Brad Willman, known to the underground as Omni-Potent, has stepped forward after three years of secretly stalking online pedophiles and tipping off law enforcement. His primary tool was a trojan horse that appeared to be an image file but was actually a remote access tool that he posted to child porn-related newsgroups on Usenet. People would download and double-click them, which silently installed the utility. He would monitor feeds from multiple installations of this utility for up to 16 hours every day, gathering evidence that he indexed, filed, and passed along to police, even against their orders. Time and again …
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have figured out how to use microphotolithography techniques to make the world's smallest chainmail. The links are made of vapor deposited copper, and each link is 500 microns in diameter. Testing shows that the micro-chainmail has the tensile strength of nylon, can stretch 1/3 of its resting length, and is extremely flexible. As flexible as 'real' fabric, in fact.
Oh, and did I mention that it conducts electricity normally?
By now we've all seen what Photoshop is capable of - just look at Worth 1000 for examples of things that just can't exist, and yet do have a strange sort of life on the screen. People can be added and deleted, colours can be changed, and still scenes can be fabricated from stock images after a couple of hours of skilled effort. Editing moving footage is more difficult, though, because you've got thirty-two frames in each second to edit, times however many seconds long a particular piece of footage is. Impossible? Hardly - video editing technology is an amazing thing. I …
One Abdul Tawala ibn Alishtari, also known as Michael Mixon, is a noted donor to the National Republican Congressional Committee, and has given in excess of $15kus in donations to the Committee since the year 2002. In fact, he was named a member of "the Inner Circle" of the committee because he's been so monetarily helpful, and was named Businessman of the Year by the state of New York two years in a row. The thing is, he's now up on charges of terrorism and giving financial aid to terrorists because it's come out that he also donated around $152kus …
If you've been watching the Net for a while, you've probably heard about the monkey in a research lab at the University of Pittsburgh that has a prosthetic arm wired directly to its brain with an implanted interface. The monkey seems to have gotten pretty good with it, too - while restrained it can use the prosthetic arm to feed itself. If you follow the link to the neuro-bio lab you can even watch it in realtime.
Tissue regeneration therapies in mammals is progressing at an impressive pace. Everyone who's ever looked into the field knows that vertebrates lower on the evolutionary ladder are capable of regrowing lost limbs and organs, like salamanders and axolotls, but higher lifeforms really can't. The best that humans can do is putting things back more or less they way they were, a process that we all know as healing. Once something's gone, though, it's gone (save for the liver, which can infact regrow if a small portion of liver tissue remains and the rest of the body is properly cared for …
Due to the ice storm, Lyssa and I weren't able to get to the Farpoint sci-fi convention this weekend passed. As much as we would have liked to, the road conditions and extremely long drive were more than a little offputting. However, this brought a smile to my day: The crew from Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (well, not really, but close enough for government work) had a go at Serenity.
Early adopters of Windows Vista have been finding themselves burned by an increasingly common problem in personal computing, namely, the utter lack of compatible drivers. Microsoft has been making it more and more difficult to write drivers these days, and a lot of companies weren't able to ship Vista-ready drivers by the time the new version of Windows hit the shelves and OEMs. Thus, they wind up on the manufacturers' websites, often hidden behind crappy search engines and mis-linked pages. This doesn't help you if your modem or network card doesn't work because - surprise, surprise - there are no drivers for …
In my almost-but-not-quite-there state yesterday, I managed to get the TARDIS down to the dealership for repairs. As I mentioned earlier, in the ice storm in DC last week, I managed to damage a couple of components in the undercarriage of my car.
First off, my car was about six thousand miles (!) overdue for maintenance and winterisation, which I take the blame for because I could probably have done so back in December of 2006 before the holiday season really set in. I know that my car was overdue for an oil change as well as a basic go-over. Due …
