Sound of stop watch clicking Almost two weeks. I can't believe it took that long. A little less than two weeks into the new era of Apple's iTunes, the first service to act as a clearing house for iTunes 4 servers is now up and running on SpyMac site …

An insightful article from FindLaw about the recent court decisions on P2P file sharing and Apple's entry into the music market.

A significant vulnerability in Microsoft's Passport facility was found by a security enthusiast. The exploit allows the changing of arbitrary passwords to arbitrary accounts, and through such access to services, personal information, and potentially hotmail email. Microsoft has been alerted to the problem, but has not responded with a …

E Ink is showing a prototype of a flexible screen with a black and white resolution similar to that of today's laptops. The screen can be rolled into a tube approximately 1/2" in diameter and then rolled back out for use. Although the refresh rate on the device is …

Researchers at Houston's MD Anderson Cancer Center have announced that they have successfully used an engineered "smart virus" made from the common cold to destroy brain tumors in laboratory rats (which I've always thought were pre-disposed to cancer...). An article from Wired provides some cautionary comments from throughout the health …

No, they're not getting $16.4M for being purveyors of fine spam. Instead, they have received a judgment in that amount from Howard Carmack (no relation to the games developer) from Buffalo, NY who reportedly sent (with his "ring" of spammers) some 825 million pieces of spam using EarthLink's …

Want to see what Phil's team put together without taking a screwdriver to your brand new Airport Extreme Basestation? Today's your lucky day. A chap in the UK has taken his apart so you don't have to.

An article on MacFixit this morning tells of a test carried out using the OS X 10.2.6 incremental (6MB) and combo (86MB) updaters from Apple. The author claims that there 2800 files that are different after installing each on two identical copies of 10.2.5. From this …

A report from the BBC recounts the story of 2 copies of the upcoming Harry Potter book being found in a field just north of the printing plant where the book is being printed in England. Four people were subsequently arrested for the theft.

For those of you who use NFS (the Network File System) under OS X for file sharing, here is a hint from MacOS X Hints that describes how to improve performance. The key is an old unix trick of doubling the number of NFS daemons running on the machine in …

Another example of the DMCA hard at work can be seen today at MacOS X Hints. The author has wisely chosen not to take on the RIAA or Apple, by flouting the DMCA and publishing information on how to circumvent the copy protection scheme used on the tunes downloaded from …

An article from the Associated Press, appearing on Yahoo covers an interview with Bill Gates of Microsoft about the Next Generation Secure Computing Base (formerly known as Palladium, FAQ Here). Key questions were whether the system would require users to use it for all documents (his answer: no, but they'd …

I went searching for this information this morning and found an excellent table from The Vaults of Erowid containing comparisons of the amount of caffeine in various beverages and drugs. Important safety tip, espresso is about 3 x the amount of caffeine as diet cola.

An interesting article (interesting to me at least) about programming the Atari video game system.

This little gem of a story comes to us courtesy of Aftenposten (a Norwegian newspaper with English information). It seems that in February, a TV2 comedian burned a US flag in the background of his monologue. Unfortunately for Mr. Jespersen, this appears to be an illegal act under paragraph 95 …

An interesting article this morning on MacCentral details the rather complex set up for using an iPod as the backup for an FM radio station that has intermittent problems with its satellite feed. The basics are that they installed the 5GB iPod as an on-site backup at the transmitter so …

A Reuters story appearing on ZDNet UK announces the renaming of the French/American games manufacturer Infogrames under the Atari name. Read the article for the sordid details of acquisition and sale that brought the world to this point.

Apple has updated the eMac computers (the only models with CRTs) today. The new machines run from $799 (800MHz G4/128MB/40GB/CD) to $1299 (1GHz G4/256MB/80GB/DVDR) for the standard configurations with up to 1GB RAM available in build to order. The new machines are also Airport …

If you use the MSN Photos service, you better be an MSN member ($21.95/month), or get your pictures downloaded before May 21. A notification on the Photos main page indicates as much. Read more about it in this article from CNet.

After switching to an Apple PowerBook last year, InfoWorld reporter Tom Yager is planning on making his switch permanent and following it up with a change in servers. His plan is to move to an OS X-running XServe, followed by adding a second one in a cluster. According to Yager …