Bruce Simpson, the New Zealand man who built a cruise missile in his garage using parts bought off the internet to show how easily it could be done, claims the New Zealand government forced him to shut down his project after coming under pressure from the United States — via Die Puny Humans
A naked, samurai sword-wielding martial arts expert screaming, ‘I’m god! I’m immortal’, hacked his wife to death in a blood-soaked Bronx rampage. When the madman lunged at police, one cop fired 14 shots — bringing down the suspect but also hitting her partner twice. The cop’s vest stopped one bullet from hitting his chest, though another slug penetrated his knee — via Die Puny Humans
When officer Jason Zier pulled over a 1992 Mazda 626 on Thursday afternoon, the vehicle’s registration had expired. By the time he’d finished writing up Sean Leach for the infraction, the car was legal again. That’s because the 36-year-old Jersey City man had a mobile, a friend with a computer who he could reach and the foresight to use the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission’s online registration service. Leach’s ingenuity did not save him from getting a ticket, but it did keep him from having his car towed and getting socked with the towing bill
Seduced by the siren song of wireless access throughout the home, many a user has experienced the discrepancy between the manufacturer’s advertised claims (150 feet indoors, 300 outside) and real-world implementation (the living room and upstairs bedroom may as well be on different continents). In steely-eyed determination to exercise his inalienable right to network access anywhere on his property, Paul Boutin hired a Wi-Fi engineer to help him bathe his property in 802.11 waves, using only mass-market consumer hardware
If you’ve ever been to Ikea and wondered about the wacky product names, you’re not alone, so has the rest of the world. All Ikea products carry the same name throughout the world, no matter how hard it may be for the locals to get their tongues around the mostly Swedish monikers.
It’s probably not going to surprise anyone that all Ikea product names have Scandinavian origins, but there is a logic in the naming that lost is on those not familiar with Swedish.
Sofas and armchairs have Swedish place names; bathroom articles get their designations from rivers and lakes; lights from music, chemistry or meteorology sources; textiles and curtains have female names; chairs and desks are given male names; and kitchen items have names that describe their function.
The European Union has asked nine member nations that have failed to adopt a privacy law intended to help the fight against unwanted email to describe how they intend to comply with the law
Should the Internet come under control of the United Nations? That will be one of the most contentious issues at the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva this week. Paul Twomey, the president of ICANN, found out what it feels like to be voiceless after being escorted from the meeting room
ATM frauds are a clever combination of social engineering and hardware hacking. The most sophisticated thefts involve the purchase and setup of real ATMs that actually do dispense cash to avoid suspicion, but are altered to save both the card’s magnetic signature and the customers PIN, which are later added to false cards and used to empty bank accounts at real ATMS
Richard Paselk makes replicas of medieval scientific instruments out of whatever materials he happens to have at hand
This is a story of weapons of mass destruction. Chemical weapons. Domestic Terrorism. Forged Identifications. And media double standards. In the Texan town of Tyler law enforcement officials found what hundreds of investigators in Iraq have been looking for months. A Tyler man named William Krar with ties to white supremacists had built a sodium cyanide bomb. In the words of the Justice Department, the man had developed his own chemical weapons — via Die Puny Humans
The ALP and Government combined in the last hours of parliamentary sitting for the year to ram through legislation to put ASIO above the public interest by giving it secret police powers. The legislation will make it an offence to discuss ASIO’s questioning of people, whether they are innocent or not, for two years after the interrogation occurs
Yahoo, owner of one of the largest e-mail systems in the world, is said to be developing a cryptographic product that will be offered freely to mail servers. Domain Keys, would require the message sender to authenticate in order for message to come across a trusted e-mail network
Consumer Joe is a collection of crank/prank letters sent by screenwriter Paul Davidson to a variety of gigantic corporations, asking, for example, if he should call poison control after swallowing toothpaste, or if the Barbie hot-tub would be suitable for a garden party. The letters are genuinely funny, and the clueless bureaucratese in the responses is often equally good, but best of all are the responses from corporate letter-answerers who have winkled out his game and are playing along with their own sly humour:
Our research and development department went to work right away in the smoothie lab experimenting with your concoctions.
The Tuna Melt smoothie looks promising. We found the key to be white albacore tuna in oil, lots of mayonnaise and some powdered cheese. However, the Thanksgiving smoothie (turkey, cranberry, and gravy) is posing some challenges. Your recommendation to heat it up would require us to install microwave ovens at all locations.
Following two release candidates, the 0.4 release of Mozilla Thunderbird is now available. Thunderbird 0.4 features an updated look to Thunderbird’s default theme, including a variety of new icons; better OS integration, cut and paste of images on Windows, and a number of bug fixes and other new features
David Pogue takes up arms against miscellaneous
charges on phone and banking bills, and against innocent
mistakes where customers are repeatedly, routinely overcharged
Are mini black holes raining down through the Earth’s atmosphere? Theodore Tomaras, a physicist at the University of Crete in Heraklion, Greece, and his Russian colleagues Andrei Mironov and Alexei Morozov think this could explain mysterious observations from mountain-top experiments over the past 30 years
An encyclopedia with water soluble pages holds all 60,000 known active mouse genes, making posting genomes much easier
Broken-down Fisher and Paykel washing machines are being converted by Taranaki engineer Michael Lawley into smart new wind turbines for the renewable energy market — via The Green Man
A novel plastic made by compressing a powdered mixture of two polymers has been produced at room temperature for the first time. The breakthrough holds the promise of plastics that are much more recyclable and more energy efficient to produce
A French hunter was shot by his dog after he left a loaded shotgun in the trunk of his car with two dogs and one of the animals accidentally stepped on the trigger
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