This website sells first editions of books signed by the authors for fans who can't make it to book signings or whose cities will not be visited by authors on their book-signing and publicity tours.
Remember the software that Billy Hoffman demo'd at Shmoocon 2007 - the Javascript that turns any capable web browser into a zombie?
One Mike Schroll snagged a copy while in the audience and posted it to his website. From there, about 100 somebodies downloaded copies, which no doubt have spread farther.
You can bet that this is going to find illicit use soon. For Firefox users, I strongly suggest that you look into installing a plug-in called NoScript, which lets you decide whether or not to execute the Javascript embedded in a particular web page.
Science fiction and fantasy magazine SFX recently held a poll to determine what the top 10 sci-fi movies of all time were. The results were posted yesterday, and check this out: Joss Whedon's Serenity finished in the number one position, beating out Star Wars, Bladerunner, and even The Matrix.
Gary McKinnon, who cracked US government and military networks under the alias 'Solo' in search of information on unidentified flying objects and unusual power sources will be extradited to the United States to stand trial, possibly under the USA PATRIOT Act because he infiltrated a number of sensitive data systems and networks. They're calling it the largest compromise of military systems in history (92 boxen known compromised) but somehow I doubt this because McKinnon certainly wasn't the first person to go wandering around inside their systems after breaking in - Hans "Pengo" Hubner beat him to it by fifteen years, give …
Not two hundred yards from the apartment in which George Orwell lived for most of his life, one can find thirty-two closed-circuit securicams watching the streets. Ostensibly for tracking down perpetrators of crimes, if asked to do so, British police forces are reluctant to do so given just cause...
It is all too common for people who have been in accidents of some kind to require donated blood to stay alive, but there's only so much to go around. Pluswhich, humanoid biology complicates matters: There are four major blood groups (A, B, AB, and O), and two Rhesus groups (positive and negative). People with type A blood can recieve blood from type A and O donors only; similiarly, people with type B blood can recieve type B or O blood only. A lucky few with type AB blood can recieve blood from any of the four groups, but people …
RSS is one of the buzzwords of the modern Internet - it's an XML file format that packages text and links to longer articles that can be viewed with a web browser (or more often, a feed aggregator of some kind). It works like the headline blocks of the newspapers of yestercentury: "Dow Jones Average falls 300 points - see p. A14!" The idea behind it is that you can glance at a website and look at a summary of articles and decide which ones to look at more closely. If you've ever used Google News you've used an RSS feed aggregator …
Rialian has arrived safely in Colorado after driving cross-country for about two days to join the Gildowan family. One of the first things he did when he got there was jack the donated eMac into their network and start installing Mac OSX Tiger for them so that they could get back on the Net (after all, there are three forms of death: brain death, heart death, and dropping off the Net).
The physicians taking care of Ashran are amazed at the speed with which he is recovering. What they thought were third degree burns were downgraded to second degree burns …
This is one of the neatest art hacks I've seen in a while. Let me explain:
Books are ultimately tools for storing information in a non-volatile manner for ease of transportation and reference. They're a relatively low bandwidth medium, limited by how fast the reader can turn the pages and the rate at which the visual cortex processes the characters, but are remarkably stable. Diskettes, on the other hand, are a more informationally dense storage medium, weigh less, and take up less space. They are more vulnerable to mistreatment, however: A fingerprint in the wrong place can wipe out large …
