publications

Government control of Net is always a bad idea

An important law that would protect California consumers from state-level regulation of VoIP and other IP-based services passed the California State Senate late last week on a bipartisan 30-6 vote.

The bill, SB 1161, now moves to the State Assembly, which has scheduled hearings for June 11.

SB 1161 is short and sweet. It prohibits the state's Public Utility Commission "from regulating Voice over Internet Protocol and Internet Protocol enabled service...except as required or delegated by federal law" or otherwise authorized by statute, until at least 2020.

Its goal is even more straight-forward. As the bill'… Read more

Text messages prompting people to get their flu shot

Only about half of kids ages 6 months to 17 years received the flu shot in the 2010-2011 season, which may be one reason influenza remains one of the most common causes of hospitalization among kids today, according to a study in this week's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

So researchers from Columbia University and beyond tested an intervention program on a randomized control trial of more than 9,000 kids of that same age range at four community-based clinics in the United States, where more than 7,500 kids had not received the vaccine … Read more

New iPad, elder iPad 2 face off in deathly drop test

Your mind goes on a roller-coaster ride of shock and hope when you drop a tablet on a hard surface. Trust me. Hey, I even feel mental pain when I watch this video showing some spine-tingling (and senseless) iPad sacrifice.

In the vid, the new iPad and iPad 2 face off in a series of waist- and shoulder-high drop tests captured on video in a PR stunt by consumer electronics warranty company SquareTrade. The unscientific experiment features a group of curiously smiling people dropping iPads face down and face up on hard concrete. … Read more

The bus rider who jams yappers' cell phones

It might be the 7:30 a.m. bus and you might be semi-comatose from a long night of self-anesthesia, but some people do insist on talking into their cell phones about last night's cabbage stew or a lover who smells of cadaver.

You can tell them to be quiet. But this, too might be ignored. So one rider in Philadelphia decided he'd use an alternative method: he says he simply jams all cell phones on his bus.

I know many will be grateful to NBC 10 in Philadelphia for discovering this remarkably simple method at achieving world peace.

"I guess I'm taking the law into my own hands. And, quite frankly, I'm proud of it," the man told NBC. … Read more

The 404 995: Where the damage is done (podcast)

Leaked from 404 Podcast 995:

Apple Mac OS X 'Mountain Lion' takes more bites out of iOS. Get started with iMessage for OS X. Low Latency No. 10: Good artists copy, great artists steal. Apple PR maintains a blacklist of journalists that it refuses to talk to. Bathroom break video : Live television texting-while-walking fail.

Facebook to launch verified accounts with pseudonyms

In an effort to root out impostors, Facebook will reportedly soon allow celebrities and other public figures to verify their accounts in much the same way that Twitter does.

The social network will begin notifying public figures with many subscribers tomorrow that they can verify their accounts by submitting an image of a government-issued ID, allowing them to display a preferred pseudonym instead of their birth name, according to a TechCrunch report. Facebook will then manually approve the "alternative names" to confirm they are the real stage names or pen names.

Facebook users must be chosen to participate … Read more

Google Public DNS prevails as the world's largest service

Handling more than 70 billion domain name system (DNS) requests each day, Google is now the largest public DNS service on earth, the Web giant announced today.

"We launched Google Public DNS in December 2009 to help make the web faster for everyone," software engineer for Google Public DNS Jeremy K. Chen said in a statement. "Today, we're no longer an experimental service."

According to Chen, the way DNS works is it acts like the phone book of the Internet. "If you had to look up hundreds or thousands of phone numbers every day,&… Read more

Researchers find flaw in key generation with popular cryptography

A group of researchers has uncovered a flaw in the way public keys are generated using the RSA algorithm for encrypting sensitive online communications and transactions.

They found that a small fraction of public keys--27,000 out of a sample of about 7 million--had not been randomly generated as they should be. This means it would be possible for someone to figure out the secret prime numbers which were used to create the public key, according to The New York Times, which reported on the research today.

The research was led by James P. Hughes, an independent cryptology expert based … Read more

The 404 984: Where we plan the 404 IPO (podcast)

Aunt Jill Schlesinger, editor-at-large for CBS MoneyWatch.com, is back on the show to tell us everything we should know but are too lazy to read about the impending Facebook IPO.

She'll break down the process of how a startup progresses from the idea stage to capital investment to public offering, and we'll speculate on how the filing will affect the site in terms of advertising, content, and sharing.… Read more

Vintage 3D 'wiggle GIFs' respun with library's cool tool

Some readers may remember the flickering, old-timey, surprisingly three-dimensional GIFs that made a splash on the Internet back in 2008. Writer and artist Joshua Heineman created them from images of 19th and early 20th century stereoscope cards he culled from a collection placed online by the New York Public Library.

Heineman took the two slightly offset images on a given card, separated them, dropped them into Photoshop, and created animated GIFs that quickly "flipped" from one image to the other, over and over (a technique known as "wiggle stereoscopy").

Then, as part of a personal project called "Reaching for the Out of Reach," he posted the GIFs on his Tumblr blog, where they were discovered by the blogosphere and spread far and wide.

Now--thanks to that online fame, and to the New York Public Library's push to reinvent itself in the Internet Age--you too can breathe new three-dimensional life into these stereoscopic artifacts.… Read more