Views Archive
Spammers Using Sender ID
Spammers have started publishing their own Sender ID records, allowing their email to speed through anti-spam filters, according to this IDG News Service article. Sender ID works by providing out-of-band notification of what IP addresses are authorized to originate email…
Wi-Fi Wars
A battle over Wi-Fi rights is being waged at the University of Texas in Dallas. This week, the university banned students at the Waterview Apartment complex from installing their own 802.11b or 802.11g wireless access points. The reason? The university…
Fly-Powered Robot
If this is what autonomous robotics has come to, count me out. The robot known as Ecobot II will generate its own energy by catching and digesting flies in a special reactor cell that generates electricity. The robot’s energy source…
Vonage Falls Down on 911
Ben Smith writes in Slate about a problem he had when he dialed 911 on his Vonage phone.What’s surprising here, though, is that Vonage makes a big deal about its 911 service. When I got my Vonage phone, the company…
Singularity
Bruce Sterling writes in Wired about the Singularity– that hard to imagine sci-fi future event that is supposed to be a sort of boundary between the human and the transhuman, a time when ever accelerating change overtakes everything and, some…
NASA Probe Crashes in Utah Desert
The planned recovery of a capsule carrying solar-wind particles from NASA’s Genesis deep-space mission went awry this morning. The capsule failed to deploy its parachutes and slammed into the desert near the Air Force’s Utah Test and Training Range at…
California Sues Diebold Over Voting Machines
The San Jose Mercury News and various other sources report that California Attorney General Bill Lockyer has joined a false-claims lawsuit against Diebold, the manufacturer of a touch-screen voting system purchased by several counties in the state.The civil suit was…
Two Processors for Twice the Price?
Advances in semiconductor manufacturing are making it easier to etch two or more processors onto a single piece of silicon. For the last year or more, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett-Packard have been building such “multi-core” chips for use in…
Human Bar Codes
Days after 9/11/01, New Jersey surgeon Richard Seelig didn’t want to take any chances that his body could be lost in a disaster. After seeing the firefighters writing their social security numbers on their forearms, he knew there must be…
When Identical Twins Aren't
According to this article in USA Today, Cellmark is trying to develop a DNA identification technique that could distinguish identical twins using micro-mutations that occur after the egg has split. It’s needed to help settle some criminal cases where the…
