Jake David writes to tell us about a uniquely emotive robot — named Quasi — developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. Quasi appears capable of holding intelligent conversations. Here is a a video of the robot in action. Note that the animatronic figure is little more than the emotive organ of the robot, whose entirety encompasses the display booth as well. From the CMU page: "Quasi has a number of features in addition to his eyelids for conveying emotion, the most prominent of which are Color Kinetics LED lighting fixtures for his eyes and antennae. These combine red, green, and blue LEDs... His antennae can move both forward and backward as well as in and out, giving them an expressive quality not unlike that of a dog's ears."

mrbill submitted linkage to a site offering to sell what appear to be very beautiful wood PC cases combining wood, glass and silicon into something a hell of a lot prettier than that beige box. Something tells me these wouldn't win the recent Intel sexy case contest, but they sure are sharp.

gettin-bored noted a nice article running in very high priority on the Washington Post, right up there on page 17 of the print edition, where it's revealed that the CIA Director warned Rice about Bin Laden two months before 9/11. And strangely, the meeting was never mentioned during all the 9/11 commission reports making you really question what exactly they were actually hearing that was more important than the CIA director telling the National Security Advisor that Bin Laden was going to attack Americans.

An anonymous reader writes "The open-source Firefox Web browser is critically flawed in the way it handles JavaScript, two hackers said Saturday afternoon. An attacker could commandeer a computer running the browser simply by crafting a Web page that contains some malicious JavaScript code, Mischa Spiegelmock and Andrew Wbeelsoi said in a presentation at the ToorCon hacker conference here."

An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo Mail recently launched their new webmail service, dubbed Beta (yes just like gmail) no doubt hoping to win back market share in the world of webmail. Their prime competition is gmail, which they've modeled some of the new features on, but Yahoo Mail Beta falls very short of offering a similar experience. The ad infested new Yahoo Mail is patchwork of ideas halfway implemented and glaring usability problems."

An anonymous reader writes, "The Zero Day Emergency Response Team, or ZERT, stepped out of the shadows a week ago to offer a quick patch for the Microsoft VML vulnerability. eWeek reports that reactions to third-party patches have been mixed. Jesper Johansson, a former Microsoft security consultant, said 'I will not use the unofficial patch, nor can I think of anyone I would recommend it to.' ZERT has enrolled former White House IT security expert Marcus Sachs as a spokesman of sorts. He told eWeek, 'This patch is just another arrow in the quiver. These guys are some of the best-known reverse engineers and security researchers. It's a tight-knit group that has worked for years to make the Internet a safer place. This isn't a patch created by some guy in a basement.' And while MS did release an out-of-band patch this week for XP, ZERT releases updates for operating systems that are out of MS support: Windows 98, Windows 98 SE, Windows ME, Windows 2000 and Windows 2000 SP3."

beebopdebop writes, "The Irish Times notes that Europe goes intergalactic tonight with the broadcast of a program conceived for aliens and broadcast towards a point 45 light years away in the direction of the Big Dipper. The two naked hosts will present their own unclothed bodies as examples of our physical embodiments, and will tell about daily human existence. Music, art, and our own personal messages will be transmitted as well as discussions from sociologists, scientists, and space experts. This project is the brainchild of the French-based Centre National D'etudes Spatiales and is rooted in seriousness as a natural extension of the gold-plated ambassador disks of Pioneer 10. Those of us wishing to be included can still post messages to be sent into space via a CNES antenna. We will have to wait 90 years to learn whether or not some lifeform was listening."

Michael Knudsen writes, "Intel still refuses to work with open source projects such that they can provide their users with proper support for Intel's hardware products. As he has done before, Theo de Raadt once again asks users to take action by contacting Intel, telling them what they think of their current policy of not releasing hardware documentation and granting open source projects the right to distribute hardware firmware with their products. Failing to do so only harms users in the way that they risk having unsupported or malfunctioning hardware in their operating system of choice." Read more below.

lmd writes "The first episode of South Park Season 10 is this Wednesday, October 4, at 10:00 PM Eastern/Pacific Time on Comedy Central. It will be called "Make Love, Not Warcraft". A sneak peek in Quicktime and DivX is available." Flash version of the blurb courtesy of Kotaku.

Aditi.Tuteja writes, "Yahoo has announced it will give away the browser-based authentication used in its email service, considered to be the company's 'crown jewels.' Yahoo made the announcement ahead of a 24-hour 'Yahoo Hack Day,' where it had invited more than 500 mostly youthful outside programmers to build new applications using Yahoo services. Considering the different needs of its huge user base (257 million people use Yahoo Mail), Yahoo has decided it can't build or buy enough innovation, so they are enlisting the worldwide developer community." The code will be released late in 2006. Yahoo notes that there are 'no security risks' since they keep absolute control of usernames and passwords.

Slightlyright writes, "Java Developer's Journal reports that some people in the community are wishing that "Java EE would be more Ajax-like because 'EJB 3.0 can not save Java EE.' This has caused strong reactions from bloggers such as Rich Internet Application pioneer Coach Wei, who wrote: 'Which aspect of Ajax [do] we really want Java EE to be like? The difficulty in developing Ajax code? The difficulty in maintaining Ajax code? The extreme fragile nature of Ajax code? The extremely fragmented nature of Ajax support from different browsers?'"

Ellis D. Tripp writes, "A computer analysis has upheld Neil Armstrong's version of the first words spoken on the lunar surface. The word 'a' was dropped due to a communications glitch, and Armstrong has been accused of flubbing his words since the historic 1969 landing. The corrected statement was 'That's one small step for *A* man, One giant leap for mankind.'"

Anonymous Tech Support asks: "I work for a small technical support company that is hired by local companies to manage networks, fix computers, and be the IT department in general. Last week I was working on a small network of 25+ computers. After a week of emotion and annoyances (long story), I have to ask the Slashdot community: How many of you are employees of small 'outsourced IT departments?' How much does your company charge per hour and how much do you make per hour? What sort of agreements do you have with your employer (non-compete etc.)?"

mikesd81 writes, "The AP reports that Google filed a motion in response to a Brazilian judge's deadline to turn over information on users of the company's social networking service Orkut. An earlier AP story gives the background: 'On Aug. 22, Federal Judge Jose Marcos Lunardelli gave Google's Brazilian affiliate until Sept. 28 to release information needed to identify individuals accused of using Orkut to spread child pornography and engage in hate speech against blacks, Jews and homosexuals. Google claims that its Brazilian affiliate cannot provide the information because all the data about Orkut users is stored outside Brazil at the company's U.S.-based headquarters. Google maintains that it is open to requests for information from foreign governments as long as the requests comply with U.S. laws and that they are issued within the country where the information is stored.'" Eight million Brazilians, about a quarter of the country's Internet-using population, are members of Orkut.

deejne writes to alert us to a new bandwidth record: Nippon Telegraph and Telephone has announced data transmission at a rate of 14 terabits per second over a single optical fiber. The paper claims the previous record was "about 10 Tbps." In the new experiment, NTT sent data over 160 kilometers (nearly 100 miles) of optical fiber, in 140 channels of 111 Gbps each.