Technology News Feeds

Mozilla's "Snowl" hunts Twitter, RSS, and (soon) e-mail  

Mozilla wants to help us stay on top of our conversations online, no matter where they're occurring. Snowl is a new tool launched in Mozilla Labs that, while an extremely early prototype, shows some potential.

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Faking passport RFID chips for $120  

At the behest of the British newspaper The Times, a security researcher in Amsterdam has demonstrated that it's possible to upload new biometric data to a passport's RFID chip. There are methods to detect this sort of tampering, but most issuing countries haven't taken the steps needed to implement them, leaving a gaping vulnerability.

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Warner Music to rhythm games: pay up or the music gets it!  

Warner Music Group boss Edgar Bronfman said yesterday that music labels aren't "real" partners in the rhythm game market yet. Unless Warner sees more cash, it will be "hesitant" to license further tracks to Guitar Hero or Rock Band.

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Hands on: Rejaw melds microblogging with instant chat  

Rejaw is a new combination microblogging and chat service with a focus on conversation features and real-time, instant updates. This could be the truly useful evolution that microblogging needed.

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VMware Joining Linux Foundation  Virtualization leader VMware is joining the Linux Foundation, which could prove to be a boon to both the virtualization and open-source hypervisor communities. VMware has had its share of problems with the open-source community, including charges that it violated open-source code standards. But VMware is now giving away its ESXi hypervisor for free and some believe VMware could open-source the hypervisor, despite statements to the contrary from VMware executives.
- VMware is bringing its x86 virtualization know-how to the Linux Foundation and will begin contributing resources to the open-source community. VMware, which despite the added competition of Microsoft, Citrix and other vendors is still considered the leading developer of x86 virtualization techn...

Google Gmail, Google Apps Outage in the Cloud  Google Gmail and Google Apps messaging and collaboration services in the cloud suffered an outage of nearly 15 hours. Google Gmail and Google Apps users spent their time away from the messaging and collaboration platforms flogging the company on the Google Apps discussion group. Can Microsoft and other SAAS newcomers take advantage of these Google Gmail and Google Apps outages?
- Several Google users, some of them paying customers, found themselves knocked out of Google Apps and Gmail after an quot;access issue quot; knocked out the company's software as a service suite for 15 hours. The snafu, spanning from 2 p.m. EDT Wednesday afternoon to nearly 5 a.m. EDT Thursday mo...

Video Game Helps Young Cancer Patients Take Meds  Cancer patients stick to their medication regimen thanks to Re-Mission, a specially designed video game that teaches adherence to treatment plans. Re-Mission players control a tiny robot called Roxxi who moves around in a 3-D environment representing the inside of the body of a young cancer patient. Players can use Roxxi to blast cancer cells and control side effects, and winning the game requires taking chemotherapy drugs and antibiotics, using relaxation techniques, eating food, and keeping up with other types of self-care.
- NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Playing a specially designed video game can help adolescents and young adult cancer patients adhere more closely to their prescribed treatment, according to a report in the journal Pediatrics. quot;Targeted video games can help improve the lives of young people with...

High Oil Prices Spur Green, Energy-Efficient Desktops and Notebooks, Mobile Devices  Oil prices near $145 a barrel and high electricity bills mean electronics makers such as LG that develop green, energy-efficient products such as mobile devices, desktops and notebooks, and market them effectively to customers may get an edge in a gloomy global economy, firms say.
- SEOUL (Reuters) - These days when customers walk into electronics stores, the first question they ask is how much electricity the fridge, washing machine or laptop computer they are contemplating buying consumes. quot;Energy savings were not exactly a hot topic among customers last year, quot;...

Review: Edirol R-09HR & M-Audio MicroTrack II   Portable recorder expert Mark Nelson tests version 2 of the popular MicroTrack and R-09 recorders side by side at his Hawaiian guitar camp. Were the upgrades worth it? Listen to his exclusive audio examples and find out.

dekePod Episode 003: Don't Fear the Lab Mode   Color models like RGB and CMYK are frightening enough on their own. But the fact that there's one called CIEL*a*b* D50 (or just Lab), and Photoshop actually encourages you to use it, is terrifying. But Deke says not to worry. RGB and CMYK are for machines. The Lab mode is for you.

Noise Ninja Plugin for Aperture   PictureCode has released Noise Ninja for Aperture, and it's the latest in the series of Edit Plugins that expand Aperture's image editing abilities. In this podcast, Derrick Story talks with Joe Schorr about Noise Ninja, and about the new plugins resource page on Apple's web site.

Off to Beijing - An Interview with Derrick Story   On August 4, Derrick Story is boarding a plane to Beijing to work in the media center at the Summer Olympics. In addition to his job of helping photographers get their images out to the world, he'll be blogging, podcasting, and tweeting, not to mention capturing his own Olympic images. In this interview, Dan Brodnitz asks Derrick how he's preparing for this assignment.

Nokia N78  The unlocked Nokia N78's svelte design and assisted GPS separate it from a crowded field of smartphone competitors.

DiVitas Mobile Unified Communications solution  The DiVitas Mobile Unified Communications solution lets you seamlessly switch cell calls to Wi-Fi and back and gives your mobile phones PBX capabilities.

MSI P45 Platinum  

Gigabyte GA-EP45-DQ6  When the shock of paying $250 (street) for the Gigabyte GA-EP45-DQ6 motherboard wears off, console yourself with this: Four Ethernet ports for link aggregation, scads of internal and external USB 2.0 ports, FireWire (but only supported via onboard bracket leads) and, most importantly, features that will keep this board from being outmoded quickly, like future-friendly PCI Express 4X slots (as well as 16X, 1X and PCI).

DNS Flaw Hits More Than Just the Web  gringer writes "Dan Kaminsky presented at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, and said that the DNS vulnerability he discovered is much more dangerous than most have appreciated. Besides hijacking web browsers, hackers might attack email services and spam filters, FTP, Rsync, BitTorrent, Telnet, SSH, as well as SSL services. Ultimately it's not a question of which systems can be attacked by exploiting the flaw, but rather which ones cannot. Then again, it could just be hype. For more information, see Kaminsky's power point presentation."

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IT Repair Installs Webcam Spying Software  Vapon writes "A lady noticed her computer was running slower after she had brought her computer in to be repaired. She took the computer to a second repair shop where they found that one of the problems was that her webcam would turn on whenever it detected her around and was taking photos and uploading it to a website. The repair technician that installed the software has done this to at least 10 women and has photos of at least one undressing."

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Ask Literacy Bridge Founder About Charity, Education, and the "Talking Book"  Literacy Bridge is a public charity working towards the goal of creating tools for knowledge sharing and literacy learning. More specifically, they have been working on producing a $5 "talking book" device that can both help improve literacy and provide a steady flow of important information while the education is taking place. Unlike many in the "wouldn't-it-be-nice" category, Literacy Bridge already has working silicon, shaped plastic, and actual presence in their target country, Ghana. Literacy Bridge has no paid employees, but several who volunteer their time to make this idea a reality. Cliff Schmidt, founder and executive director of Literacy Bridge, would like to answer any questions you have about the charity, the mission, or the technology. Prior to Literacy Bridge, 'Cliff ran a successful open source software consulting business for clients throughout Europe, the Middle East, and North America, specializing in intellectual property issues, nonprofit governance, privacy policies, and community development. He also served many nonprofit organizations, such as The Apache Software Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, the OpenSEA Alliance, and the Free Software Foundation' in addition to working as a industry standards rep for Microsoft. Click through to see the Google TechTalk given by Cliff earlier this year. The usual Slashdot interview rules apply — so ask all the questions you'd like, but please confine yourself to one per post.

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ISS Gets New Recycling Gear, Ready for Larger Crew  TnGoastiiaiu submitted a space.com story that expands on coverage we've had earlier about improvements being made to the ISS to increase crew capacity. He writes "ISS gets new recycling gear that transforms human waste to drinking water. Some of the water will be used to get Oxygene, too. This way it will soon be possible to host more crew members. " Also, someone needs to smack the webmaster over there for putting a background texture behind the text. It's pretty unreadable along the left hand side of the screen.

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T-Mobile dates BlackBerry Bold launch  

RIM's first HSDPA 3G BlackBerry coming next month

T-Mobile will launch RIM’s first tri-band HSDPA 3G handset into the UK next month.…

'Carbon neutral' Dell's wind-blowing pays off  

Round Rock doesn't fart around

Computer maker Dell has claimed it is now a carbon neutral company.…

Mule sought for mysterious Chinese delivery  

Silkworms 2.0

The Free Software Foundation is asking for someone travelling back from China to bring a small package back with them, presumably leading to some interesting questions at airport security.…

SQL Server 2008 moves on, wants to stay friends  

It’s not you, it’s the BI and database engine

Review Microsoft's SQL Server 2008 is now upon us. More than a year after its initial planned delivery date, Microsoft Wednesday released to manufacturing code for a new version of its database that's almost as significant as its last great release - SQL Server 2005, three years ago.…

Major Internet security flaw also affects e-mail (AP)  

AP - A newly discovered flaw in the Internet's core infrastructure not only permits hackers to force people to visit Web sites they didn't want to, it also allows them to intercept e-mail messages, the researcher who discovered the bug said Wednesday.

Lenovo says quarterly profits up 65 percent (AP)  

AP - Lenovo Group Ltd., the world's No. 4 PC maker, said Thursday its quarterly profit rose 65 percent as strong sales in China and emerging economies offset weakness in the United States.

Hacker indictment greeted with muted response (AP)  AP - Federal authorities are calling it the largest hacking and identity theft case yet. But this week's indictments of 11 people who allegedly plundered millions of payment card numbers might not seriously dent the underworld where such crimes occur.

Hackers target Google Gadgets (AP)  AP - One of the biggest problems with the so-called Web 2.0 movement has been its encouragement of oversharing — which often means underestimating security risks. Adding doodads of varying quality to a home page can add a lot of pizazz, but can also be fraught with danger, since they can open a door for hackers.