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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. |
| Sysadmin = Hacking? |
| 1:35:15 am mst / 20 February 2001 found by paul / filed in legal / source Rediff 53 hits / 0 comments / 0 e-mails |
| TBTF pointed us towards this story about a bizarre loophole in Indian computer law. Two owners of an Indian web-hosting business have been jailed because they shut off the website of a customer whom they claimed had defaulted on his payments. The angry customer then filed charges with the police claiming that the two men were "hackers", because Indian law defines hacking as any act which "destroys or deletes or alters any information residing in a computer resource or diminishes its value or utility or affects it injuriously by any means". As TBTF notes, "Thus a simple dispute over nonpayment for services, the kind that is resolved every day with the exchange of a few lawyerly letters, was immediately escalated to a felony charge under India's new IT law." |
| The Law of Unintended Consequences rears its ugly head... |
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| Harvard scientist outlines unbreakable code |
| 3:58:32 am mst / 20 February 2001 found by paul / filed in cryptography / source NY Times 106 hits / 1 comment / 0 e-mails |
| A Harvard computer scientist claims to have invented a cryptography system that can be proven to be mathematically unbreakable. |
| His system is essentially a one-time pad cleverly plucked from a continuously generated stream of publically available random numbers. But as Bruce Schneier points out, it's not clear that this sort of provably secure code will make that much practical difference because would-be crackers will simply choose some other point of attack. |
| read 1 comment |
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| Breasts in Space |
| 4:52:05 am mst / 20 February 2001 found by diana / filed in science / source Ananova 330 hits / 0 comments / 0 e-mails |
| Ananova reports that the folks over at New Scientist have bravely answered a question about the effect of zero-gravity on a woman's breasts. (The answer to the question hasn't yet been posted to The Last Word though.) |
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| Secret Messages Come in .Wavs |
| 9:01:32 am mst / 20 February 2001 found by paul / filed in cryptography / source Wired 90 hits / 0 comments / 0 e-mails |
| According to the article, "U.S. government agencies, including the NSA and the Pentagon, are quietly funding research into steganalysis: the study of detecting hidden messages inserted into MP3 or JPEG files." |
| Curious, especially given that the NSA claims that it can't keep up with technology developments. (Thanks to Steven Den Beste and MetaFilter for the link.) |
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| Mobile phone "paintball" game to debut in Sweden |
| 11:31:34 am mst / 20 February 2001 found by paul / filed in games / source Dallas Morning News 91 hits / 0 comments / 0 e-mails |
| The startup company It's Alive will debut a new high-tech mobile phone game that takes advantage of global positioning technology. The mobile phone screens will display the nearby scenery as if the players had stumbled across a secret network of aliens trying to take over the world. Players "will track and shoot each other with their cell phones in a kind of high-tech paint ball", with the positioning technology used to determine if they're close enough to score a hit. |
| It's a pretty clever idea. I just hope too many people don't start playing this game on their phones while driving... |
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| Top ten reasons for old e-mails to disappear |
| 2:12:09 pm mst / 20 February 2001 found by diana / filed in internet / source ZDNet 286 hits / 2 comments / 0 e-mails |
| A nice list of the dangers of lingering e-mails, along with some juicy examples. |
| I save all of my e-mail, but I'm sure that the FBI doesn't care about my well-documented plans to assasinate despotic world leaders. :-) |
| read 2 comments |
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| PGP Creator Bolts to Hush |
| 4:21:27 pm mst / 20 February 2001 found by diana / filed in cryptography / source Wired 48 hits / 0 comments / 0 e-mails |
| Phil Zimmermann, creator of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is leaving Network Associates to become cryptographer-in-chief at for Hush Communications (best known for Hushmail). |
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| Best high-tech hotel in Manhattan |
| 7:07:31 pm mst / 20 February 2001 found by paul / filed in business / source Wired 83 hits / 0 comments / 0 e-mails |
| One travel agent said, "The trendy tech people think they want to stay at W, The Mercer or the Roger Williams. But if they express a burning need to have access to fast Internet and other tech offerings, I steer them to the Holiday Inn Wall Street." Click through to find out why. |
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| Science vs Censorship |
| 7:22:12 pm mst / 20 February 2001 found by diana / filed in science / source The Daily Camera 161 hits / 0 comments / 0 e-mails |
| A elementary school student in Boulder conducted a very interesting science experiment on race bias in kids versus adults, but had her project yanked by teachers because of worries that it might make some people uncomfortable. (The results, found in the article, were pretty surprising!) |
| Normally, we don't repeat Slashdot stories, but this one was too good to pass up. |
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