Being inside a pinball machine factory sounds exactly as you think it would. Across a 40,000-square-foot warehouse here, a cheery cacophony of flippers flip, bells ding, bumpers bump and balls click in an endless, echoing loop. The quarter never runs out. But this place, Stern Pinball, is the last of its kind in the world. A range of companies once mass produced pinball machines, especially in the Chicago area, the one-time capital of the business. Now there is only Stern. And even the dinging and flipping here has slowed: Stern, which used to crank out 27,000 pinball machines each year, is down to around 10,000
The regeneration of lost body parts has just moved from science fiction to US military policy. Yesterday the Department of Defense announced the creation of the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine, which will go by the happy acronym AFIRM. According to DOD’s news service, AFIRM will harness stem cell research and technology… to reconstruct new skin, muscles and tendons, and even ears, noses and fingers
. The government is budgeting $250 million in public and private money for the project’s first five years. NIH and three universities will be on the team
Spammers are using an automated method to create bogus pages on Google’s Blogger service, again highlighting the diminishing effectiveness of a security system intended to stop mass account registrations, according to security vendor Websense. The spammers are sending coded instructions to PCs in their botnets, or networks of computers that have been infected with malicious software
Ancient humans started down the path of evolving into two separate species before merging back into a single population. The genetic split in Africa resulted in distinct populations that lived in isolation for as much as 100,000 years. This could have been caused by arid conditions driving a wedge between humans in eastern and southern Africa
MP3tunes’ CEO Michael Robertson sent out an email to all users of the online music backup and place-shifting service MP3tunes.com, asking them to help publicise EMI’s ridiculous and ignorant lawsuit against the company. EMI believes that consumers aren’t allowed to store their music files online, and that MP3tunes is violating copyright law by providing a backup service
Last year, one out of every 909 e-mails was infected with malicious code. In 2008’s first quarter, only one out of every 2,500 was infected. Good news? Not really — attackers have just changed tactics
Microsoft said Live Mesh, now in a limited preview, uses the Web as a hub to centrally connect people to the information, applications, people and devices they care about most
Microsoft has emailed former customers of MSN Music saying it would be turning off the DRM servers used to authorise playback of music purchased from the now-defunct MSN Music store
PayPal has denied claims it plans to lock Safari users out of its online payments service as it reinforces its protections against online credit fraud. It has been previously reported that the company intends strengthening its defenses against phishing attacks. Early reports indicating Safari may be affected by the company move to block users of older or less secure browsers were incorrect
CSIRO’s Australia Telescope National Facility has been awarded a private data highway
— a 10 gigabit per second link — across the US by a major internet consortium and a US communications company
When Charlie Miller won $10,000 for hacking into a Macbook Air laptop last month, he exploited a flaw that had been publicly disclosed nearly a year before the contest. The flaw, it turns out, lay in an open-source software library called the Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) library, which is used by many products including Apache, the PHP scripting language, and Apple’s Safari browser, which Miller hacked to win the contest. Miller won $10,000 and a new Macbook Air last month after hacking into the laptop in a matter of minutes. The PWN2OWN contest invited hackers to try to install unauthorized software on fully patched Mac OS X, Windows and Linux computers using previously undisclosed zero-day
flaws
Skype has introduced its first plan for so-called unlimited calls to overseas destinations. There are no long-term contracts — just a monthly fixed rate to dial landline numbers. Monthly packages to North America start from $3.95, Europe costs a dollar more while Asia rings in at $5.95. Consumers can choose from three types of subscriptions — 34 countries, several countries in a region or a single destination. The offering is extended to mobile calls in some countries
An Australian team of researchers is developing next-generation discs that can store the contents of as many as 200,000 DVDs. The five-year, $1 million project at Swinburne University of Technology’s Centre for Micro-Photonics is looking at how nanotechnology, particularly the use of nanoparticles, can be used to boost the amount of information contained on a disc
Australia will lead a worldwide revolt against new PayPal-only payment plans adopted by online auctioneer eBay at a conference in New Orleans kicking off this week. The charge is led by the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance (PESA), which consists of eBay’s elite sellers. Combined, they generate more than $US400 million ($424.88 million) in sales each year on the web site
Six Apart, a blogging-software company that offers Movable Type and TypePad, has acquired creative agency Apperceptive and launched its own advertising network and consulting services division
After 8 years of effort, InPhase Technologies is shipping the world’s first holographic disk drive next month. They showed it at this week’s NAB. With a 300GB 5.25″ disk cartridge and a 50-year media life, the Tapestry 300r is aimed at the video and film archive market — via Slashdot
The Soviet Union may be in the dustbin of history, but there’s one place the socialist utopia lives on: cyberspace. Sixteen years after the superpower’s collapse, web sites ending in the Soviet .su
domain name have been rising — registrations increased 45 percent this year alone. Bloggers, entrepreneurs and die-hard communists are all part of a small but growing online community resisting repeated efforts to extinguish the online Soviet outpost
A leading contender to replace silicon as the basis for computing has made another step forward. Transistors one atom thick and ten atoms wide have been made by UK researchers. They were carved from graphene, predicted by some to one day oust silicon as the basis of future computing
Both the music and movie industries see file-sharing as a very real threat to their livelihood. Their approaches to the problem have differed, however, as the RIAA has targeted individual P2P users with lawsuits while the IFPI and MPAA have chosen to go after BitTorrent sites. The MPAA has scored some high-profile victories against P2P site operators and the men behind The Pirate Bay have been indicted by Swedish prosecutors, but many observers have questioned whether the motion picture industry’s efforts are in fact backfiring, as traffic to popular BitTorrent sites and participation in swarms appears to be on the upswing
PayPal, eBay’s electronic payment service, plans to take the dramatic step of locking out people using older versions of web browsers in order to stem phishing attacks. PayPal said a significant
group of people still use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 3, released in 1996, and IE 4, which debuted in 1997. Those browsers lack a phishing filter, which can block users from accessing a reported phishing web site
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