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Feed The 2006 Engadget Awards: Vote for Worst Gadget of the Year (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Announcements, Misc. Gadgets

Ready to get your hater on? We're at the end of the line, and your chance to cast your ballot for the 2006 Worst Gadget of the Year! (Note: nominees were not necessarily selected for having outright bad or defective gadgets -- the disappointment / let-down factor also plays a big role.) Our Engadget Awards nominees are listed below, and you've got until 11.59PM EST on Wednesday, April 18th to file your vote. You can only vote once, so make it count, and may the best tech win! The nominees: Defective Apple MacBooks (see here, here, here, and here), Exploding Sony batteries (see here, here, here, here, here, and many more), Microsoft Zune, Motorola Q, Nintendo Wiimote straps (see here, here, here, and here), and Sony PlayStation 3.

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Media

Submission + - You're all obsolete: Machine-readable news

Submitted by guanxi
guanxi writes: One of the fastest growing markets for news has no interest in sex, celebrity gossip, or partisan hackery — it's computers. Financial traders looking for an edge no longer want to wait for people to read, analyze, and communicate the latest events; they want the news fed right into their computers so they can process trades immediately. The turnaround time from a "PS3 sales slow" story to dumping the stock is milliseconds. Reuters met this demand with NewsScope Real-Time, which outputs machine-readable news, and reportedly Thomson Financial (which already sells computer-generated news) and Bloomberg offer similar products. Would you trust your money to an unskeptical computer reading the news? Can bloggers compete? Will Jon Stewart have a feed?
Privacy

Submission + - ID theft: how likely?

Submitted by spge
spge writes: Everyone's going on about ID theft these days, but there's a lot of FUD being sprayed around. Apparently, in the UK there's much more chance that you'll get punched or just plain shouted at by a criminal, than to have him nick your identity. UK crime stats extrapolated here.
The Internet

Enforced Ads Coming to Flash Video Players 397

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the advertising-ploy-to-rule-the-world dept.
Dominare writes "The BBC is reporting that Adobe is releasing new player software which will allow websites that use their Flash video player (such as YouTube) to force viewers to watch ads before the video they selected will play. 'But the big seller for Adobe is the ability to include in Flash movies so-called digital rights management (DRM) — allowing copyright holders to require the viewing of adverts, or restrict copying. "Adobe has created the first way for media companies to release video content, secure in the knowledge that advertising goes with it," James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research said.' This seems to have been timed to coincide with Microsoft's release of their own competitor, Silverlight, to Adobe's dominance of online video."

Feed Review: SpamSieve 2.6 (macworld.com)

From feed by macworldfeed
SpamSieve 2.6 should be on the lips of all Mac users serious about ridding their computers of junk mail. It's affordable, effective, easy to use, and as configurable as just about anyone needs a spam utility to be.
Patents

Submission + - Microsoft Copies BlueJ, Patents It

Submitted by PRC Banker
PRC Banker writes: One of BlueJ's developers, Michael Kolling, has posted a message on his website, Michael Kolling, saying Microsoft copied BlueJ and are attempting to patent it. "After blatantly copying BlueJ (without reference or attribution), Microsoft have now filed for patent for the functionality they knowingly copied from us." He even quoted a Microsoft developer "*My* [Dr Fernandez's] interpretation of the above statement is basically that our academic customers wanted this because of the success of this BlueJ feature." Something in Microsoft just doesn't tie up. BlueJ is an educational IDE for teaching object-oriented programming and Java to beginners, a cross-platform academic project started in 1998.
Patents

Submission + - Microsoft steal BlueJ idea and patent it

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft is attempting to patent "Object Test Bench", a graphical object-oriented teaching tool. The problem is that BlueJ created it in 1994 and it's been in active and healthy use since, as a free project created by academics. Microsoft openly acknowledges this. Whichever way the BlueJ team turn, they now face a legal battle against huge corporation. Headstrong Slashdotters might be screaming "SUE!! PRIOR ART!!" but BlueJ is an academic project and legal battles require lots of cash. It's not helped by the fact BlueJ is based outside of the US.
Programming

Father of Instant Ramen Passes Away 195

Posted by Zonk from the a-sad-day-for-noodles dept.
Chained Fei writes "Ando Momofuku, Father of the Instant Ramen, passed away on January 5th at the age of 96. He concocted the idea for Instant Ramen after WWII, hoping to reduce the amount of poor nourishment for soldiers in the field. If not for this great man, many a poor college student and programmer would have starved over the years. From the article: 'In 1971, Nissin introduced the Cup Noodle featuring instant ramen in a waterproof plastic foam container. Dubbed the "Ramen King," Ando is credited with expanding Nissin into the No. 1 company in the industry and was well-known for his dedication to his work ... In 1999, Ando opened the Momofuku Ando Instant Ramen Museum in Ikeda, Osaka Prefecture, after installing his second son, Koki, as president of the company.'"

SHA-1 Collisions for Meaningful Messages 128

Posted by CmdrTaco from the well-this-isn't-very-helpful dept.
mrogers writes "Following on the heels of last year's collision search attack against SHA-1, researchers at the Crypto 2006 conference have announced a new attack that allows the attacker to choose part of the colliding messages. "Using the new method, it is possible, for example, to produce two HTML documents with a long nonsense part after the closing </html> tag, which, despite slight differences in the HTML part, thanks to the adapted appendage have the same hash value." A similar attack against MD5 was announced last year."

Are NDA 'Prior Inventions' Clauses Safe to Sign? 300

Posted by Cliff from the contractual-time-bombs dept.
BenderMan asks: "I own a small consulting company. Today I was asked by yet another corporate customer to sign an NDA with the increasingly popular 'Prior Inventions' clause. The gist of it is they want you to provide a list of all your past and current inventions and/or ideas so they can define and protect the intellectual property that they have hired you to build. Like many of us that lay awake at night, whilst the hamster wheel spins new ideas, I've got a number of un-patented works in various stages of development. Given that mutual NDAs only provide one year of protection, I don't feel obligated, nor do I have sufficient time and energy, to fully and properly document my inventions for an NDA. While these clauses are written with good intentions, the reality is that these valuable ideas would be placed in the hands of people that could potentially profit with impunity (Have you priced patents lately?). Unfortunately many companies are not willing to strike this clause from their contracts. Does Slashdot agree that this is a concern, and how have you dealt with these situations?"

Cloned Beef Coming Soon? 529

Posted by CowboyNeal from the identical-steaks dept.
An anonymous reader writes "According to this article at Popular Science cloned beef may be coming soon. It talks about using meat within 48 hours of slaughter to allow cloning the best possible specimens, something that is not possible to determine while the animal is still alive. Apparently only 1 in 8000 animals is truly the best. Personally I'd love to see us progress to the point where it was possible to grow just the meat itself without the animal. That would end all the ethical issues with raising an animal for food, potential issues from mad cow disease, bird flu and whatever the next media induced panic is."

The Future & History of the User Interface 249

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the pointing-at-point-and-click dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Mac Observer is taking a look at UI development with lots of video links to some of the latest developments in user interfaces. It also has links to some of the most interesting historical footage of UI developments, here's one of the 1968 NLS demo. From the article: 'Sadly, a great many people in the computer field have a pathetic sense (or rather ignorance) of history. They are pompous and narcissistic enough to ignore the great contributions of past geniuses... It might be time to add a mandatory "History of Computers" class to the computer science curriculum so as to give new practitioners this much needed sense of history.'"

Researcher Creates Handheld Hacking Tool 69

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the how-many-till-the-it-guy-snaps dept.
Kickball Notches writes "Immunity's Dave Aitel plans to start selling a portable hacking device equipped with hundreds of exploits. The wireless handheld, called Silica, comes equipped with more than 150 exploits from Canvas and an automated exploitation system that allows simulated hacking attacks from the palm of your hand. It supports 802.11 (Wi-Fi) and Bluetooth wireless connections and is based on Linux."

Voyager 1 Passes 100 AU from the Sun 326

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the they-don't-build-em-like-they-used-to dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday, Voyager 1 passed 100 astronomical units from the sun as it continues operating after nearly 30 years in space. That is about 15 billion kilometers or 9.3 billion miles as it travels about 1 million miles per day. Scientists still hope it will find the edge of the solar system and get into interstellar space."

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