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| Notice: GeekPress is back up and running, thanks to Paul! It's still a not-so-serious tech news blog, but the format is significantly looser. Diana, having given up programming for philosophy, has her own philosophical blog NoodleFood. More of her work can be found at DianaHsieh.com. |
| Hackers hijack Net traffic in attack |
| 1:51:44 am mst / 21 January 2001 found by paul / filed in internet / source MSNBC 65 hits / 0 comments / 1 e-mail |
| By exploiting errors in the DNS of the web hosting firm MyDomains.com, clever hackers were able to divert traffic from Yahoo.com and Microsoft.com to convincing-looking imposter pages. Then when the unsuspecting surfers continued to click on additional links, they were diverted to two pay-per-click sites (Goto.com and SearchTraffic.com), yielding a total of 8 cents per click for the rogue webmaster. |
| 500,000+ clicks at $0.08 per click yields over $40,000 for the hacker(s). It might be worth it for the two paying sites to track down the rogue webmaster and disallow all clicks from his or her site. |
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| British Official Secrets Act "unsustainable" |
| 2:32:51 am mst / 21 January 2001 found by paul / filed in legal / source The Times 23 hits / 0 comments / 0 e-mails |
| British government officials are quietly acknowledging that their draconian Official Secrets Act is "unsustainable", particularly in the wake of the recent publication in Russia of a new book by former MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson which reveals some of the methods and secrets of the British intelligence services. Although British newspapers are currently banned from publishing excerpts from the book, it is easily available from Amazon. Plus, according to a government spokesperson, the attorney general "recognises that with the internet there's almost no way to keep these disclosures quiet". |
| If only the US government were to come to the same conclusion. Fortunately, the American version of the law was vetoed by President Clinton last year. I just hope it doesn't rear its ugly head in the new Bush administration. |
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| Is the future nano? |
| 7:11:03 am mst / 21 January 2001 found by paul / filed in nanotechnology / source Nanodot 70 hits / 0 comments / 0 e-mails |
| An excellent and accessible overview of chemical nanotechnology from chembytes. "Even with our current rudimentary chemical nanotechnology, it has been possible to fabricate a surprising range of simple nanomachines. These include abacuses, batteries, brakes, gears, plugs, rotors, ratchets, sensors, shuttles, sockets, switches and wires". The abacus, the rotor, and logic gates are then discussed at greater length. (Link from Nanodot.) |
| It looks like this field is about to enter the steep upward portion of the usual "S-shaped" technology growth curve. The next 10-20 years should be very exciting. |
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| GeekPress upgrade |
| 9:20:29 am mst / 21 January 2001 found by paul / filed in geekpress / source GeekPress 38 hits / 0 comments / 0 e-mails |
| The GeekPress server will be down for a little while today while Diana upgrades the RAM. But it will be back up soon. |
| I remember when 128 meg was a huge amount of space for a hard drive. Now it's just a minor RAM upgrade. |
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| Oops, wrong number |
| 10:02:47 pm mst / 21 January 2001 found by paul / filed in business / source Salon 47 hits / 0 comments / 0 e-mails |
| The Bahamas' government-run telephone company had to recall all 175,000 of its 2001 telephone directories because the front cover displayed the URL of a porn site (www.XXX.com). This has since escalated "into the Bahamas' biggest political scandal". The perpetrator of the presumed prank is still unknown. |
| The most amusing part was the fact that the telephone company employees had to work all weekend using black markers to cross out the offending URLs by hand on each book before redistributing them to the public. As one local resident said, "This makes no sense... We all know about the site." |
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