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POPSConficker Starts...Well, Doing Something The first seven words of this story are pretty telling. Basically, we still don't know what the megaworm is up to. If it were simply keylogging, as Trend Micro speculates, that could mean major identity theft. But it would also be much less scary than some of the distributed denial of service scenarios others cybarmageddon scenarios others have worried about.
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POPSWhy Print Media Should Subsidize the Kindle Not a lot of substance/data in this story, but it's a good idea. Right now, it seems that book publishers are selling their Amazon e-books with low margins, but the news media hasn't pitched in to widen the Kindle's userbase.
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POPSThe iPhone Reads Your Blood Pressure This was just a vague note in Engadget's liveblogging of the new iPhone software release. But it brings to mind images of Star Trek-style medical tricorders. Combine it with IBM and Google's plan to stream data from devices directly to Google Health, and all of this starts to get very weird.
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POPSInstalling a USB Drive in Your Finger Hard to imagine this guy would go to so much trouble for just 2GB of storage. If you're going to make it an actual digit, you might as well install the new iPod shuffle in your finger and double your capacity.
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POPSFirst Bendable E-Ink Touchscreen E-Ink developers have made the passive screens flexible, touchable and now both flexible and touchable. So when does the really useful stuff like color and fast screen refreshing arrive?
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POPSMagazine Publisher Plans Its Own Kindle Hearst gets points for forward thinking. But can it really build and sell a device more successfully than Amazon or Sony? Why not just offer their content through existing devices?
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POPSOfficial Accidentally Demonstates E-Voting Problems on Film This video of an election official trying (and failing) to debunk claims of e-voting problems makes it clearer to me than ever before just why e-voting has been such a disaster: Wishful thinking on the part of non-technical morons who seem willing to discount practically any problem with machines that make their jobs easier.
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POPSAnother ISP Snoop Bites the Dust Sorry, American ISPs. The possibilities of selling your heaps of lucrative data have now officially dried up. Overseas ISPs, however, (even British ones) seem likely to get away with this.
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POPSListen To Your YouTube Comment Before Posting Not sure which is weirder--that YouTube now gives commenters the opportunity to listen to their comments out loud in order to better filter their idiocy, or that this feature was taken from an idea in an uber-geeky web comic.
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POPSPrivately-funded Rocket Reaches Space Just a few days after the Chinese government performed its first spacewalk, SpaceX has achieved the first successful rocket launch funded by a private company. Finally, space exploration as a for-profit venture might be starting to make sense. And that may mean a new sort of race to the moon is beginning--this time between China's government and American private industry.
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POPSLarge Hadron Collider Stalled till Spring '09 This must be frustrating for physicists who have waited decades to smash particles together in exciting new ways. But those of us with (scientifically debunked) fears of being swallowed by an LHC-triggered black hole can breathe a sigh of relief. For now.
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POPSCreationist Lashes Out Against Spore More interesting than the blog itself, which is pretty much what you'd expect from a creationist writing about a game based on evolution, are the hundreds of comments, most of which are defending Spore. Apparently this guy touched a nerve.
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POPSWhy Google Releases Half-Baked Products Basically, Nick Carr is arguing that Google is exploiting something like the long tail in its product releases. It may only have a few hits--products like Gmail, for instance--but the cost of development is low enough that even a marginal traffic bump to its ads makes new features worthwhile. Hence all the Google products that seem to be languishing in semi-obscurity, like Knol, Android and Open Social.
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POPSComputer Virus Infects Space Station This piece of malware sounds mostly harmless, designed to steal video game passwords. But I'm imagining a hacker causing a satellite to plummet from space onto a US city. It's possible I've been reading too much science fiction.
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POPSDoes Joe Biden hate techies? Barack's VP pick has a pretty rough record when it comes to the government's handling of copyright protection. But his tech savvy still trumps McCain, who by all appearances has only learned about electricity in recent briefings with his staff aides.
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POPSPentagon/IBM Create World's Fastest Computer A few other bits from the Times' article: The Roadrunner will consume about as much power as a large shopping mall, and is based on more than 12,000 IBM Cell microprocessors, which were originally developed for the Playstation 3.
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POPSStudy Tracks People With Cell Phones I spoke with Sandy Pentland at MIT about his studies on this topic recently. But this brings the same idea to a much larger group. It also seems to have taken data from participants who didn't volunteer for the study--a bit shady if you ask me.
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POPSHacker Trick Can Destroy Hardware The idea of Chinese cyberspies blowing up your hard drive isn't fun. But as with most stories like this, the researchers are showing a proof-of-concept of the vulnerability, not an imminent threat.
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POPSSteve Ballmer Egged in Hungary Ballmer's response: "It was a friendly disruption." Bill Gates slightly more clever response to being hit in the face with four cream pies in 1998: "The worst part was that the pies were not very tasty."
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POPSTaser Creates Peel-and-Stick Electrified Film Taser International is still thinking of new ways to paralyze people, this time with an adaptable stick on surface for any device. From a PR perspective, the company can always argue that these semi-brutal devices are just innovative ways to avoid lethal force.
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POPSVolvo Promises Injury-Proof Car Several automakers are working on pre-collision systems that take control of cars and steer them or brake automatically. But an injury proof car? Luckily no one remembers these bold claims 12 years later.
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POPSMicrosoft Gives Cyber "Skeleton Key" to Cops This may be necessary for effective law enforcement, but the idea of making it a physical device is a little scary. It won't be long before one of these ends up in the hands of cybercriminals. What security measures stop them from getting as much access as the police?
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POPSClick Fraud Problem Getting Better? Google and Yahoo's changes that decreased clicks seem to have been partly a result of better click fraud filtering. So now the question is, can Google take credit for solving a problem it has always denied existed?
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POPSGoogle: Cookies Are Complicated Google has a growing tendency to make flashy announcements that draw press and then let their ideas stagnate and disappear. Looks like they may be doing the same with an element of their search privacy solution.
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