Free Republic

Inca may have used knot computer code to bind empire By Steve Connor, Science Editor 23 June 2003 They ran the biggest empire of their age, with a vast network of roads, granaries, warehouses and a complex system of government. Yet the Inca, founded in about AD1200 by Manco Capac, were unique for such a significant civilisation: they had no written language. This has been the conventional view of the Inca, whose dominions at their height covered almost all of the Andean region, from Colombia to Chile, until they were defeated in the Spanish conquest of 1532. But a leading...

The mysterious trojan horse that's been making security experts scratch their heads now has a name as more details of the oddball malware were made available. The trojan horse that has been causing confusion and concern among security researchers for over a month now has been dubbed 'Stumbler' by experts at Internet Security Systems (ISS). As reported earlier, Stumbler embeds itself in Unix systems and seems to be part of a concerted effort to map Internet-connected networks using port scanning techniques. A copy of the trojan was finally captured Wednesday, and investigation of its code began Thursday. After additional analysis,...

This computer is making a grinding noise; it sounds like it might be the fan. I have the cover off and it really sounds like the fan in the back is about to go out. Will it hurt the computer if I leave it on as long as it's turning? The computer is an HP Pavillion 6535, about 3 or 4 years old... Can it be fixed at home if I go buy a new fan, or is this a do-it-yourself project that blondes should avoid? I added some RAM to it a few months ago with no problem. And...

<p>The .zip compression format has known remarkable stability and compatibility for many years, but that may soon change. PKWare and WinZip, makers of competing compression and encryption products, are fighting over the .zip standard--which means that .zip archive files created by one program may not be accessible by the other.</p>

<p>NEW YORK — A new computer virus that offers hackers full control of infected PCs, giving them access to critical information such as passwords and credit-card numbers, was spreading on the Internet Thursday.</p> <p>The virus, dubbed "BugBear.B" by virus experts, follows two other quickly spreading e-mail viruses seen in recent weeks — "Sobig.B" and "Sobig.C" — but far exceeds them in its ability to do harm and in the aggressiveness of its spread.</p>

Ex-Stokes manager had computer full of porn Finding led officials to fire him, not accept resignation By Sherry Wilson Youngquist JOURNAL REPORTER DANBURY The former county manager for Stokes County, Craig Greer, had downloaded so much Internet pornography that his computer hard drive at the government center was running out of space, county officials say. The cache of more than 27,000 photos - with such titles as 'Bye bye bikinis,' 'Housewife,' and 'Midget peep show' - was discovered by information-technology workers after Greer resigned April 28. County commissioners said yesterday that the discovery was behind their decision last week to...

<p>IBM is expected to unveil today its next-generation mainframe computer, a more powerful version of the system that once generated at least 80 percent of its profits.</p> <p>Even though IBM has become more of a services company in recent years, the mainframe is still a key product for the world's largest computer maker. Despite IBM's code-name for the product -- T-Rex, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the constant dismissal by competitors that the mainframe is a dinosaur -- the mainframe is far from death's door.</p>

<p>May 12, 2003 -- A Brooklyn woman stabbed her hubby to death early yesterday after he complained about her figure and how long she spent using the computer, cops said.</p> <p>Judy Thomas, 27, was in the bedroom of the pair's basement apartment on Hemlock Street in Cypress Hills around 1 a.m. when her husband, Jackson Thomas, berated her about the amount of time she spent on the computer, investigators said.</p>

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Security guards smashed their way into an official limousine with sledgehammers on Monday to rescue Thailand's finance minister after his car's computer failed. Suchart Jaovisidha and his driver were trapped inside the BMW for more than 10 minutes before guards broke a window. All doors and windows had locked automatically when the computer crashed, and the air-conditioning stopped, officials said. 'We could hardly breathe for over 10 minutes,' Suchart told reporters. 'It took my guard a long time to realize that we really wanted the window smashed so that we could crawl out. It was a harrowing...

Computer error to blame for rapid fall of Soyuz By Marcia Dunn in Star City, Russia 07 May 2003 A computer error is suspected of plunging the three spacemen who returned to Earth on Sunday into a descent that was so steep their tongues rolled back in their mouths and they could hardly breathe. Their Soyuz spacecraft landed in Kazakhstan, 270 miles from its intended destination. The two US astronauts and one cosmonaut were returning after five months on board the International Space Station. The landing was the first since the Columbia space shuttle disaster in February. One of the...

I am having MAJOR problems....for starters, I am accustomed to usign Netzero ISP (used it when I lived in St. Louis, MO), but now that I am in Toronto, CA my fiancee has AOL....I have no problem dialing into AOL up here ("AOL Canada"), but when I open Internet Explorer (in another window) I am not able to pull up my Hotmail account and my www.50megs.com (free) website where I regularly post articles (to friends and family) that I find on Free Republic (I have converted a LOT of people to Free Republic this way!). It has been my experience...

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) -The volume of junk e-mail has reached a critical threshold that requires swift action to protect the Internet correspondence millions of people take for granted, regulators said today at the end of a three-day forum on ``spam.''</p> <p>Harrington said that was the impression left by the dozens of technology experts, government officials, industry executives and lawyers who flocked to Washington to discuss the problem of unwanted commercial e-mail and what to do about it.</p>

Help, fellow Freepers! Here's my problem. I run Win 2000 Pro and IE 6, and had a trojan-caused crash. I ran Norton AV, and everything is OK, except for what happened when I did a clean install of Win2000. On bootup, I now have two choices: the old desktop, and the new desktop. Fine, no problem. I just have two parallel universes on my computer! When I reinstalled IE6, all my old folders, inbox messages, sent messages, and my fancy subfolders (all .DBX files) I use for work did not migrate over. I can't even open them up in the...

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>