A Houston computer security analyst has been charged with hacking after demonstrating the insecurity of a county courts wireless LAN. Stefan Puffer, 33, was indicted by a Grand Jury with two counts of fraud for allegedly breaking into Harris County district clerk’s wireless computer system. It’s believed to be the first case of its kind in the US
One of the more amusing displays that was on display at Siggraph was a sword-fighting simulator that used a virtual reality headset along with a virtual sword
that had two gyro motors running it that allowed for tactile force feedback — via Slashdot
Rephah Berg, a California woman who spends her spare time crafting slogans for lapel buttons has won the 2002 Bulwer-Lytton bad writing award for a piece which compared a faltering relationship to a balky roll of toilet paper
Arcade in a Box is essentially a PC ready to play MAME, but built into a console with true arcade parts for the buttons and joystick for a more authentic arcade video game experience. It’s not quite as realistic as, say building your own cabinet, but it definitely is a lot less time consuming
Princeton officials entered the Yale Online web site on several occasions and viewed admissions decisions. Princeton officials claim they were simply researching security for their own web site — via Slashdot
The Federal Government is under fire for its decision to vote against a new United Nations protocol against torture. The protocol calls for independent visits to prisons as a way of halting torture. Australia was one of eight countries to vote against the protocol, while the United States abstained, having earlier expressed its opposition to the protocol
Saddam Hussein blames western sanctions for the dying children of Iraq. But the only Iraqis who can speak openly — those in the safe haven of Iraqi Kurdistan — blame Baghdad. But can the Father of the Iraqi nation really be sacrificing his children?
Campaign group StopEsso said this week it would move its French language web site to an American internet provider after a court in France ruled it could not continue using its logo on the site
Some people are trying to reduce their electronic presence, and discovering that doing so is not as simple as it would seem. Seems these people forgot that they were the idiots that published the data online in the first place
American defence contractors, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, are developing a 100-kilowatt infrared laser weapon for the F35 Joint Strike Fighter that may be powerful enough to blind people on the ground, even if they are relatively far from the target — via Slashdot
Israeli doctors have discovered a gruesome new way to catch hepatitis and possibly other blood-borne diseases — from the flying bone fragments of suicide bombers
The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman is currently evaluating Telstra’s ADSL service level agreement, as customers of the network continue to suffer lengthy outages
SkyTower, a US-based technology company, is planning to launch crewless solar-powered airplanes that would provide entire cities with broadband Internet access and 3G mobile services coming from 70,000 feet above the ground
A flaw in the way annual software usage statistics are compiled may have led to legal distribution of open-source programs being lumped with illegal trafficking in desktop applications, inflating losses to industry through phantom
piracy. The annual software piracy statistics — published by trade groups the US Business Software Alliance and Business Software Association of Australia — are compiled from several sources but none take into account the growing use of open-source desktop applications
Todd, a young black Labrador, paddled for 10 miles over six hours, dodging ferries, oil tankers and yachts to reach land after falling overboard from his master’s boat off the southern English coast
It seems as if the JPEG Committee has noticed the recent patent fuss, and is working on the prior art angle. Good to know that even though there’s a new standard, the committee is standing by their previous work. Meanwhile, the ISO standards body will take the unprecedented step of withdrawing the JPEG image format as a formal standard if Forgent Networks, a small Texan company, continues to demand royalties on a seventeen-year old patent — via Slashdot
Hackers will be unable to attack Web sites protected by a new security system unless they can change the laws of physics, according to Naoto Takano, chief executive officer of Scarabs, a Japanese company. The company claims that it has developed a hard disk with two heads that prevents disk files published on the Web from being altered by hackers
Request Broadband has launched a broadband VPN service that requires the installation of no additional equipment at customers’ premises, bringing cost savings of 40 or 50%
Voters in San Francisco will decide this fall whether the city should grow its own marijuana. Under a measure that will be on the ballot in November, city officials would explore growing pot and distributing it to seriously ill patients who have permission from their doctors. Supporters said such a program on city-owned land could double as agriculture job training for the unemployed
The ACLU recently had a study done that suggests that broadband access is a threat to internet freedom. Their study focuses on the control available to broadband providers who don’t have to deal with the same level of competition or regulation as ISP providers. The result is the ability to radically control internet access combined with the omnipresent corporate incentive for profit, whatever the cost to free speech — via Slashdot
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