Do5 your war3zin bra1n

Yeah, right. Single-view movies, hardware-locked music, and attacks against file sharing. The trend is towards accelerated expiration. If the implanted chip does anything, it is to make us rapidly loose memories of copyrighted material for which we are not paying monthly licensing fees for.

robots.py

I'm sure privacy is a top concern for Google. It's not like they're a communist-friendly search engine, spam gateway, or the biggest host of copyright violations ever. Your confidential application data is in safe hands. Hundreds of safe hands. Millions of safe hands.

RDF power

No solar powered iTurtleneck with charger ports? Apple is just wasting patents.

Barnacles

New job opportunities coming in the area of removing old, unsightly electrosticky bots from skyscrapers.

Prepay

If only there was a simpler solution to retrofitting a gas station with a robotic checkout clerk that can slash your tires and tag you with a homing beacon.

What this really means is that thieves will steal a couple pieces of robo-crippling plywood before they steal the gas.

See not

It might be funny if anyone read c|net. Their page doesn't even load for me because their content shares servers with flashing, blinking, buzzing, talking ad hosts. Classy!

Sink

Being serious now...

MS isn't going to disable your brakes or cause the engine to explode due to bugs. There are very serious security issues, though. Imagine a virus injected in MP3, cellphone, Bluetooth, or RDS metadata. MS has a long history of buffer overruns and superfluous features ready for abuse. Your car could be programmed to reveal what electronics devices are inside and where your car is parked so that it's an easy target for thieves. The car could relay audio and GPS records to stalkers. One might even program the system to emit 115dB of auditory pain and flashing dashboard lights when the GPS and speed sensors indicate a high-speed turn is in progress.

Standardizing on a single buggy system is never good.

Notify the ISPs

The right thing to do would be to notify the ISPs of which computers are suspected of being hijacked. Good ISPs will take care of the problem. Some ISPs won't give a crap, but spam filters and firewalls know about them already.

Satan Gates because...

<abuse@microsoft.com>:

131.107.115.214 failed after I sent the message.

Remote host said: 550 5.7.1 <Your e-mail was rejected by an anti-spam content filter on gateway (131.107.115.214). Reasons for rejection may be: obscene language, graphics, or spam-like characteristics. Removing these may let the e-mail through the filter.>

What about TV?!

I still don't buy the BS that whitespace devices won't interfere with TV. Their calculations assume that the WiFi device and TV have comparable antennas. That's completely ridiculous, especially in high density housing and homes containing stucco or brick walls.

The FCC really has its head up its ass if they trust companies like Microsoft and Google to do what's right. Where's the National Association of Broadcasters? Where are the people who hate Comcast?

Too suitable for work

Where's the flesh-toned IT curve?

New patent

I should patent a curved mirror that reduces blind spots. Until that's on the market, I expect lots of people to be slaughtered by incapable drivers in cars made by a company not known for reliable electronics.

I know everyone is dying but I'm typing as fast as I can

This reminds me of horribly complicated decision making computer programs in the 80s where inputting the parameters of the problem required 100 times the manpower of solving it manually. Just thinking about it makes me want to burn a tractor feed printer.

No such thing as a one-way hash of IP address

An IP address has fewer than 4 billion possible combinations. Taking regional data into account, you're probably left with a few hundred thousand combinations at best. It would only take a moment to generate a reverse lookup table. Collisions are highly unlikely. Claiming one-way hashing is a complete lie.

I would sue my ISP if they were intercepting and sharing my data.

And PointCast?

Is this Dave "Doormat", the momentary CEO of PointCast? The guy who helped drive the company into the ground with long-term indecision and a complete lack of direction, followed by a futile sales pitch to his buddies at SBC? The guy who told investors he was turning the company around, quit, then admitted in an interview that he expected the company to fail from the moment he arrived? Poor Motorola. This like is like patching a sinking ship by filling the hull with concrete.

Insert coins

This sounds like a crappy video game. Airplanes: -100 points, Missiles: +1000 points, birds: +10 points, pop a falling bird before it hits the ground: +100 points, luggage: no penalty but it goes boom.

The future of duh

Science is scary. Science is a threat to humanity. Screwdrivers are for opening boxes, hammers are for walnuts, saws are for trees. Soldering irons are for killers. Anyone who tinkers science is a deviant criminal or a terrorist. Jail them to restore peace to the ignorant!

Shafting

Google gives Ebay a well deserved shafting. Who shafts Google? They believe they're big enough that they can be a huge conduit for crime, offer zero customer service, and suffer zero consequences. I'm glad they didn't win the C block of radio bandwidth. Google would have built the coolest WiFi system ever then abandoned it to spammers, illegal telemarketers, and phishers. Take a look at Google Groups or GMail.

They still have big plans to destroy TV by using what they claim is unused bandwidth.

Bill icon, because he does no wrong as Google does no evil.

Vroom!

Why not download the movie? Flying my car to the video store for a flash card update sounds like such a pain.

Oh, I forgot. I'm still using telco wiring from 1945, flash memory is slow and expensive, and my car drinks half a gallon of gas just rolling to the video store. I was thinking of the far future. The year 2000 when... Oh, wait...

ISPs suck

Anyone who relies on content-based spam filters should shut up about their mail being lost. It's their fault for expecting a machine to remove spam rather than holding the senders accountable. E-mail has degraded into one big "Just Hit Delete (for me)" pile of crap.

A bit harder for CIFS

Time Machine would crash some CIFS servers because the entire disk image is built as 8MB files in a single directory. You'd get to about 125 GB archived and then Samba dies. I don't know if Apple has fixed that yet. You can hack it if they haven't:

http://www.pixelmemory.us/TimeMachineNAS/

Next bandwagon please

Now is the time for another cellphone maker to collect all the eager developers rejected by Jesus Jobs. (Or don't want to use Objective-C)

Change of duties...

An employer in the 90s hired a woman from a temp agency to "work the phones." Everybody was laid off and a mountain of their disconnected phones was dumped in the lobby for her to untangle, catalog, and package.

At least she could quit.

Cheap, actually

Their hacking equipment cost $30000 because of that fancy oscilloscope shown. It wouldn't surprise me if it cost $29000.

The paper states the frequency and encoding protocol. Hackers don't need the fancy oscilloscope now. Taking into account what a hacker already owns, that cuts the cost down to maybe $50 for a short-range model. Boosting the range to a few city blocks would require maybe another $100 in parts.

I bet Cheney goes in for an operation soon.

buzz-clunk-clunk-clunk-buzz...

I think the "8 hours a day" rating was invented for the Deskstar 75GXP and 120GXP (aka Deathstar) back when IBM couldn't keep them working longer than a year.

Impossible!

We all know that Google GMail can't be used for spamming. That's what Google says every time they ignore your complaints about spam coming from their mail servers.

Zero customer support?

How does this work with Google's zero customer support strategy? Lets say your house is being robbed three times a month and your family has been beaten nearly to death twice because criminal gangs have figured out how to view your prescriptions on Google. Who at Google is going to help? Nobody. You're going to die.

Arc welders?

This ship doesn't doesn't just cruise around a lake, does it? I was expecting something more rugged than what's being built in the teaser. Space hardware stores may be a major component of the plot.

M!

A giant, unstoppable mega-conglomeration of mediocracy to battle against Google? I think I hear laughing over in Mountain View.

Seriously, Yahoo is better off apart. Yahoo may be able to outmaneuver Google every now and then if they're nimble enough. That means not having Microsoft to lug around. Maybe the strategy is that MS/Yahoo and Google with bleed to death in a bitter war, then MSN takes over the void.

Crashing like it's 1999

"Scale matters for online advertising." Are we back to forgetting about the product and customers again?

Google is the spammer

Google is definitely a spam-friendly corporation because they seem to pride themselves on not having live customer support. Their published abuse contacts of abuse@gmail.com, abuse@google.com, and groups-abuse@google.com are not read. I've sent Google hundreds of complaints about criminal Usenet spammers using Google Groups. The criminals are still flooding Usenet a year later. I've sent dozens of GMail complaints to Google. Google auto-replied saying that GMail wasn't the spam source because it can't spam. Getting spammed for Google's Blogspot? Good luck with that.

Lets see how bad it gets when Google owns some wireless bandwidth. I'd be impressed if they can keep the level of legitimate traffic above 5%.

The new pickpocket

So thieves can load card debit software onto PDAs and pull a small amount of cache from you by waving it near your pocket? Brilliant!

Here's my legal money making scheme - Sell a disabling plastic clip for each type of RFID vulnerable card. There's no expensive RF adsorption technology involved. It just has small hole where you insert a spinning drill bit.

Tooney

I'm going to paint holes in the sidewalk.

Sleazy credit card billing too

Sears also charges your credit card at the moment you place an online order, not when it's delivered. For a home appliance, that can be $1000 charged two or three weeks early. It violates the policies of many credit card companies.

"You are correct that our web site charges right away when permission is

granted by submitting ones credit card information to place the order."

- order@customerservice.sears.com

Broken contract

I don't agree to the RIAA's new terms of use. I propose that the RIAA settle this by buying back my CD collection at the original price.

If my screen isn't the size of a postage stamp?

It's funny how Apple serves up 1920x1080 movie trailers to glorify the power of QuickTime but then sells them at an embarrassing 640x360. I had a computer that could play 640x360 videos 17 years ago.

I can't see iTunes rentals working unless the quality improves a lot. Sometimes you can't tell what's going on in a movie because it's too blurry. Even the old DVD standard offers a 50% higher resolution and it is racing towards obsolescence. That leaves iTunes video as a novelty that you try once then regret. I feel really sorry for anyone who though that an Apple TV was an inexpensive path to HD movies and TV.

Funny stuff

A super-sensitive household-AC EMF detector that comes with a wall-wart battery eliminator. "Hey, it's picking something up!"

A pendant coded by a computer "ASKE" code. It took me a second to get that. Nice.

Mmmm... Inverter smoke

Does anyone make a CFL with a half-life better than a month? CFLs are expensive, contain a lot of hazardous material, and are often illegal to throw in the trash. Any store that sells them should be required to proxy warranty replacements for the full warranty duration. Replacing DOAs isn't good enough. Consumers contacting the manufacturer for replacement of bulbs one-at-a-time is a joke and manufacturers know it. That's why they make ridiculous "7 Year Warranty" claims on a bulb built to last just barely longer than a store's return policy.

Big deal

Feed the computers an AC square wave with rounded edges. This will provide a better power factor without disabling TRIACs and voltage doublers. All that changes is the UPSes. Sure, some wall-warts will go up in smoke but you're not using them if you're trying to be energy efficient, right?

Of course this plan doesn't suck enough money out of the "Green Movement" to be a product. Even if a UPS manufacturer did it, computer manufacturers would claim all warranties voided unless new certified computers were purchased.

Silly

Unless you're Paris, calling something like "http://maps.google.com/local_url?q=evilhostname" a major security hole is silly. Don't you look at the URL before typing in your username and password? Redirects hide nothing and they don't evade normal security measures.

If you want to talk about Google helping criminals, head over to Usenet. Many once-popular discussion groups like rec.photo.digital have been crushed by non-stop spam flooding from Google Groups. It gets better. The spam often points to advertisements hosted on Google's own blogspot.com. Google gives anonymous Usenet access and hosting services to criminal networks that the rest of the world has firewalled. Got an abuse complaint for Google? They don't accept it. Complain about GMail spam and you get an automated response saying that GMail can't spam!

This is called "bullet proof hosting" and it causes most networks to be disconnected.

Works perfectly with Unlimited Internet Access*

* Home servers and the serving of content is prohibited

* Idle PPoE logins are automatically terminated

* Excessive bandwidth is prohibited

* No static IP addresses

* No bandwidth sharing with other computers

Leopard

They're all too busy pirating Mac OS X 10.5. As you can see in this technical comparison, it's a far superior upgrade compared to Vista:

---

Vista- Everything has changed and nothing works anymore.

Leopard- Old features still work. Only new features are broken.

---

Vista- Harder to spell than XP

Leopard- Can't be spelled properly by anyone who listened to 80s rock but it can be abbreviated to "10.5".

---

Start upgrading! You must! The version number is higher!

Bone-crushing melt?

The investigator sat down next to him in a badly bent and somewhat charred chair then figured that the phone must have snapped the poor guy in half.

Huh?

So... How is this helping? Did NaHCO3 become a valuable resource or nutrient? If only there was some kind of self-replicating solar powered machine that could separate the carbon and oxygen atoms from CO2.

Irony

The only way people born after the 1970s are going to know about Kiss is by accidentally downloading one of their songs off the Internet.