...more recent posts
I thought I remembered posting about this before, but I can't find any reference to it. Liquid lenses for camera phones:
The company was founded two years ago to exploit two core technology patents covering lenses based on the principles of electro-wetting. This is the tendency of liquid to spread on a substrate, Paillard explains. "It means we can tune the shape of the drop to create a lens. Think about a tunable lens, like in the human eye," he suggests....Better lenses are crucial, especially in light of the first round of 1 megapixel cameraphones that are exhibiting lackluster image quality. Sheer megapixels are only part of the issue, and improvements there without corresponding improvements in the lenses and other sub systems are not going to do it. Here's to hoping their time frame isn't overly optimistic.
The company has a non-exclusive licensing deal with a subsidiary of Samsung to develop the lenses for use in its camera phones. Paillard expects products will be on the shelves by Q1 2006 at the latest, and maybe even in time for Christmas next year.
Clean System to Zombie Bot in 4 minutes
Slashdot thread on a USA Today investigation into how long it takes computers attached to the internet to be attacked and compromised:
According to the latest study by USA Today and Avantgarde, it takes less than 4 minutes for an unpatched Windows XP SP1 system to become part of a botnet. Avantgarde has the statistics in their abstract. Stats of note: Although Macs and PC's got hit with equal opportunity, the XP SP1 machine was hit with 5 LSASS and 4 DCOM exploits while the Mac remained clean. The Linux desktop also was impenetrable, but only was only targeted by 0.26% of all attacks.In the slashdot thread the well known geeks from Avantgarde had some more info. The interesting bit is the difference between XP SP1 and SP2 (Service Pack 1 and 2 - these are Microsoft security updates you XP users should be installing. Obviously 2 is the most recent.)
There was an SP2 machine included in the same test. It went unmolested, due largerly to the new firewall enabled by default. This particular test environment included no user activity, i.e. no email reading, no web browsing.Of course, it will probably take you more than 4 minutes of being connected to the net to download the SP2 patch! D'oh.
Generally speaking, I'm pleased with SP2. As long as you're running XP, and it won't affect your critical functionality adversely, install it. It won't be exploit proof moving forward, but it's the easiest way to patch the current set of problems.
In related news, Ars Technica recently did a roundup of spyware removal tools for Windows. No sense reading the whole thing, but they conclude that the free Ad-Aware is your best bet. You can download it here.
I am still trying to keep a grip on all the comment spam here, so I have neglected, so far, the other issue of referrer log spam. But that's on my list as well. Here's a post on clone blogs and referrer log spam that is interesting and frightening.
BTW, this site has been running for 5 years, with over 20,000 comments in the database. We've only been getting spam comments for a few months, but already we have deleted, as of this moment, 11,745. They should overtake real comments in number in another few weeks. Those are some industrious spammers.