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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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POPSMacBook Air Hacked In 2 Minutes Charlie Millers proves yet again that there's nothing inherently more secure about a Mac. In fact, he's argued that Apple has been able to ignore security for the last decade as hackers focused on more common targets.
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POPSGoogle is Adults Only Probably every company has these strange legal policies that are read by no one and are never enforced. But Google, as usual, gets the most scrutiny.
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POPSCellphone Inventor Predicts Phone Implants The idea of wireless devices in the human body is interesting...but combine this with recent security reports about the ability to hack pacemakers, and suddenly it sounds a bit less pleasant.
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POPSChinese Hackers Kill 3Com Buyout China's government should take notice: Concerns over China's cyberspying are starting to stifle more than US-China relations--they're also hampering China's beloved economic development.
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POPSTerrifying Great Dane-Sized Robot This is the most organic-looking and creepiest robot I've ever seen. About a third of the way through the clip, you see a guy give it a hard kick, and it keeps its balance in a way that looks exactly like a living thing. Added to the bat surveillance robot announced last week, DARPA is doing some truly disturbing stuff.
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POPSSecond Life Founder Steps Down Given that Linden Lab's CTO stepped down last December, this might be a sign that the company is crumbling. But more likely it's a sign that it's growing up. As Pasick implies here, Rosedale is probably better at thinking up ideas for a startup than running a mature company.
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POPSRaul Lifts Cuba's Computer Ban Looks like Raul's leadership is having some small effects after all. The Cuban Internet is still extremely restricted and very expensive, but more offline use could help loosen the control of Cuba's digital media.
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POPSAOL Buys Bebo On the Cheap Another sign that Facebook is terribly overpriced. So why did Microsoft value the company at $15 billion when Bebo's sizable audience sells for a small fraction of that? One element is that Google has never seemed interested in Bebo--Facebook's price probably resulted from bidding between Microsoft and Google.
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POPSTaliban Attacking Cell Towers A cell tower is sadly much easier to attack than an underground line. But turning off your cell phone at night as obviously the easiest way to avoid an attack. The Register speculates that the phone company attacks are actually just a display of power on an easy target.
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POPSFace to Face with Chinese Hackers CNN does a nice short profile of a few Chinese hackers who claim to have penetrated the Pentagon. It's hard to imagine that these are the real masterminds behind Titan Rain and the Pentagon hackings from last summer--more likely they're what some government cyber security experts call "ankle biters." Even so, it makes for an interesting interview.
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POPSHow to Kill LOLCats ComplaintRemover is one of the newer entrants into the business of controlling negative content about individuals and businesses on the Web. To point out the problems with the service, Consumerist asks them to remove LOLCats from the Internet. Funny stuff ensues.
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POPSControl Your iPod By Blinking This is not so exciting for the average iPod user...Apple's clickwheel is pretty intuitive and convenient. But it's big news for those with disabilities, and it may foreshadow a new kind of interface for gadgets in general down the line.
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POPSDungeons & Dragons Creator Dies Long before the creation of Second Life and World of Warcraft, the preferred realm of geeks seeking an escape from reality was D&D. Sad to see this guy go.
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POPSGoogling for Hackable Sites Google Hacking is an old trick made popular by the well-known penetration tester Johnny Long. But this is an interesting way to make those techniques more accessible to Web developers. Wonder what Google thinks about all of this...
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POPSChina Cracking Down on Virtual Worlds? Not sure what this news post on China's embassy site means...I'm not even sure if the news agency itself knows, judging by how they spell "virtual." But this may turn into a big deal for China's hordes of World of Warcrafters.
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POPSOne Computer Could Run Entire Internet Hard to imagine how this is possible, and it seems counterintuitive to think of the Internet as a single computer. But it fits with the strange trend that's underway: After becoming more and more distributed, computing is again becoming more and more centralized, with thin, simple nodes at the edge and massive hardware at the core.
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