Ant writes "Here is a collection of "spy equipment" found for sale around the Internet. Everything listed is completely real, is sold at online stores, and almost any item listed here costs less than $500, and often times can be bought for less than $200. Seen on Compfused."

Yoshi writes "DCEmu have released an article detailing the current State of the Homebrew Scene on all consoles from the PSP to GBA and even to the Next Gen Nintendo Wii, the article explains whats needed to run emulators and games and if its worth bothering for each console."

Krishna Dagli writes to mention a Register article about a mechanical process for analyzing malware. Using an automated system, researchers are able to more accurately classify the often randomly-named bots and viruses that plague us. From the article: "The researchers modeled a piece of malicious software as the series of actions that the software takes at the operating system level. Referred to as 'events' in a paper written by Lee and anti-malware program team manager Jigar Mody, the actions can include data copying, changing registry keys and opening network connections. The researchers then trained a recognition engine using an adaptive clustering algorithm - similar to self-organising maps - and classified a previously unseen subset of malware using the trained system. Using more clusters typically resulted in better classification. When the software samples were classified based on 100 events, accuracy fell below 80 per cent, while classification based on 500 and 1,000 events typically has accuracy rates above 90 per cent."

Skapare writes "Your next prospective employer might be watching your MySpace page, according to a story at the New York Times. And if you think Facebook is more private, maybe not if that prospective employer has an intern from the same school checking up on you." From the article: "Students may not know when they have been passed up for an interview or a job offer because of something a recruiter saw on the Internet. But more than a dozen college career counselors said recruiters had been telling them since last fall about incidents in which students' online writing or photographs had raised serious questions about their judgment, eliminating them as job candidates."

grammar fascist writes "According to an Information Week article, on Friday Microsoft released Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003." From the article: "The software is Microsoft's first to run parallel HPC applications aimed at users working on complex computations... 'High-performance computing technology holds great potential for expanding opportunities... but until now it has been too expensive and too difficult for many people to use effectively,' said Bob Muglia, senior vice president of [Microsoft's] Server and Tools Business unit, in a statement."

byrnereese wonders: "The media never fails to point out how the age of Web Two-Point-Oh has helped to drive the adoption of Ajax into the Internet industry, but rarely does anyone point out that it has also help popularize CSS-centric design practices -- the Slashdot redesign being only one example. But now that we, as programmers, feel comfortable ditching the use of font tags, finally grok div's, understand absolute vs relative positioning, and can work around all of IE's CSS bugs, what is the next step for HTML and CSS? Several standards or conventions seem to be coming to forefront: one is building standards around the HTML structure itself so that wildly different designs can be achieved via style-sheets alone (e.g. CSS Zen Garden and The Style Contest), the other being the standardization of CSS classes (e.g. micro-formats) so that semantic meaning can be derived from the class name we use to label our content. Both show an interesting potential for how this technology is evolving. So here is the question for all the visionaries out there: where is this taking us? What's next for HTML? What's next for CSS?"

AirmanTux asks: "Next march I will be separating from the US Air Force, after six years wearing 'the uniform', working in the closest thing to IT that the military has. For certain reasons, I've come to the conclusion that I will be more effective in serving the US public out of uniform than in it. There seems to be a common belief that the civilian sector is just as disorganized and mismanaged as the uniformed services. Do you think this is true? Are there any 'honest' places to work any more (where promotions/awards are based on work preformed and bureaucracy, and politics aren't encouraged to supplant the 'mission), or has America become one big living Dilbert strip?"

prostoalex writes "Reuters reports eBay is planning to roll out its own contextual ads network, thus claiming its stake in booming Internet advertising market. Currently both Google and Yahoo! run contextual ads programs (AdSense and Publisher Network, respectively) with MSN's AdCenter not open to publishers yet." From the article: "What goods appear in any particular advertisement will be determined by the keywords on that Web page, a technique known as contextual advertising. A sports Web site would feature links to sporting gear or memorabilia from eBay, for example. As listings change on eBay, advertising automatically changes on affiliated Web sites to reflect the new products or services for sale on eBay. Web site affiliates receive a cut of 40 percent to 70 percent of sales, depending on volumes."

WakefieldHS-students asks: "I attend a public school, Wakefield High School in Raleigh, North Carolina. A friend of mine recently created a site that hosted a web proxy browser. It ran for a few months, and others at our school found out about it. The original domain was blocked by the censorship software the school uses, and it was changed a few times to get around this. Recently, he was forced to take down the proxy, with the threat of not graduating and the taking of legal action by the school. What legal rights, if any, can the school use to ban someone from hosting a website? Furthermore, what rights does the U.S. Government have to censor such websites?"

An anonymous reader writes "BBC news is reporting that music fans in the UK won't have to fear litigation from the British Phonographic Industry. Peter Jamieson, chairman of the British Phonographic Industry, said 'consumers would only be penalized if they made duplicates of songs for other people.'" From the article: "Mr Jamieson also called for Apple - which makes the popular iPod portable music player - to open up its iTunes software so it is compatible with the technology of other manufacturers. Apple applies a digital protection system to its downloads, which means they are not usually compatible with other companies' devices. "

Cliffe asks: "I am a PhD candidate preparing to implement a new security (access control) model. I have been reading about Linux's LSM (which allow security frameworks to be loaded) but I was unable to find documentation for a mechanism in MS Windows which allows every individual application's access to resources to be mediated; for example, to restrict each application's access to particular files or network protocols. Is this type of mediation possible in Windows? Virus scanners and firewalls likely utilize similar capabilities. Where can the documentation be found?"

Dylan Knight Rogers writes to mention a News.com story discussing the realities of chip power consumption. From the article: "Assessing only pure performance is passe. The debate these days is about performance-per-watt, which seems like it should be a simple miles-per-gallon type of calculation. However, miles are miles, and gallons are gallons. There's no one simple way to measure processor performance, and measuring the amount of power output by today's chips is proving just as difficult."

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet reports on a recent German Linux migration by the tax authority in Lower Saxony which has made the decision to migrate an impressive 12,000 desktops to SuSE Linux using KDE. The project, which is now in process converting 300 desktops daily, moves systems from Solaris x86 version 8, which the organisation has been running since 2002. The migrations are reported as going well thus far. KDE's Kiosk desktop customisation, source code access and licensing costs were cited as key reasons for the decision. Congratulations to all involved, and best of luck going forward with this effort!"

Juha-Matti Laurio writes to mention a Reuters report about a fairly worrying case of identity theft. A determined hacker gained access to the U.S. National Nuclear Safety Administration's records and made off with the information for over 1,500 employees and contractors. From the article: "The incident happened last September but top Energy Department officials were not told about it until this week, prompting the chairman of the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee to demand the resignation of the head of the NNSA. An NNSA spokesman was not available for comment."

Nirnimesh writes "Google reveals their ranking system for videos on the official blog. The system lists videos according to their country-wide popularity. From the article: 'We use algorithms to identify videos that are suddenly becoming popular, and then rank them based on how popular they are -- and how suddenly they became popular. We've been using this list internally, and now it's ready to share with you, so check it out. Right now this feature highlights videos from close to 40 countries, including Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, and New Zealand, to name a few.'"