Slashdot Mirror

Kiyyik writes "Google just announced the details behind their inaugural fiber optic service in Kansas City. They're doing a set of packages including $120/month for tv plus internet, $75/month for internet alone, and regular 'conventional' internet for a one time $300 fee. Rollouts are starting in the central areas and will work their way out on a demand basis: at least ten percent of a neighborhood must sign up for the service before Google will come in and start hanging fiber." Update: 07/26 22:04 GMT by T : Nick Kolakowski points out at GeekNet's Slash Cloud that this Google will probably hinge future developments on how well the Kansas City push works.

New submitter Kiyyik writes "After weeks of wrangling over shared space on utility poles, Google and the KC Board of Public Utilities have gotten their act together and Google is starting to wire Kansas City, Kansas today. They will be paying attachment fees and hanging the fiber optic lines in the space on the poles reserved for telecommunications. The Kansas City, Missouri side is still on track to begin a few months behind the Kansas side."

rick446 writes "In late 2009 SourceForge embarked on a plan to 'reboot' our developer tools on an open platform including Python, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, and SOLR. The result was the Allura platform, and was released under the Apache License in February 2011." Note: Slashdot and SourceForge are both part of Geek.net.

Luminary Crush writes with this excerpt from PhysOrg about the permanance of leaving Earth for Mars, at least for early travelers: "The first astronauts sent to Mars should be prepared to spend the rest of their lives there, in the same way that European pioneers headed to America knowing they would not return home, says moonwalker Buzz Aldrin. '[the distance and difficulty is why you should] send people there permanently,' Aldrin said. 'If we are not willing to do that, then I don't think we should just go once and have the expense of doing that and then stop.'" On the other hand, maybe they'll catch a ride back with Carrie-Anne Moss.

spagiola writes "The Dilbert.com website just got an extreme makeover. Gone is the old, rather clunky but perfectly functional, website, replaced by a Flash-heavy website that only Mordac the Preventer of Information Services could love. Users have been pretty unanimous in condemning the changes. Among the politer comments: 'Congrats. Vista is no more lonely at the top in the Competition For The Worst Upgrade In Computing Industry, this web site upgrade being a serious contender.' You have to register to leave comments, but many seem to have registered for the express purpose of panning the new design."

ricst writes "Google is, as we all know, King of the Hill. But Yahoo, MSN and others have come a long ways towards catching up as this International Herald Tribune article describes. The gap between 'best' and 'next best' has narrowed substantially. The good thing is that we all benefit as these guys keep challenging each other."

ezodon asks: "I have been tasked by management to submit a plan on creating a wireless hot-spot in several of our locations. Management would like to be able to charge for the wireless access from our customers. Because of the desire to charge, I have not been able to find any Open Source software, and just a few commercial offerings. I have checked out PublicIP and LessNetworks wireless management software, but neither has a direct billing option. We already have a merchant account and credit card machines at all of our locations. Can anyone in Slashdot land give me some recommendations on how to get this done?"

NonNullSet writes "Minutemen ICBMs were deployed in the early 1960s, and grew to over 1000 in number. They were allegedly protected from a "rogue launch" by an approach known as PAL (Permissive Action Link). The PAL required that the correct 8-digit launch code be entered by the missiliers before the missile would establish ignition. What if all the PAL codes had been set to '00000000,' and 'everyone' in the Strategic Air Command knew it? That is unbelievably what happened, as described in this article from the Center for Defense Information. Not exactly a great example for getting people to choose difficult passwords!"

NonNullSet writes "Who would have thought that that something new could be said about how best to select passwords? Ross Andreson of Cambridge University and some of his colleages have performed new empirical studies and found some pretty non-intuitive results. For example: 1. The first folk belief is that users have difficulty remembering random passwords. This belief is confirmed. 2. The second folk belief is that passwords based on mnemonic prases are harder for an attacker to guess than naively selected passwords. This belief is confirmed. 3. The third folk belief is that random passwords are better than those based on mnemonic phrases. However, each appeared to be just as strong as the other. So this belief is debunked. 4. The fourth folk belief is that passwords based on mnemonic phrases are harder to remember than naively selected passwords. However, each ap- peared to be just as easy to remember as the other. So this belief is debunked. 5. The fifth folk belief is that by educating users to use random passwords or mnemonic passwords, we can gain a significant improvement in security. However, both random passwords and mnemonic passwords suffered from a non-compliance rate of about 10% (including both too-short passwords and passwords not chosen according to the instructions). While this is better than the 35% or so of users who choose bad passwords with only cursory instruction, it is not really a huge improvement. The attacker may have to work three times harder, but in the absence of password policy enforcement mechanisms there seems no way to make the attacker work a thousand times harder. In fact, our experimental group may be about the most compliant a systems administrator can expect to get. So this belief appears to be debunked."

NonNullSet asks: "I am having trouble finding a truly programmable mouse for Linux. I'm a longtime (read older) computer user and have to use an ergonomic mouse (http://www.evoluent.biz) to work on Windows. I would like to find something similar (vertical shape, if possible, programmable buttons) for Linux, but haven't had any luck. Have any Slashdot readers been successful at finding/using programmable ergonomic hardware on Linux? Vertical shape plus click and hold would be excellent!"

Daniel_Staal writes "Apple's recent release of their music download service created quite a discussions here on /., with a lot of opinion and speculation. In light of this I thought I'd poke around, kick the tires, and see how it actually works." Staal's review follows. The Wall Street Journal also has a review. Daniel_Staal continues:

First, the disclaimer: I'm an Apple supporter, having used them as my desktop system since my parents got a IIe back when they were new. I run several Unix servers, but my desktop of choice has always been Apple. Also, while I like listening to music, I'm no audiophile, and can't usually tell the difference between a 192kbps MP3 and the CD it is encoded from. My best speakers are on my computer, and they are Monsoon flat panel 3-piece set.

Ok, on to the review. iTunes Music Store requires the new version of iTunes of course, for which Apple has updated the brushed metal interface again (Apple, why do you come up with this great Aqua interface and then never use it?). My first stop on any new program is always the preferences, and Apple's added some new options for this version: "Sharing" and "Store." I don't have any other computers worth streaming music too, so that's off, and I turn off the one-click shopping. I like having a shopping cart.

The store itself is presented as a special playlist in iTunes, just click and it connects. It presumes a fairly wide iTunes window, wider than I usually use, but the stuff I wanted was all on the left side so I'm fine. The default store layout is obviously Amazon-inspired: new additions, up and coming, editor's picks, and most popular all being highlighted. Genre is a pull-down menu on the top left: all the picks change and the background color. Click on an album to view it in a two-pane view: info above and songs below. There are easy links back at any point, or up the hierarchy. Double click on a song to hear the preview (not just the first 30 seconds, they seem to actually choose them).

That's the basics. There are two levels of search: the search box in iTunes and a Power Search available from inside the store. The Power Search lets you search by song, artist, album, genre, and composer. Users of Limewire will find it familiar. Clicking Browse puts up three panes across the top: genre, artist, album. Once an album is selected the songs are available below.

On to the interesting stuff: actually buying songs. I select a song I've got a poor p2p copy of and click buy, and it asks me to sign in with my Apple ID, or create one if I don't have one. This is where I have my first problem. I have an Apple ID, but entering it puts up a message saying I've never used it with iTunes Music Store before (well, duh) and asks me to review the terms and conditions. Then it directs me to the account creation screen, with my info already filled in.

Of course, the account creation screen won't let you create a duplicate account, and asks me to log in. Can we say endless loop? How about bug that should be fixed?

I create a new email address, and make a new account. No problem. Log in, select the song and a couple others. Click "Buy Song," enter credit card info (which is then saved into the account, on Apple's server) and the songs download quickly. I had one more blip: one song had trouble downloading (I assume server load) and was told to try again later, with a menu option. It worked several hours later.

The selection is broad, but not yet very deep. Many albums I found are in partial status, with only one or two songs. Several artists I was looking for were not listed at all. Considering this is just roll-out that isn't a major issue (they weren't big artists, at least not in the U.S.). Everyone should be able to find at least some of their picks available.

Also, some albums are listed as "Explicit" or "Clean." Notice I said "albums": if one song in an album has a label they all seem to, though I didn't do an exhaustive search. Since this is structured as song-centric, I feel they should have labeled on a song-by-song basis.

Enough with the marketing stuff, this is /. The files, as was mentioned in the announcement, are in AAC format. Let's see what we can do with that, shall we?

First options: inside iTunes. iTunes can convert one format to another normally, trying it on a 'protected' AAC file returns an error. Also, trying to burn an MP3 CD with one on the playlist just skips burning the AAC files (or returns an error if they are the only files.) Fair enough, we didn't really expect the capability to circumvent all controls to be built in... (Though you can of course burn regular CDs.)

Next, let's see what can be done with the file itself. They are saved, just like any other iTunes music file, in the iTunes music folder. The icon has a little lock on it, to indicate its 'protected' status. A few clicks later and the file is owned by guest:nobody chmod 777 and in a world readable folder. (Assigned to guest.)

So much for one definition of protection. [Ed: I renamed the file to .m4a (not protected) and set the permissions to the same as my other tracks, and iTunes would still not let me convert it to MP3.]

I can also play that file as another user on the same machine. I would try other machines, but I only have the one Mac at the moment.

The only other Mac player I can find that claims to play AAC is only for Mac OS v9, and does not appear to recognize the bought file, so no help there. I do however have an app that hijacks the audio stream before the speakers and allows you to play with equalizers, balance, etc. Oh, and it lets you save the result as an MP3 as well as playing it through the speakers.

I fire it up and a few minutes later I have an MP3 that I can't tell from the AAC. So much for that definition of protection.

Is this service for everyone? Probably not if you are a hard-core audiophile and can tell the difference between a 128kbps ACC and the original, but for most of us: it works. I can do what I want with the file, even get it to MP3 if I need it, though it is hard enough that I have to actually think about doing it (which means I won't do it unless I need to). I'd love it if it were cheaper, but I probably would not buy twice as many songs at half the price. Finding songs is easy, buying them is easy. (For reference: $0.99 per song does not include taxes, taxes will be listed in the invoice you are emailed.)

I'll probably spend too much money there.

Milican writes "'It's easy to have a complicated idea," Carver Mead used to tell his students at Caltech. "It's very, very hard to have a simple idea...And now one of Mead's simplest ideas--a digital camera should see color the way the human eye does--is poised to change everything about photography. Its first embodiment is a sensor - called the X3 - that produces images as good as or better than what can be achieved with film.'" We had a previous story about Foveon last February.

spagiola writes "CNN has a brief story about Voyager I continuing on past Pluto, and about the problems of keeping in touch with it as it keeps heading further away. They've activated a spare sun sensor and star tracker. I wonder: would it make sense to send out another probe after it, to relay messages to/from it?"

Milican writes "I think its time we ask our fellow Slashdotters, 'is there still room in a company for a quirky 'guru', or are projects so large now by necessity team-based development rules.' Read this article on Embedded.com and decide for yourself." I think this article didn't describe someone really 'quirky' though - it was someone who didn't really want to work.

VeniDormi asks: "While watching TV on my TiVo, I actually stopped to see an ad for a device called 'The TeleZapper', which claims to foil tele-marketers by convincing their auto-dialers that your number has been disconnected. The FAQ is light on technical details, only mentioning that the device 'emits [a] tone briefly when the line is answered'. I'm hoping Slashdotters with more telecommunications expertise can enlighten me as to: how/if this might work and whether or not it is something I could reproduce with a sound card, say for recording at the beginning of my voicemail message. Could it be as simple as playing back the three shrill tones I hear when I dial a wrong number?" Ah, the telephone equivalent to SPAM. Too bad phones don't have the equivalent of procmail filters.

IPSection asks: "I have been looking for a way to sync my PDA or Outlook to my cell phone (a Panasonic EBTX210). The serial data cable didn't come with any software (of course) and the only commercial solution I see is software called FoneSynch from Paragon Software (Windows only). Is there any free/shareware software for Windows/Linux that allows this functionality? Come on all you cell phone users - don't tell me you type in all of those numbers manually?" We've handled this question in a couple of earlier articles before, however there doesn't seem to be an all-in-one utility that once can use to extract your messages/address-book from your phone (or to allow you to set your phone from your PIM, for example). Many utilities focus on a specific line of phones (like Gnokii, which only works on Nokia phones) and others only work if your phone supports GSM or CPDP. If no all-in-one solution exists, what utilities have you found useful in keeping it all together?

grytpype writes: "According to this story, a team of astronomers have determined (based on their observations of distant quasars) that [certain physical constants] may have been different in the far past of the universe. The discovery (if validated) is said to be good news for string theorists."

Alowishus writes: "Looks like it's the end of the road for Webvan. Their website appears to be down, and Oakland local news reported employees clearing out their possessions from the company's warehouse. A press conference is scheduled for Monday." First kozmo.com, now this -- I'm giving up hope on ultra-cheap delivery by web as a business model to support my retirement fund. Perhaps Peapod can buck the trend, though.

Johan Jonasson writes "Scientists have found the "switch" that allows a firefly to light up its body. The beetle flashes the "lantern" on its abdomen to attract a mate. Researchers have long understood how the light is generated but the control mechanism used by the insect has been a mystery. Now, a US team has been able to show that the simple molecule nitric oxide acts as the on-off "button"."

Brock Tellier writes "The old adage 'The only safe computer is locked in a room and unplugged from the Internet' proves false. According to a recent security report about Logitech wireless mice and keyboards, an attacker can sit a hundred feet or more from your computer and 'sniff' the data from your keyboard and mouse. Scary." Scary indeed! Having just purchased one of these, and finding them immensely conveinient such news is disheartening. Are there easy ways in which Logitech might be able harden any new models against this? How difficult are these things to sniff, and what kind of hardware would one need to do so? Obvious security tip: if you have these keyboards attached to machines that may access secure data, consider moving them back to the wired standbys until a more secure wireless options present itself.

Alowishus writes: "IBM is going to make one of its high-end zServer mainframes available for free to the public for development and testing of Linux applications. It has 10 CPUs and 2.1TB of storage, and will offer TurboLinux or SuSE distributions set up as virtual servers. It's expected to support about 1,000 simultaneous users." However, hold your horses just a bit: Registration is not yet open, the accounts are good only for a limited time, and the site lists other conditions details, though none sound onerous. Among other things, "once a user is registered and approved to access a LCDS system, a user is required to have direct Internet connection, via a Telnet and SSH client." Though there have been other free sandbox accounts, having an account on an S/390 would be sweet, eh?

TWX_the_Linux_Zealot asks: "Recently I realized that I hadn't heard anything new regarding AMD processors and SMP, which had occasionally been mentioned on various tech news sites. There is no mention of such chipsets on AMD's Website, or on any of the motherboard manufacturers that I would have expected at least a press release from, such as ASUS, Gigabyte, or Abit Does anyone know what's going on?"

sumdumgai noted that Compaq is now selling preconfigured Linux Clusters if you happen to have any weather patterns sitting around needing to be analyzed or something. But this is a pretty substantial bit of heft behind Linux as a valid Clustering platform, as well as an easier way to get one.

Acheon writes: "The CPS-2 arcade board from Capcom uses some hard encryption scheme that has been a very hot issue in emulation for years. Yet finally the code was broken Final Burn, a quite recent arcade emulator, showed concrete results by running previously unsupported games such as Street Fighter Zero using decrypted ROM images. The CPS-2 Shock Team, who managed to reverse engineer the process for scratch, really outdone themselves and it is a very uncommon achievement." Thanks to Jamie for also pointing out more info.

calags noted that CNN is reporting that the very cool "Cosmos" is finally going to be available on DVD. I'm curious to see how well the 20-year-old mini- series has aged. I loved it when I was little tho. They're also going to air an hour "Highlights" show on PBS.

Acheon asks: "I recently learned to use LaTeX recently and I wondered why it couldn't be turned into the next standard for online documents. After all, most features of LaTeX make it either easier or more powerful than HTML, such as pagination (pure HTML 4.0 is a nightmare to code by hand) and scientific notation. It is much more suited for scripting, much more standard and readable, as well as more versatile. Also, HTML to LaTeX transcription is already feasible, so the only big feature missing for LaTeX to be supported in browsers would be linking, perhaps object embedding. On the other hand I don't know of any project going into that direction, what is most of a surprise to me given the huge interest for LaTeX and the omnipresence of such documents in many areas."

Johan Jonasson cites a story at Wired which reads in part: "Low vision can't be corrected with medical procedures, glasses or contact lenses. But a new product from Microvision that uses lasers to 'paint' rows of pixels directly onto the eye is helping people with low-vision see clearly again." "The device, called Nomad, consists of two pieces: a small control module worn clipped on to a belt, and the head-worn display. The control module receives a video signal from a computer -- a desktop, laptop or a wearable computer -- which processes this signal to drive a low-power laser. The light is then scanned by a small mirror to create images." Essentially, it's the same type of display that many wearables come with, but with the image enhanced to compensate for the low-vision user's greater needs.

Alowishus writes: "Open Projects Net, the IRC network which is home to Debian and other open source projects, has been suffering DoS attacks from a disgruntled customer of one of their server sponsors. Lilo, their sysadmin describes the attacks here, and asks for assistance." It's pretty terrible when a kid goes bananas and can damage the volunteer efforts of many people working really hard to create and support something so many of us use and enjoy. The sad part is that whoever is doing this feels self-righteous and justified in his actions, so nothing any of us say will matter. I hope they catch him. DoS attacks just aren't cool, ever.

David Symonds asks: "CVS is great if you can commit after each significant change; however, if you have limited access (e.g. a dialup connection), this tends to make things sloppy. Are there any "CVS proxies" that can cache CVS commits locally, then send them on to the CVS server when you next connect to the Net?"

Vandermar asks: "AMD's 'PowerNow' promises to vary clock speed in 50mhz increments on the fly similar to Crusoe. If I remember correctly, Linus had to make changes to the Linux kernel to keep it from freaking out when the clock speed changed. Will the variable clock speed of AMD's new mobile chips require changes to the kernel (or will PowerNow need to be disabled)? How was the kernel modified to allow it to run on Transmeta chips?"

yet another coward writes: "According to a story in Internet Week, Deja.com is for sale. The company plans to sell the Usenet archive and the buying guide separately. This move might mean a comeback for the archive." So what's the going rate for 1,000,000 MMF posts?

King_B writes "Metallica is taking a stand against major universities by requesting a restriction on the use of Napster." I hear They Might Be Giants is gonna respond by going after universities that use NFS.

ebresie writes "Here's an interesting article about a new technology that is being developed by the IETF. It's being called itrace. This is basically an ICMP Traceback Messages." There's a lot in this to think about.

grytpype writes "According to a recent news article, a team of French researchers has reported that cells that develop in zero-G conditions fail to form critical "microtubules" needed for proper cell structure. The problem persists even after the affected cells are returned to gravity. The implications for long-term human space travel are interesting."

notacracker asks: "A friend and I are trying to learn about network security. I figure it would be more fun if we set up a two machine local area network, and practiced breaking in and detecting break-ins. But where to start ? It's easy enough to find a cookbook (eg O'Reilly) on security, but where is the equivalent to an O'Reilly book on cracking and actively defending a system? It sounds like someone has been toying with this idea over at ZDNet as well. You might want to check out their free-for-all hackfest on OpenHack.com (thanks to Tarsi for the link).

In this episode of slashback, there's more on NanoStuff, censorship in various forms and venues, and further proof that the word "upstart" uttered or tapped in computer journalism regarding Linux is ever so much twaddle. You have been warned.

Sorry, but the print doesn't get any smaller. If the recent release of the Foresight Institute's nanotech guidelines intriguing to you, you might want to check out the new forum for nanotech advances and issues. bento writes: "From the press release: "I'm happy to report that one of Foresight's long-term goals -- to have a way to meet online that truly works -- is now a reality at http://nanodot.org. We think of this site as our daily newspaper -- all the news that's fit to "print" -- combined with a continual Nanoschmooze discussion. No login is needed to read the site." For those who are interested in nanotechnology's social and technological implications, this site should prove a great resource in finding out what's up in the field of nanotechnology."

One man's trash is other people's trash, too. psxndc writes: "FGNOnline has the scoop about the Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association unveiling new packaging options for PC Games at their annual conference. It brings up the point about games with large documentation not fitting into smaller DVD-type Keep Cases, but wasn't the digital revolution supposed to cut down if not eliminate the need for paper in the first place?? Most game-box contents are a jewel-cased CD, some docs, some ads, and a whole lot of unused space? Why?" Well, in the bad old days of the CD longbox (which are not that long ago), the most commonly cited reasons for the box of mostly-air were 1) the space is helpful for marketing purposes (pictures and blurbs and artwork, oh my!) and 2) everyone's favorite eupehmism for shoplifting, "shrinkage." Probably the same rules apply; game makers want to "stand out on the shelf." But if CDs can handle the switch, I bet games can, too.

How will the children survive? CuriousGeorge113 writes: "In a major decision today, a Federal Appeals Court has struck down COPA (The Children's Online Protection Act). According to this ACLU Press Release, a federal appeals court has deemed the law unconstitutional in nature and 'impossible to establish one "community standard" by which Internet speech could be governed.' You can also see the official court case here."

And in news that can only be called related ... Rude Turnip writes: "It looks like Mattel, one of the most despised toy companies discussed on Slashdot, is sellling off its notorious Cyber Patrol censorware. Cyber Patrol's parent company, The Learning Co., which is also owned by Mattel, is being sold off separately. Mattel said they would like to concentrate on their "core competency" of toys. The lucky buyer of Cyber Patrol is the British firm, JSB Software Technologies, PLC, who paid $100 million. With people like Jamie McCarthy out there fighting these purveyours of censorship and great sites like peacefire.org, I bet JSB will soon realize they paid just a little too much :-)" Maybe it's just not a sellers market; the article indicating that Cyber Patrol was to be sold went up a few months ago.

In six years, Tux will be driving. xannax writes: "I just bought a new IWILL VD133 motherboard, and after the usual setup and such, popped in the configuration cdrom - and was suprised to see a Linux kernel boot up on the monitor. When the cd boots, it gives users without an fdisk'ed partition a chance to make disks for board and chipset config; but the neat thing is the use of Linux for the cd. I mean, two years ago, when I wore my "Penguin Power" t-shirt, most of the attention I got was from hockey fans. But just as the logo on the shirt has faded from repeated washing, the exact opposite has happened to the visibility of the Linux OS; it's gone from hackers and nerds only to mainstream. Great to see a company with a reputation like IWILL use Linux in this fashion."

Come sirrah Jack Straw! MrM writes: "An IDG.net story on CNN says that in the face of increasing pressure from privacy groups, business groups and Internet service providers (ISPs), the U.K. government is backing away from some of the more controversial aspects of its e-mail surveillance bill currently under consideration in the House of Lords." The controversy is mostly over little things like, oh, (from the article) "Under the provisions of the RIP bill, the U.K. government -- specifically the Home Office and its head, the Home Secretary -- can demand encryption keys to any and all data communications with a prison sentence of two years for those who do not comply with the order."

David Symonds asks: "We've all known our fair share of easter eggs, in the form of hidden screens or messages that are activated by a certain keystroke sequence, or clicking on a certain pixel, and so on. Easter Eggs have been around for ages, from the old "xyzzy" command for "Colossal Cave" (a text-based adventure), to that move in International Karate (for the C64) which would cause your opponents pants to drop, to the various "about:..." entries in Netscape. My question is, are Easter Eggs a dying breed, and has anyone found any good ones in open source software?" I've always thought that the best Easter Eggs in Free Software was found in the comments of the source-code. What was your favorite easter-egg? I remember the secret room from the Atari 2600 Adventure game, mainly because I had found that one all on my own.

bio2 asks "For the past year I've been trying to connect my Palm Pilot IIIe to the Internet. I saw in a few programs that use RAS services in NT, and some that let you connect via linux ppp, but none of them work. I want to use the Palm Pilot base to send and receive data from my computer with the hotsync cable or base connection, and use icq, send and receive mails, and browse Internet pages. If I can do this, I can save money and not have to buy Palm modems. Is there a way to do that?"

Vanbo asks: "My job requires that I be in the field all day, and I don't have the ability to check my voicemail regularly, so I ask people to email me with problems, then I check my mail with Webmail. Lately, I have been thinking it would be much easier if people could post their problems (ala ask slashdot) to a webpage on our mailserver. I don't need something as powerful as slashcode, but just maybe something that allows them to select from pull downs of common problems, and then when they submit it, it could be emailed to me. Anyone, implimented a support system like this? Any draw backs to this approach?" Seems like a novel approach. Does this seem like a good idea to you?

In an attempt to amplify, revisit, correct or update some recent Slashdot stories, the following tidbits have been hand-trimmed for your reading pleasure. I hope you like them. (Read more.)

Library of Congress will have online items o'plenty. franimal wrote in reaction to the report that the Library of Congress does not plan to digitize its collection. "Even though reading online may be 'mindless,' 'isolating,' 'lonely' and 'arrogant' the Library of Congress plans to have 5 million 'items' posted by the end of the year."

Twice as close to the middle of nowhere. HerringFlavoredFowl pointed out that "Ikonos 1 has just raised the bar on Area 51 images. As we all remember, terraserver just released a set of two meter images taken in 1998. Space Imaging snapped this set on April 4th, 2000. The Federation of American Scientists [has posted] a wonderful side by side interpretation of these images. Thank you John Pike for clueing me in on the FAS update. Space.com also has some color images and an the steps Mr. Pike went through to obtain these images. "

One lump or two? Or three? Scott Marks and hordes of fellow travelers let us know that "The US DOJ U.S. v. Microsoft web site has all the gory legal details on the Proposed Final Judgment as well as a number of other interesting tidbits. Not the least is the ability to comment on the trial directly: 'If you would like to send the Antitrust Division your comments on this case, please direct your correspondence to Microsoft.atr@usdoj.gov .'"

What kind of power is that? After the latest brouhaha both on Slashdot and in the rest of the world about the link between violence and video games, Jer Davis wrote: "The Tech Report has an article up written by Andy Brown dissecting some of the psychological studies that have been released recently regarding correlations between real-life violence and violent video games. ... This is a very important issue, and Andy does an excellent job at dissecting the very suspect results these studies have claimed."

And speaking of violence ... Deadli contributed the news that the secretary of education opposes mechanical profiling programs according to this Washington Post article. Perhaps he's been reading the reaction to Jon Katz' article on WAVE.

Once in a while, some good news slips through. In this case, it's from TheGreek, who wrote, "Jason Haas is out of the hospital and well on his way to recovering." Congratulations, Jason.

TreeRat sent us a Salon story by Simson Garfinkle about legit companies and spam. Its an interesting piece: it talks mostly about Caldera, but mentions several other offenders. The Spam in my INBOX is somewhere aroung 20-30 a day (mind you most of it is press releases from PR firm mailing lists, and random lists that "helpful" slashdot readers subscribed me to). Thank god for filters. But this is a problem we don't think as much about -- normally we think of spammers as slimeballs in basement sending out a hundred thousand emails advertising 'printer toner sale' or 'hot naked sluts want you' featuring 900 numbers and typos, not legitimate businesses.

Let's start this off with bio2's link to "the tube": an unrollable laptop:super crazy hardware. seizer sent us the most amusing firewall circumventer: a TCP/IP Email Tunnel. While on the subject of bizarre technology, John Petz sent us a webserver running on an Atari 800. Still not in shock? hool sent us a hack over at x42.com which uses the hostname as input to a calculator. tdunn linked us to a place that lists odd things found inside PC cases. It includes a *shudder* severed finger tip. For more wierd tech support, yeahbensteres submitted iamanidiot.com which has some tales that you may or may not believe. Pike sent us 94 Uses for Old Altoids Tins: Who eats 94 tins of altoids? Oh... wait. OwenF sent us linkage to the latest robotic pet craze. Look out AIBO, here comes Robotic Fish! Slashdot's own jamiemccarthy points us to TimeCube.com for all your wierd-science needs. You econ majors might be interested in Yhetti's link to the fortune-cookie market index. Bradley noted a story about a man who changed his name to 'Oxford University' to avoid domain squatting charges from Oxford University. If you have a mission:impossible scheduled next week, Dr. Manhattan sent us a link to a Swiss company that is developing self-destructing CDs. The CIA has some on back order. An anonymous reader pointed us to EarthKam, which has several really beautiful pictures of earth from space. Check out their top 10 ... if only they were bigger they'd make great background art. And finally for those of you who are sick of all the naughty language on TV, deepak saxena sent us a machine that claims it will filter all the damn swearing from TV and video. I'm waiting for a version that filters out Regis.

brockgr was the first to note that Perl 5.6.0 has been released and has begun propagating through CPAN. Anyone have a changelog or something I can link to?

Hai|_ Hai|_ writes "Linux vs. Linux? ZDNet has an interesting article about the potential for a forking of Linux distributions into incompatible OSes. " Nothing we haven't seen before, the article just basically says "Linux could fork". Well duh, welcome to open source. The bigger questions are 'Will it' and if it did, 'Would it matter?'

Alowishus asks: "A company called sevenval has an interesting, but obvious, use of Wildcard A-Records in the DNS to encode Web session management IDs in the hostname of the site. Interesting, because if you are using relative URLs on your site, you do not need to do anything (i.e. setting a cookie or appending GET parameters) after the initial redirect to maintain a user session. See www.fahrschulportal.de for an example. Sevenval is applying for a patent on this technique, and Kristian Kohntopp, the author of a PHP session management library, is looking for prior art. He would like to find uses of hostnames that encode state or session information. Has anyone seen this before? It's an exceptionally useful technique, and I'd hate to see its use restricted by another improper software patent. "

plaXion writes, "Here's a CNET.com story on how Lineo has taken major steps forward in its effort to sell Linux software for use in TV set-top boxes and other non-PC devices by signing agreements with six Taiwanese electronics manufacturers, Korean electronics giant Samsung, and Korean computing and communications firm DaiShin. In addition they have acquired Rt-Control, which is creating a version of Linux for devices even farther removed from regular computers such as cell phones, digital cameras and even cars. "

plaXion writes, "California's Transmeta Corp said on Monday Taiwan's key computer manufacturing industry was already adopting one of its new chips as a de facto industry standard for new mobile 'Web pads.'" It's a New York Times story, free registration required to read.

BlueBlade writes, "Inprise, formerly known as Borland (and now merging with Corel) has released their latest compiler for free. They said the move was to show support for the open source community. You can find the full article here. " It's Free Beer though. No source code, although such a release would really show their support for the Open Source Community.

Johan Jonasson writes "There's an excellent review of the ATI Rage Fury MAXX over at Tom's Hardware. For those unfamiliar with the product it's a monster graphics board with two Rage 128 PRO chips, each with isolated 32MBs of memory per chip which adds up to 64MB on one board. There's another review of the same board at Sharky Extreme. I've got to get me one of these. "

Johan Jonasson writes "Alan Cox has posted the first draft of the 2.3.x "Things to fix" list. Also known as "the stuff that has to be taken care of before 2.4 can come out". "