called “Wildcard” service so that misspelled domain names would be directed to their search engine. The move caused havoc for those Read More

Posted on October 6, 2003 by

Blame Microsoft

An LA woman was a victim of identity theft when a hacker got into her personal computer and used her name and social security number to access her bank accounts. She has launched a class-action lawsuit against Microsoft claiming that its Operating System is not secure enough. That’s just silly. Let me just put a Read More

  • Category: OS
Posted on October 6, 2003 by

Airbags for your Laptop

IBM has unveiled the new T41 line of notebooks, safe for use by crash-test-dummies. It integrates circuitry that can measure acceleration. If you drop your notebook, the new ‘Active Protection System’ (APS) will detect the impact and immediately move the hard drive heads into the ‘park’ position to avoid damage to the data. Of course, Read More