2003 November

iPod’s Dirty Secret (Quicktime video) tells the story of a 18-month-old iPod with a dead battery. Apple will fix it for $255, or about what it costs to replace the thing.
Except, as a reader has commented, the price isn’t nearly that high despite what the technical support person seems to have told the movie maker.
Read [...]

Excellent and thorough walk-thru done by the folks @ GameBanshee

It updates the firmware inside your powerbook’s superdrive, which enable it to write at its true speed, 2X DVD-R, and 16X CD-R, as well as unlock the DVD-RW capability that was entirely missing.
Get it @ Superdrive.cynikal.net

November Bandwidth Report reports US Broadband Penetration at 40.9% and broadband use tracks household income. Overall, broadband grew by 0.95% in October, with 40.9% of US home users enjoying a high-speed connection. 59.1% of US home users dial into the Internet with narrowband connections of 56Kbps or less.* The top four US states in broadband [...]

“Linux distributor Debian reported Friday afternoon that some of its servers have been compromised since Thursday. The alert, posted to several security and Linux mailing lists, stresses that its archive had not been hacked, sparing thousands of installations a potential security nightmare.
Debian said its bug-tracking system (master), mailing lists (Murphy), Web and CVS servers [...]

FREE. Is there any sweeter word? Its promise of something for nothing, and its underlying connotation of liberation, put a spring in the step and make the world seem a better place. But lately, free isn’t what it used to be, especially on the Internet, whose very history and technology are based on the notion [...]

“…BNSF locomotives carry freight across the continental US. However, it is using wireless technology to move units around its rail yards. It reckons the system is more efficient - presumably one driver can run multiple locos from the same seat in the yard control centre - and a darn sight safer than putting drivers inside [...]

“An appeals court this week put the brakes on an FBI surveillance technique that turns an automobile driver’s on-board vehicle navigation system into a covert eavesdropping device, after finding that the spying effectively disables the system’s emergency and roadside assistance features.
The case arose from a 2001 FBI surveillance operation in Las Vegas, in which agents [...]

“White House plans to ratify a Council of Europe Cybercrime treaty will be a disaster for the privacy and security of Americans, Privacy International (PI), the human rights watchdog, claims.
President Bush this week urged Senators to back the adoption of the mutual assistance Treaty into US law. The Treaty, designed to streamline cooperation between [...]

“A hand-held device [PDA] designed to identify drivers impaired by drugs, alcohol or excessive tiredness, is being evaluated by the British police.
The device is intended to deliver a quick yes or no verdict on whether a person is in a fit state to drive and works by assessing the driver’s behaviour, rather than testing [...]

“Secretary of State Kevin Shelley today announced that beginning
July 1, 2005, no county or city may purchase a touch screen voting system that does not include an accessible voter verified paper audit trail (VVPAT). As of July 2006, all touch screen voting systems used in California, regardless of when they were purchased, must have a [...]

“Federal officials this week accused a third Michigan man of conspiring to steal credit card numbers from the Lowe’s chain of home improvement stores by taking advantage of an unsecured wi-fi network at store in suburban Detroit. The new defendant, Brian Salcedo, 20, was named by the original suspects, Paul Timmins, 22, and Adam Botbyl, [...]

“MP3.com founder [Michael] Robertson is in talks with Vivendi Universal to save the music collection at the site. CNET bought the domain name last week after a night on the tiles, and Vivendi said the archive will close in December.
But Archive.org founder Brewster Kahle says he’s only too happy to host the collection.
‘Our [...]

“Jon Lech Johansen, better known as DVD Jon for his authorship of the DeCSS decryption software, has turned his attention to Apple’s locked music format.
While he hasn’t decrypted the DRM which Apple uses, he has produced a simple Windows command line utility which will install a DLL which dumps the output of a QuickTime [...]

“The SCO Group will pay its lawyers $9 million to pursue lawsuits against Linux users. Linux users should keep a low profile and have a contingency plan. SCO customers should have a migration plan in case SCO’s legal strategy falters.”
It’s not usual for you to pay your legal bills with stock from your company - [...]

There is adult content in this story.
“Call it spam rage: A Silicon Valley computer programmer has been arrested for threatening to torture and kill employees of the company he blames for bombarding his computer with Web ads…In one of the first prosecutions of its kind in the state that made “road rage” famous, Charles Booher, [...]

Fink Project announces the availability of a new binary distribution, version 0.6.2. The release of
this new binary distribution the Fink team is an important milestone in the transition to Mac OS X 10.3 and completes the transition to version 3.3 of the Gnu C Compiler. Fink now supports all users running Mac OS X [...]

Scientists find mystery particle have found a sub-atomic particle they cannot explain using current theories of energy and matter.
The discovery was made by researchers based at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation in Tsukuba.
Classified as X(3872), the particle was seen fleetingly in an atom smasher and has been dubbed the ‘mystery meson’.
The Japanese [...]

From NASA hopeful of late 2004 launch: The US space agency says it is ‘on track’ to launch a space shuttle into orbit in the autumn of 2004, despite lingering worries over safety.
NASA admits it has made little progress to date in finding a way to repair the sort of damage that caused the orbiter [...]

From Japan’s Nozomi Mars Mission Faces Critical Dec. 2 Deadline: “Mission planners for Japan’s Mars-bound Nozomi spacecraft have until Dec. 2 to bypass a short on the probe’s electrical system so it can conduct critical orbit correction maneuvers Dec. 9. If the electrical problem is not repaired, Nozomi, Japan’s first interplanetary mission, will almost certainly [...]