Archive: May, 2004
“Wired is running an article about a seven-year, $250 million revamping of the US Army’s uniforms. One of the major obstacles is going to be how to power all the electronic devices that the soldiers will use. ‘They have at least one idea, though. “Avoid the use of Microsoft Windows operating systems,” a recent memo on the subject directed. FFW is going open source. Cleaner software needs less energy to run.’”
Oxfam is launching a music download service to help raise money to fight poverty around the world.
The charity will offer 300,000 songs to download through its Big Noise Music website, which launches on Wednesday.
Tracks will cost between 75p and 99p, with 10p going to Oxfam. Stars who have backed the site include Coldplay, Faithless and The Darkness.
“Artists will see their music help some of the poorest people in the world,” Oxfam’s Adrian Lovett said.
The service - backed by digital music firm OD2 - will be available across Europe, although songs will be priced in sterling…More
My transatlantic call with my little sister at Smith College in Northampton, MA, starts with her recurring complaint about the campus food. This week, it seems, there’s a shortage of fresh fruit. Normally, as the long-distance seconds tick by, I’d be tempted to ask her about more serious issues. But this time I’m happy to listen: our hour-long call, placed over the Internet from my computer in Riga, Latvia, to her computer in Northampton, is using a free program called Skype and is costing us nothing.
When I start up Skype to call my sister, the software links my PC with the computers of other Skype users who also happen to be online. In this case, one of them is my sister, 6,500 kilometers away. Our voices are broken into digital packets that hopscotch from computer to computer until they reach their destinations, where they’re reassembled into astonishingly clear audio.
The peer-to-peer strategy used by Skype is very similar to that of the Internet file-sharing systems, such as the original Napster, that have become the bane of the music industry. Indeed, the creators of Skype Niklas Zennstrof Sweden, Janus Friis of Denmark, and a set of expert programmers in Estonia and elsewhere are largely the same team that unleashed Kazaa, the music-sharing program perhaps most loved by music swappers and most reviled by music corporations. So it’s only natural that Zennstr and Friis, who have given away more than 10 million copies of their new software to users in more than 170 countries since launching Luxembourg-based Skype Technologies in August 2003, would be anointed by some as Davids aiming their high-tech slingshot at the Goliaths of the telecom world…More
Ever wonder why, despite a new federal antispam law, you’re still getting e-mail from African widows eager to download $25 million into your bank account - for a small fee?
So is Congress. That’s why lawmakers are revisiting the 2003 CAN-SPAM Act, only five months after it took effect.
There are signs that the new law is not stemming the flood of unwanted e-mail - and may even have increased it by preempting stricter state laws.
Spam - or unsolicited commercial e-mail - is the new weapon of choice for those engaged in fraud and deception, according to the Federal Trade Commission, and its volume is increasing at staggering rates. In 2001, spam accounted for 8 percent of all e-mail. Today, industry experts say it accounts for anywhere from 64 percent to 83 percent of all e-mail over the Internet - and is beginning to surge as text messages on cellphones and pagers…More
Can it get any more bizarre? Only a few weeks before Washington’s long-promised hand-over of the keys to Iraq, we discover that the lackey the Pentagon only recently had in mind to manage this very valuable property for the United States is suspected by us of being a world-class con artist and, worse, a spy for America’s enemies in Iran.
Nobody is speaking on the record yet, but U.S. intelligence officials are making it clear to a variety of preeminent news sources that Ahmad Chalabi, a longtime darling of the neoconservatives who dragged the U.S. into this war, not only fed Western intelligence sources false information about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq but is accused of having passed on U.S. secrets to Iran, possibly through his security and intelligence chief, who is now a fugitive.
“This is a very, very serious charge,” Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska said on Sunday, noting that his Senate Intelligence Committee will be investigating it. “There were a number of us who warned this administration about [Chalabi]… But the fact is, there were some in this administration, some in Congress who were quite taken with him.”…More
After a lot of red tape, Briana Lane has her skull back in one piece. The 22-year-old woman was injured in an auto accident in January, and doctors temporarily removed nearly half her skull to save her life.
But for nearly four months afterward, the piece of bone lay in a hospital freezer across town - and Lane had to wear a plastic street hockey helmet - because of a standoff with Medicaid and the hospital over who would cover the surgery to make her whole again.
The surgery finally came through after an excruciating wait, during which she suffered extreme pain just bending down and would wake up in the morning to find that her brain had shifted to one side during the night.
“When you think of weird things happening to people you don’t think of that,” Lane said. “It’s like taking out someone’s heart - you need that!”…More