Author Archives: james

Power lines reconnected to Japan’s quake-damaged nuclear plant

By james | Published: March 22, 2011

Full Story at LATimes.com Lights are turned on in the control room of reactor No. 3 at the Fukushima complex, but officials warn that equipment must be checked before the restored electricity can be used to operate cooling systems at the plant. Meanwhile, the death toll from the quake and tsunami rises to nearly 10,000, [...]

Posted in Earthquake, Electricity, Japan, Natural Events, Nuclear | Leave a comment

Diebold Admits Ohio Machines May Lose Votes

By james | Published: August 22, 2008

More at Slashdot Premier Election Solutions (a subsidiary of Diebold) has acknowledged a flaw that causes the systems to lose votes. It cannot be patched before the election and the machines are used in half of Ohio’s counties, but they are issuing guidelines for avoiding the problem that presumably contain a work-around. While Diebold initially [...]

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US company sues Nintendo in Wii wand patent suit

By james | Published: August 21, 2008

More at Wired News Nintendo’s hit Wii console with its wandlike remote controller has been targeted in patent infringement complaints by a U.S. technology company. Hillcrest Laboratories, based in Rockville, Md., has filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington D.C., and a patent infringement lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in [...]

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Thinking outside the square finds light in oven

By james | Published: August 21, 2008

More at The Sydney Morning Herald FOR her 10th birthday, Nicole Kuepper received an inspirational present from her parents – her first solar-energy kit. It sparked a fascination with solar technology that last night led to Ms Kuepper, 23, winning two Australian Museum Eureka Prizes for her scientific research. She has developed a simple, cheap [...]

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MIT engineers work toward cell-sized batteries

By james | Published: August 21, 2008

More at MIT News Office Forget 9-volts, AAs, AAAs or D batteries: The energy for tomorrow’s miniature electronic devices could come from tiny microbatteries about half the size of a human cell and built with viruses. MIT engineers have developed a way to at once create and install such microbatteries — which could one day [...]

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Visual search engine is photographer’s best friend

By james | Published: August 18, 2008

More at PC Pro A new visual search engine could help photographers keep track of their photographs whenever, and wherever, they appear on the internet. The TinEye search engine, developed by Canadian company Idee, allows users to search by uploading a picture rather than typing in a keyword. It then conducts a pixel by pixel [...]

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Foreclosure fallout: Houses go for a $1

By james | Published: August 13, 2008

Full story at The Detroit News One dollar can get you a large soda at McDonald’s, a used VHS movie at 7-Eleven or a house in Detroit. The fact that a home on the city’s east side was listed for $1 recently shows how depressed the real estate market has become in one of America’s [...]

Posted in Economy, Financial, Legal | Leave a comment

One Man’s Quest to Digitize and Publicize Rare Records

By james | Published: August 13, 2008

More at the Listening Post from Wired.com Thousands of recordings that had been largely consigned to the realm of prehistory in the digital age have gained a new life, thanks to the tireless efforts of one man. Cliff Bolling didn’t realize what he was getting into when he picked up a copy of the first [...]

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Apple removes $1,000 featureless iPhone application

By james | Published: August 8, 2008

More at Los Angeles Times Blog Eight iPhone owners have joined an elite clan: Their Apple gadget is running a program that cost nearly $1,000. When the iPhone first hit the market in June 2007, those who paid the $499 entry price — and signed the two-year AT&T contract — owned a status symbol. A [...]

Posted in Business, Financial, Strange, Technology | Leave a comment

Stealth Destroyer is Largely Defenseless, Admiral Says

By james | Published: August 4, 2008

More at Wired.com Two weeks ago, the Navy canceled plans to build the rest of its hulking stealth destroyers. At first, it looked like the DDG-1000s’ $5-billion-a-copy price tag to blame. Now, it appears the real reason has slipped out: The Navy’s most advanced warship is all but defenseless against one of its most common [...]

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Blizzard Seeks Permanent Injunction Against MDY, Asks Court to Prohibit Making Glider Open Source

By james | Published: August 1, 2008

More at Virtually Blind Fresh off its summary judgment victory against the creator of MMO Glider (a “bot” program that lets people play World of Warcraft unattended), WoW creator Blizzard has now asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona for a permanent injunction (.pdf) which would functionally shut down Glider’s WoW presence. [...]

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Project to rebuild Internet gets $12M, bandwidth

By james | Published: July 31, 2008

More at Wired News A massive project to redesign and rebuild the Internet from scratch is inching along with $12 million in government funding and donations of network capacity by two major research organizations. Many researchers want to rethink the Internet’s underlying architecture, saying a “clean-slate” approach is the only way to truly address security [...]

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The Mozilla CEO on His Firefox Strategy, His Google Gambit, and Working With Apple

By james | Published: July 30, 2008

More at Wired.com When Mozilla released the Firefox browser in 2004, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer dominated the market with a whopping 95 percent share. Now Firefox has 18 percent of the market and Apple’s Safari has another 6 percent. Along the way, Wall Streeters began pressing Mozilla to go public (it won’t) and Mozilla CEO John [...]

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Nintendo reports jump in 1Q profit on hit Wii

By james | Published: July 30, 2008

Full Story at Wired News Nintendo Co.’s profit for the fiscal first quarter surged 34 percent as sales of its hit Wii console shot up, underlining the success of the video game unit in attracting novice players. The Japanese manufacturer of Super Mario and Pokemon video games reported Wednesday a profit of 107.27 billion yen [...]

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New search engine takes aim at Google

By james | Published: July 28, 2008

More at CNET There’s a big new search engine launching Monday: Cuil. Developed and run by the husband-and-wife team of Stanford professor Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson, it’s pitched as bigger, faster, and better than Google’s flagship search engine in pretty much every way. See video interview with Tom Costello, below. [...]

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Patch DNS Servers Faster

By james | Published: July 25, 2008

Read more at Slashdot Austrian CERT used data from one of their authoritative DNS server to measure the rate at which the latest DNS patch (source port randomization) is being rolled out to larger recursive name servers. While about half the traffic (PDF) they receive is now using source port randomization, their data suggest that [...]

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Drug Companies Get Healthy, but at Whose Expense?

By james | Published: July 24, 2008

More at Wired.com Trevor Foltz was six months old last fall, fresh off a visit to Disney World in Orlando, when the spasms first began. Healthy until that point in his life, he began thrusting backward in his car seat, repeatedly and forcefully, as he rode with his parents north toward home in Rhode Island. [...]

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The Death of Nearly All Software Patents?

By james | Published: July 24, 2008

More at Slashdot The Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents, including pioneering patent claims to such innovators as Google, Inc.

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Most Bank Sites Are Insecure

By james | Published: July 24, 2008

Full Story at InformationWeek More than three-quarters of bank Web sites have design flaws that could expose bank customers to financial loss or identity theft, according to a University of Michigan study that will be presented this week at the Symposium on Usable Security and Privacy. The study, “Analyzing Web Sites For User-Visible Security Design [...]

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San Francisco Admin Coughs Up Passcodes in Secret Jailhouse Meeting With Mayor

By james | Published: July 23, 2008

Full Story at Wired.com The city of San Francisco has regained control of its network after a “rogue” city employee hijacked the system and then coughed up the passwords nine days later to Mayor Gavin Newsom in a secret jailhouse interview, a city official told Threat Level late Tuesday. “We were able to regain complete [...]

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