I logged into my PayPal account using Firefox 3.0+. I simply logged in, checked the balance, and logged out.
After I logged out, I sat in my chair trying to remember something else I wanted to do. While sitting there, my iSight camera came on for a second and then turned off. I was sitting in the dark. Otherwise, I may never have noticed it.
Anytime your MacBook Pro camera comes on without your knowledge is a serious problem in my view.
There is also the “creeps you out” factor.
The San Francisco Chronicle kind of thinks so…
Irrefutable evidence came to Palo Alto on Friday.
It was brown and fuzzy and looked very much like irrefutable evidence of a man in a gorilla suit.
But it wasn’t, said two Georgia hikers in baseball caps who rented a hotel meeting room to tell the world that they had found the dead body of the creature known as Bigfoot.
The hikers - Matt Whitton and Rick Dyer - found the body, they said, on a hiking trip about two weeks ago in northern Georgia. Unfortunately, they said, it was not possible to show the actual body. It’s in an icebox at an undisclosed location, awaiting a necropsy by a prestigious molecular biologist to be named later.
But the hikers did present three photographs of their find. The clearest one looked like a man in a gorilla suit.
The fuzziest one - the one that looked like a banana inside a tortilla - depicted what Whitton said was Bigfoot’s jaw. That photograph was airtight proof of the existence of something that looked like a banana inside a tortilla.
from The AP…
LONDON (AP) — Britain’s top court refused Wednesday to stop the extradition to the U.S. of a British hacker accused of breaking into Pentagon and NASA computers — something he claims to have done while hunting for information on UFOs.
Gary McKinnon, 42, faces charges in the United States for what officials say were a series of cyber attacks that stole passwords, attacked military networks and wrought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of computer damage.
I’ve noticed a problem with our special pages (About… for example).
After I upgraded ALL of our sites to 2.6, the pages broke. They are still there but an upgrade slash database slash retarded code monkey prevents them from being seen.
I am aware of the problem and will fix it as soon as I can.
iPhoto - 7.1.4
This update contains new holiday greeting card and postcard themes for use with Apple print products. It also addresses general compatibility issues, improves overall stability, and addresses a number of other minor issues.
iLife - 8.3
iLife Support provides system software components shared by all iLife ’08 applications. This update improves overall stability and addresses a number of other minor issues. It is recommended for all users for iLife ’08.
iMovie - 7.1.4
This update addresses general compatibility issues, improves overall stability, and addresses a number of other minor issues.
Did you ever want to know what each element on the Periodic Table of the Elements is?
Of course, you do. Thanks to Cali Lewis at geekbrief.tv for giving us this website. Check out Sodium. You won’t be disappointed.
via TechCrunch…
All Yahoo has to do to defeat Icahn is convince a majority of voting shareholders that he is wrong and not qualified to control the fate of the company via his hand-picked board. Taking the battle to the homepage shows how close it may turn out to be. Every single vote counts, and Yahoo is not shy about using its Web real estate to put up a sign arguing its case. It doesn’t say much for the editorial independence/neutrality of the homepage, but when you are fighting for your life those sorts of considerations are thrown out the window.
Update: Yahoo has already convinced one of its biggest shareholders, Legg Mason’s Bill Miller, who just announced that he will vote his 4.4 percent stake in Yahoo to support Yang and the current board. If Yahoo’s biggest shareholder, Gordon Crawford, does the same. It’s game over for Icahn.
It will show up in your auto downloads.
Neat. Not sure if it’s security related.
from The Washington Post…
Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.) called yesterday for better measures to protect government computers and cellphones from cyber-attacks after revealing that computers in his office and several others on Capitol Hill had been targeted in recent years by hackers thought to be based in China.
via Reuters…
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Alison DeLauzon thought the snapshots and home videos of her infant son were gone for good when she lost her digital camera while on vacation in Florida.
Then a funny thing happened: her camera “phoned home.”
Equipped with a special memory card with wireless Internet capability, DeLauzon’s camera had not only automatically sent her holiday pictures to her computer, but had even uploaded photos of the miscreants who swiped her equipment bag after she accidentally left it behind at a restaurant.
If you have the time, I strongly recommend listening to this podcast.
If you travel between the US and Canada, you may be surprised to know that the border guards may dig through your laptop looking for copy protected content and or child porn.
If the thought of this pisses you off, listen to this show.
The border conversation starts around 44 minutes into the show.
It’s worth a listen.
Download MP3 (right click and Save as…)
*** Thanks to Leo Laporte for the podcast.
From the Twitter Status Page that I just now found.
Concerning the IM system…
Wanted to provide an update on where we are in restoring services. The partial pagination fix we deployed appears stable. Some folks are still going to be missing Older links but we’re working to restore those.
IM remains offline today but we completed the testing of an important technology fix. Getting IM back for all users remains the top service we need to restore; we’re working on it.
The API limit is still being kept at 30 requests per hour to help us stabilize the service for everyone. Some folks will get “rate limit exceeded” error if you use API clients that request data from us at a higher rate. Please reconfigure them appropriately for the time being.
Interesting story from Wired this morning…
For now, though, optical computing remains a dream. The chips require crystals that channel photons as nimbly as silicon channels electrons — and though engineers have been able to imagine the ideal photonic crystal, they’ve been unable to build it.
Enter a beetle known as Lamprocyphus augustus. In a study published this week in Physical Review E, Purdue University researchers describe how the inch-long Brazilian beetle’s iridescent green scales are composed of chitin arranged by evolution in precisely the molecular configuration that has confounded the would-be fabricators of optical computers.
This is the dumbest thing I’ve heard so far this week.
It’s not tech but it’s really stupid.
from SFGate…
The Senate, by a 56-42 vote, defeated a Republican measure Tuesday that would have opened Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling and allowed states to drill off their shores. Democrats criticized the measure, saying the country can’t drill its way to energy independence and should focus instead on conservation and renewable energy.
I’m really not into the whole oil market thing. Let me ask you this.
If we get our own oil from our own country doesn’t that make us less dependent on Saudi oil and more dependent on our own oil.
Doesn’t that make us oil independent?
This is earth right?
via Digg via Yahoo! Tech…
One of Windows Vista’s biggest selling points was that it was the only way you could get DirectX 10, the software component that would be required to play the very latest video games in their full glory. Sure, you could still play games in DirectX 9, but the differences with DirectX 10, Microsoft promised, would be striking. (Check out this video showing the same scene under both systems and you’ll see what Microsoft was talking about. You can find loads of similar comparisons online.)
Games like Crysis benefit clearly from the DX 10 upgrade, but that benefit hasn’t been enough to push gamers into upgrading to Vista. Historically, those are the very first computer users, living on the bleeding edge, to upgrade to new hardware and operating systems. The statistics from Valve, whose Steam system lets gamers download titles from the web and which collects system information in return, shows that Vista still has less than a 15 percent market share among these users.
Great story.
A White Plains, NY woman who was the victim of burglary, including her MacBook, used the Back To My Mac screen sharing feature to turn on her webcam and capture images of the unwitting culprits using the computer. As a result, police were able to arrest the thieves and recover most of the stolen goods, which included two laptops, two flat-screen televisions, two iPods, gaming consoles, DVDs and computer games.
This plan first launched into action when a co-worker of the nameless woman at the Apple Store noticed her computer online and notified the woman. She was then able to log into her computer and the rest is history. So the moral of the story is this: If you steal a MacBook, please be sure to cover the iSight with some tape. Otherwise, you could also be charged with a second degree felony.
This is a cool story from Reuters…
BEIJING (Reuters) - Speeding drivers in south China are getting clear away thanks to machines which switch the numbers on their licence plates in seconds, state media said on Tuesday.
“More than 50 percent of cars caught on camera for speeding and other offences either cover up their plates or use a fake licence plate,” a traffic policeman in the Guangdong city of Yangjiang was quoted by the Beijing Youth Daily as saying.
“Our chances of capturing them is next to nil.”
The price of the remote-control device starts at around 800 yuan ($115), while a more advanced apparatus with the ability to flip over the numbers in less than three seconds costs more than double.
Mike Williams | 
Aug 27th, 2008| 
