Category: Technology

Most malware comes from legit sites

Most malware comes from legit sites, says researcher
According to data compiled by Websense Inc., 51% of the sites it classified as malicious in the second half of 2007 had been compromised and then seeded with attack code that infected unpatched machines visiting the URLs. The remaining 49% were “intentionally built for malicious intent,” the Websense report said. Keep you patches, virus and anti spyware up-to-date – “Shields Up”

Your Camera Phone As Scanner

scanR
scanR is a free service that lets you use your mobile camera phone or digital camera to clean photos of whiteboards, documents and business cards, extract the printed information, and get a digital file in your email, contact manager, or fax.

Slide Show of Specialized Cameras

Photos: Camera makers bring niches into focus | ZDNet Photo Gallery
With hundreds of models on the market, it can be tough to get your digital camera to stand out–heck, it can even be hard not to be overwhelmed by the 28 models Canon sells right now. One strategy employed by mainstream manufacturers and smaller rivals: specialize.

Ooops! – Server Worth $1.5 Million Wrecked by Forklift

PC World – Server Worth $1.5 Million Wrecked by Forklift
The accident happened in October, 2006. The server destined for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, was being transferred from a delivery truck to T.R. Systems’ warehouse in Alexandria, Virginia, near Washington, D.C. It was packaged in a crate on a pallet and held on a fork-lift truck’s prongs.

A report said that the rear wheels of the fork-lift truck encountered a step at the warehouse entrance. The truck rocked and so did the pallet: “the base of the pallet and the crate broke and the crate fell onto the curb, damaging the server packed inside.”

Block YouTube Ads

TubeStop :: Now I Have a Blog Too
Now that Google is trying to generate money from YouTube with embedded ads, you can stop them with  this plug0in for Mozilla’s FireFox Browser. TubeStop simply swaps out the site-based player for the embedded player, the ad-blocking feature is really just a happy coincidence. TubeStop is an extension for Mozilla-based Web browsers that disables the autoplay on YouTube videos. This means that you can open multiple YouTube videos in tabs in the background without them all starting to play at once. TubeStop also disables the autoplay on YouTube videos embedded on non-YouTube.com sites (MySpace, for example).

Free Net Phone Calls?

Get Your Free Net Phone Calls Here – New York Times
The price of home phone service has dropped 30 percent since 1999. Surely, say the analysts, that trend line will eventually plummet all the way to zero. Surely, thanks to the Internet’s ability to carry your voice, landline phone calls will soon be free.

Of all of these approaches to free Internet calling, T-Mobile, Jajah and Ooma come the closest to delivering the holy grail: free calling, to any phone number, from regular phones. Even they are not entirely without drawbacks — but they’re certainly enough to keep phone company executives awake at night.

Zoom liquid lenses for digital cameras

» Zoom liquid lenses for digital cameras | Emerging Technology Trends | ZDNet.com
Researchers at the University of Central Florida (UCF) have developed zoom lenses which closely replicate the working of the human eye. These adaptive lenses should be manufactured at a dramatically smaller size than conventional zoom lenses without compromising clarity. After being granted no less than 5 U.S. patents, the UCF team has licensed the technologies to a manufacturing company. So we might soon get better zoom lenses in our cell phones and digital cameras.

Unbeatable Checkers Computer

news @ nature.com – Checkmate for checkers – Computer program is unbeatable at English draughts.
Long-time world checkers champion Marion Tinsley consistently bested all comers, losing only nine games in the 40 years following his 1954 crowning. He lost his world championship title to a computer program in 1994 and now that same program has become unbeatable; its creators have proved that even a perfectly played game against it will end in a draw.

Jonathan Schaeffer and his team at the University of Alberta, Canada, have been working on their program, called Chinook, since 1989, running calculations on as many as 200 computers simultaneously. As Chinook has worked out all relevant lines of play, it needs virtually no time to ‘think’ to work out each perfect move in a game. The results were announced today in the journal Science1. The paper and supporting materials, including the ability to play Chinook, are available on the web at http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~chinook.