Nextel is rolling out a coast-to-coast version of its popular Push to Talk (PTT) service, which lets users have their cell phones operate like walkie talkies on a dedicated channel. As described in this article from CNET, the new service will initially be available to customers in Boston, LA, and …

Everything old is new again. This article on Music Piracy from MP3 Newswire and this article (The Ediston Movie Monopoly) from Hollywood Renegades Archive both talk about Thomas Edison and attempts to tie up intellectual property for music reproduction and films respectively.

Thanks to SlashDot for the pointer to this index of papers for the Digital Arts and Culture 2003 conference. The conference is in Australia (so, we're probably not going), but the paper titles are fascinating. Here are some examples: The Sopranos Meets EverQuest: Social Networking in Massively Multiplayer Online Games …

This site describes "teergrubbing" (from a German word akin to tar pit), a process of grabbing a hold of the spammers connection and holding it until their delivery efficiency drops to nearly nothing, thereby making them feel your pain.

An article from the Washington Post refers to an article from the June issue of the magazine Cell that claims to have discovered the gene that makes stem cells so useful. As usual, the work is very preliminary, but interesting. As an aside, those spending this weekend at NANOG will …

A paper from Rice University describes a method and implementation of creating algorithmic DoS attacks that don't require a large amount of bandwidth to saturate servers. The idea is to attack obvious or hidden hash algorithms (relatively compute intensive) and bring the server (or in one of the cases, the …

Sick and tired of Bluetooth adapters that just don't have the range? This review from MacMerc is of a "Class 1" device from Mitsumi that claims 100M range. Further, the review says he's actually been able to confirm 60 feet, which is pretty amazing all by itself.

Note: this is not a joke. There actually was a draft declaration of a "state of hostility" against Iowa by a state Senator in Nebraska. Senator Pam Brown has withdrawn the amendment and has claimed in this article that it was merely a joke, but Iowa Daily Nonpareil columnist wrote …

CNET is reporting that Microsoft has announced they will drop support for a stand-alone version of Internet Explorer after IE6 SP1. Previously, the company had made a stand-alone version to appease its rivals during the anti-trust case.

According to this post on Waxy.org, the Canadian kid who has become known as "the Star Wars kid" and his parents are considering legal action against the folks who put the video up on the net in the first place. In light of this, some of the folks who …

A German company has announced AQWON, a hydrogen-powered scooter. They have an English web site that has some further information, but production and cost info is not yet available.

An article from BBC News notes the end of an era as the last passenger flight of the Air France Concorde takes place today. The planes will be moving on to museums in the US, Germany, and France.

A little bit of topical weekend humor. Thanks to Amanda for passing this on.

According to an article on CNET, SCO is planning to start showing some if the disputed linux code under NDA to outside analysts. Further, the company has stated that it is turning the issue of disputed ownership of UNIX to its attorneys. It certainly makes me wonder, though, if the …

NTT DoCoMo, Japan's trend setting cellular service provider is has sold out if its first batch of "Dick Tracy"-like watch cell phones. An article on CNN details the offering and the 20 minutes it took to sell out the 1000 limited edition phones.

An interesting paper (abstract here) was posted at SSRN (Social Science Research Network) yesterday. The paper is about law and its relationship to virtual worlds.

BBC News reports that the successful test of the license plate cameras in London has resulted in an expansion of the program throughout the UK. The program started as a way to enforce the new London motor vehicle tax, but was apparently also used by authorities to track stolen vehicles …

The project page on SourceForge claims that they have added Layer 7 (Application Layer) priority queuing and filtering to the Linux networking kernel, allowing for the appropriate prioritization of traffic with non- deterministic ports.

One day after its announcement, AOL has pulled from release a peer to peer file sharing solution crested by subsidiary NullSoft. A report from CNET details some of the previous issues AOL has had with this subsidiary, including a similar problem over MP3 sharing software two years ago. This years …

An article in CNET reports that the lawsuit by rival search advertising seller SearchKing has been thrown out of court. The suit contended that Google had intentionally removed links from the sites that SearchKing is trying to draw traffic to and that this was somehow illegal. The court, however, found …