2005 November 21

Patrick L. Barry of NASA writes:
When your computer behaves erratically, mauls your data, or just “crashes” completely, it can be frustrating. But for an astronaut trusting a computer to run navigation and life-support systems, computer glitches could be fatal.

Someone responded in the Talkback to this story that they were watching it ‘with greeful fascination.’ My thoughts exactly! Dana Blankenhorn, on his ZDNet blog, writes:
Sony-BMG is beginning to remind me of Jimmy Breslin’s The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight.
If there was something they could do wrong in trying to “protect” their CDs [...]

Most corporate blogs are pretty cheery places, with their message almost perpetually positive and the tone reflecting some of the best copywriting on the entire network. General Motor’s FastLane Blog has been an example of this, with interesting and engaging articles from various members of the massive GM team talking about auto design, car shows, [...]

The state of Texas has filed a lawsuit against Sony BMG over the rootkit-like digital rights management (DRM) software which Sony included on many of its music CDs. As reported here earlier, the software, provided to Sony by First4Internet, opened up a security hole on the PCs of any customer who attempted to put [...]

Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes:
I think Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) President Cary Sherman must have his head buried in the sand, as he seems to feel the actions of Sony BMG in the (what can only be termed) XCP fiasco have been “very responsible.” He made this statement in a university press round [...]

Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes:
I was using BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) last week, and as I went through the Transbay Tube, I was playing a game on my phone, and I saw the signal bar go to nil. I started thinking, why can’t they put antennas in the tubes? I mean, they’re talking about [...]

One of our contributors, John Tintle, has been covering WordPress.com, the hosted alternative to Blogger for some time. He has also written up a great review of the platform. Some of the exciting new features he mentioned include “AJAX scripts, a rich WYSIWYG environment that allows you to drag and drop photos or images into your [...]

Just days after being launched, Google Base is apparently already overloaded with porn.
The screenshot I took was about as wholesome as I could make it to show the extent of what is going on, but Google Base has quickly gone from being a “Craigslist killer” that also threatened newspapers and classified ad services all [...]

A weakness has been reported in Safari, which can be exploited by malicious people to trick users into visiting a malicious Web site by obfuscating URLs displayed in the status bar.
The problem is that the browser fails to show the correct URL in the status bar if an image control has been enclosed in a [...]

Today we enter a site that has a biographical twist to it. It is the online journal of Frank. “Frank who?” you ask. Well, that is the warped twist the site has. Frank is a robot. The rest… well that is for you to discover on the site.
Robot Frank’s Life is a simple, blog-like site [...]