Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel says the key to quicker business innovation is skipping college. His foundation is handing out $100,000 to 24 people under 20 to drop out of college for two years and start companies. From the press release: "As the first members of the 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship, the Fellows will pursue innovative scientific and technical projects, learn entrepreneurship, and begin to build the technology companies of tomorrow. During their two-year tenure, each Fellow will receive $100,000 from the Thiel Foundation as well as mentorship from the Foundation’s network of tech entrepreneurs and innovators. The project areas for this class of fellows include biotech, career development, economics and finance, education, energy, information technology, mobility, robotics, and space."

An anonymous reader writes "The recently concluded 2008 Mozilla Summit, held in Whistler, Canada, was impacted by a rock slide that cut off the main highway between Whistler and Vancouver, where most attendees planned to depart via airplane. In true open-source fashion, summit attendees collaborated on a solution, opening a Bugzilla bug (severity: "blocker"), posting crash dumps, and proposing solutions, including chartering a flight (which would land first in TRUNK, then BRANCH). Eventually, attendees settled on a workaround which seems to have been successful. For next year's summit, organizers might want to consider a location with more redundancy."

tjhayes writes "The iPhone App Store released an application called NetShare that allowed the iPhone to tether a laptop to the internet. It was priced at a $10 one-time fee. After being available for approximately 2 hours, the application has disappeared from the apps store. What exactly are AT&T/Apple trying to accomplish here?" They are trying to prove what is wrong with DRM, and demonstrate why hackers want to jailbreak the iPhone.

Khalid Baheyeldin writes in with a CBC interview with the CEO of Sandvine, Dave Caputo (bio here). Sandvine is the Waterloo, Ontario-based company that provides the technology that Comcast and other ISPs use to overrule Net neutrality by, for example, injecting RST packets to disrupt Bittorrent traffic. Caputo says, among other things, that Internet monitoring is a necessity. Some of the comments to the interview are more tech-savvy than the interviewee comes across.

lseltzer alerts us to a story in the Washington Post on the defense strategy in the Hans Reiser murder trial. "In the courtroom where Hans Reiser is on trial for murder, [the evidence] might appear to indicate guilty knowledge. But his attorneys cast it as evidence of an innocence peculiar to Hans, a computer programmer so immersed in the folds of his own intellect that he had no idea how complicit he was making himself appear. 'Being too intelligent can be a sort of curse,' defense counsel William Du Bois said. 'All this weird conduct can be explained by him, but he's the only one who can do it. People who are commonly known as computer geeks are so into the field.'"

Apu writes in to inform us that the ACLU is trying to block an Ohio county from moving from touchscreen voting machines back to paper ballots. While it may seem like Cuyahoga County — which includes Cleveland — is moving in a good direction from the perspective of ballot security, the system chosen tabulates all votes at a central location. This means that voters don't get notified if their ballot contains errors, and thus they have no chance to correct it. The ACLU of Ohio is asking a federal judge for an injunction against any election in Cuyahoga County it they move to the new system.

alphadogg sends us to Network World, as is his wont, for a summary of a new study of identity theft based on the outcomes of more than 500 Secret Service cases from 2000 to 2006. Here is the study report (PDF). The AP has coverage emphasizing other slants on the findings. Among the surprises: just 51% of convicted ID thieves were sent to prison. Only 20% of the cases involved use of the Internet, and such cases may be on the decline. More perpetrators used good old-fashioned dumpster diving and stealing stuff out of mailboxes.

Lucas123 writes "The missing tape, stolen from an intern's car, contained data on all 64,467 state employees, 19,388 former employees and 47,245 Ohio taxpayers. The state believes the incident will cost them $3 million. So after four months of deliberation, the Ohio Department of Administrative Services announced today that they decided to take a week's vacation away from Jerry Miller, their payroll team leader and the guy in charge of the missing data."

mikemuch writes "When his lovely girlfriend Glenda needed a new PC, Jason Cross, who spends much of the week assembling PCs with the latest gear to test for ExtremeTech, decided he would let her build it herself. She gave him her list of needs, he came up with a part list, and then watched as she did all the screwdriver wielding herself. Despite a DOA hard drive and some mis-connected wires, everyone was smiling when it was all finished. (Slide show here.)"

An anonymous reader writes "The first emulator for iPhone, iPhoneNES has been released. It run very slow, and has no sound, but hacker NerveGas has managed to modify the source to release an optimized version that is playable. " My favorite bit is that your controller is a clickable picture of the NES controller. Not exactly the ideal UI but still an amazing accomplishment.

PatPending writes "American companies General Electric, IBM, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard have joined with the New York Law School and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to inaugarate a new system of peer review for software patents. The four companies, plus Red Hat, the world's biggest listed open source software business, are the lead sponsors behind the Community Patent Review project. The one-year pilot program will begin in early 2007 and focus on published but not-yet-granted patent applications relating to computer software. Scientists and engineers will be able to submit prior art to patent examiners at the USPTO using an online system. All Community Patent review project documents will be available on the internet for public comment. 'High-quality patents increase certainty around intellectual property rights, reducing contention and freeing resources to focus on innovation,' said David Kappos, vice president of IP law at IBM."