I arrived in New York City somewhen around 1400 EST5EDT, after getting turned around in Penn Station (what kind of adventure would it be without my getting lost, after all?) and being sent in the direction of the hotel by a wary yet friendly security guard at the office building I'd blundered into. I finally got to the Hotel Penn, which they really did a nice job fixing up since the last time I'd been there (though the air conditioning was still pants, which became a common complaint that weekend). I wandered around for a while because I had no …
First off, someone's created a trojan horse program that affects unlocked Apple iPhones. By definition, you can't install anything on an iPhone unless you crack it, so the impact of this is potentially smaller than it could be. At any rate, it pretends to be a patch for v1.1.3 of the iPhone firmware. It doesn't do anything until you try to uninstall it (because it doesn't look like it does anything), at which time it will take any copies of OpenSSH and Erica's Utilities with it when it goes. While the original website that offered this utility is …
Lyssa pointed me at an article that brought up something that never occurred to me - how libraries manage the limited amount of space they have for all of their materials. This is to say, they keep track of how often each book is checked out (much easier to do since card catalogues and patron records went digital in the mid 1990's) and if it isn't touched for longer than a certain time, they either throw the books out (dumpster diving at the local library is how I got most of my books when …
A major precedent has been set in net.law following Apple losing its lawsuit against Apple Insider and O'grady's Power Page. In those lawsuits, Apple sued to uncover the identities of the people who leaked information about an audio playback device that Apple was going to release at some point (I think it was supposed to be the iPod Nano - I don't follow Apple news), and stated that amateur news sites and writers are not covered by the laws that protect professional journalists. The court, however, decided that there is no reliable test that can be used to distinguish legitimate …