Free Republic

Posted Apr. 23, 2003 Shot-up computer left on doorstep labeled a prankPolice unlikely to file charges in unusual caseBy Peggy Breister the reporter pbreister@fdlreporter.comA bullet-riddled computer left on the doorstep of a local computer business was a practical joke, a business-owner says. “They called us this morning after they heard about the story in the newspaper and said it was just supposed to be ‘My computer’s shot and I need a new one,’” said Linda Bearwald, of F-1 Systems, 459 S. Main St. She said she knows the people who played the “practical joke” but isn’t happy with them. The...

A federal judge was kept in the dark about failures in a computer system created to help track royalty payments that were owed to Native Americans, a court-appointed investigator reported yesterday. Last September, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth said Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton had defrauded the court by making misleading statements about the department's efforts to fix management problems of oil, gas, mining, timber and other royalties from Indian lands. That included covering up failures of the Trust Asset and Accounting Management System.

Al-Jazeera is Now on the Air...Maybe Not Since that moment - just a few weeks ago at the time of this writing - Al-Jazeera has faced quite a struggle. Its DNS was hijacked, so that visitors to the Web site were redirected to a Web page featuring an American flag and the words "Let Freedom Ring!" It was knocked offline due to a denial of service attack. Its inital hosting company, DataPipe, dropped the site, forcing it to move to Akamai. Finally, Akamai ended its hosting contract with Al-Jazeera, without offering a clear explanation. Since then, the news site is...

<p>Edgar F. Codd, an IBM computer pioneer who created the ``relational database model'' that underlies a $7 billion industry of storing the world's online business data, died of heart failure at home Friday in Williams Island, Fla. He was 79.</p>

Argh! I tried tonight to access my Roadrunner home page through the same FTP program I've used for months. No dice. Even though it worked fine 3 days ago. I get a "login incorrect" return as a result. I even went and changed the password at my page's management utility. I can login that way. I went and installed the FTP program on the host computer (mine is on the home network) just in case that was the problem. Nope. Still can't get a correct login, though I KNOW my password is correct (and remember, I tested it)! Is this...

I have an idea and want to see if anyone in FreeperLand can help me. I want this for my Husband and his shipmates. I would like to make a CD with photos of the War with a soundtrack of patriotic songs. I am not sure what software I may need for a project like this but I have a brand new computer that is loaded and chances are that I have what I need. So many wonderful pictures that I want to share with him as he is deployed and only hears snipettes of news of the war. Thank...

<p>In blistering remarks at a hearing Thursday, lawmakers accused the California State University system of operating in a "culture of corruption" and said they would work to temporarily halt further spending on the university's controversial $662 million computer system.</p> <p>Members of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee said recent audit findings on the computer system showed that CSU couldn't be trusted to make decisions in the best interests of students. They also told CSU officials that more state oversight is necessary on the system's future expenditures of taxpayer dollars.</p>

A Minnesota man has plans to launch his own Macintosh-manufacturing business, building a low-cost, upgradeable Mac called the iBox. John Fraser, a 21-year-old engineer from Chanhassen, Minnesota, is finalizing the design for his flat "pizzabox" Mac and hopes to go into production in three to four months. If successful, Fraser will be the first third party to make a Mac since Apple shut down its three-year experiment in clone licensing in 1997. Unlike the world of Windows PCs, which has many hardware makers, Apple is the only company making Macs. Apple doesn't license its operating system to outside hardware manufacturers

Engineers Create World's First Transparent TransistorCORVALLIS - Engineers at Oregon State University have created the world's first transparent transistor, a see-through electronics component that could open the door to many new products. The advance has been reported in a professional journal, Applied Physics Letters, and a patent has been applied for. The university is already consulting with major electronics companies about the findings and their potential applications. The discovery "is a significant development in the context of transparent electronics," the scientists said in their publication, but pointed out it's too early to tell what applications may evolve. "This is a...

Ghosts, computers, and Chinese Whispers Toby Howard This article first appeared in Personal Computer World magazine, November 1996. "CLICK HERE to upload your soul" was one of the tamer headlines seen recently in reports describing the "new research direction" of British Telecom's research labs at Martlesham Heath. BT, it was reported by such authorities as The Guardian, Reuters, Time, and the Electronic Telegraph, is embarking on a huge new research project. Funded to the tune of 25 million pounds, an eight-man team is developing a "Soul Catcher" memory chip. The chip will be implanted behind a person's eye, and...

<p>Texas Instruments breaks new ground with its bundling of three technologies into a single chipset.</p> <p>Back in September, I wrote a column lauding Texas Instruments for its breakthrough designs that reduced from four to one the number of chips needed to operate a cell phone. Looks like the company is at it again.</p>

March 17 — A computer intruder armed with a secret, particularly effective attack tool recently took control of an Army Web server, MSNBC.com has learned. Both Microsoft and the CERT Coordination Center released hastily-prepared warnings about the vulnerability that led to the attack on Monday. But it was a disturbingly successful attack, experts say, because the intruder found and exploited a flaw that took security researchers completely by surprise. It’s unknown what Army computer was attacked, how significant a target it was, or what the intruder’s intentions were. But the exploit was sophisticated and well designed, and it was alarmingly...

<p>What is it about state institutions and computer systems? Why can't the state that is home to Silicon Valley get one to work on time, on budget and without reeking like a dead rat?</p> <p>The latest state entrant into the information technology hall of mishaps is the California State University system, which this week got hit with a state audit that revealed waste and worse. The audit says CSU's contract with PeopleSoft Inc., a Pleasanton company hired to coordinate a software system to track student, personnel and financial records among the system's headquarters and 23 campuses, has exceeded its original $400 million budget by -- this is not a misprint -- more than $250 million. A quarter-billion-dollar overrun would be bad news any time. This one, coming in the middle of an epic state budget crisis, couldn't possibly be any worse.</p>

<p>A massive new computer project under way at the California State University system might be the latest example of the state's inability to wisely fulfill its own technology needs.</p> <p>A new audit of the CSU's systemwide software says the project was never properly justified by university administrators, might not have been necessary and may not even be accomplishing much of what the university set out to achieve.</p>

A new worm that leaves behind two Trojan horse programs has begun spreading over the Internet and may be paving the way for a crippling distributed denial of service attack. Although the experts are not yet rating the Deloder worm as a high risk to PC users, the technical make-up of the Trojan horses it leaves behind is of concern. They consist of a commonly used piece of network administration software called Virtual Network Computing (VNC), and an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) bot, or remote-access Trojan horse. The VNC component allows attackers to connect to an infected system and control...

From "TransExodus: The Enduring Secular Reformation, Pluralist Transhumanism, and Posthuman Pilgrims", by George P. Dvorsky, February 16, 2003: A large community of genetically modified posthumans and fyborgs, fed up with antiquated and restrictive biolegislation, depart Earth to parts unknown. Similarly, a group of clones, hoping to flee religious persecution and threats from terrorists, build a spacecraft and head to Rigel Kentaurus. And unnerved by the revivalist turn taken by the World Government and its parliamentary human majority, an entire population of cyborgs permanently upload themselves into a secure and massive supercomputer on Titan and establish an isolationist polis of their...

Only nine of 112 search warrants executed over the last 14 months in Story County have been sealed from public disclosure - and one of those is the unexplained search of Iowa State University's men's basketball coaches offices. Court records show that Story County prosecutors obtained an order on Feb. 3 to seal a search warrant served on Iowa State assistant basketball coach Randy Brown. Prosecutors obtained the order by telling a judge that the investigation was in the preliminary stages and of a "highly sensitive" nature. The warrant only will be opened if charges are filed, according to the...

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ITHACA, N.Y. -- Available soon: You step into a booth where a 3-D body scanner sends more than 300,000 data points from your body to a computer. Then you select style, fabric and design features from a clothing manufacturer on the Internet and e-mail your body scan. Soon you receive a custom-fitted garment. Thanks to a major donation of software, worth as much as $600,000, from Lectra Systems, Inc., apparel students at Cornell University are the first in the country to produce automated custom patterns for garments. They use a sophisticated body scanner, which generates an individual's detailed measurements from...

I have a D-Link Airbus 650+ wireless network card, with 128-bit WEP encryption. I use the card in a Dell Inspiron 5000 laptop. The card works fine for the first hour or so. Then, the computer slows to a CRAWL. In fact, the system time starts lagging by a few hours. If I restart the computer, everything is fine again and the system clock is correct. What's going on, and how can I correct it? Their technical support has no idea of why it's happening. Thanks.