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Samsung a970 EVDO swivel 2-megapixel cameraphone. Or should it be called a camcorderphone?

Very very nice. No release date, but it is coming to the U.S.
- jim 3-15-2005 6:47 pm [link] [add a comment]

New whitepaper from the honeynet project: "Know your Enemy: Tracking Botnets"

Honeypots are a well known technique for discovering the tools, tactics, and motives of attackers. In this paper we look at a special kind of threat: the individuals and organizations who run botnets. A botnet is a network of compromised machines that can be remotely controlled by an attacker. Due to their immense size (tens of thousands of systems can be linked together), they pose a severe threat to the community. With the help of honeynets we can observe the people who run botnets - a task that is difficult using other techniques. Due to the wealth of data logged, it is possible to reconstruct the actions of attackers, the tools they use, and study them in detail. In this paper we take a closer look at botnets, common attack techniques, and the individuals involved.

- jim 3-15-2005 6:33 pm [link] [add a comment]

The long tail:

The most interesting statistic however, was that while the top 10 searches were thousands of times more popular than the average search, these top-10 searches represented only 3% of our total volume. 97% of our traffic came from the “long tail” – queries asked a little over once a day....

You know the real reason Excite went out of business? We couldn’t figure out how to make money from 97% of our traffic. We couldn’t figure out how to make money from the long tail - from those queries asked only once a day.

- jim 3-12-2005 6:49 pm [link] [1 ref] [add a comment]

The site feels a little spammy, but this guy has been around for a while and I think he's legit. And he is now selling a dual EV-DO wireless solution that he claims will get 256 kb/s up and 3.2 mb/s down. Takes two PC card slots, and he has to saw the antenna off the bottom card. It's ridiculously expensive, but this is the bleeding edge.
- jim 3-12-2005 6:46 pm [link] [add a comment]

After living joyfully without fear of pop up ads for quite some time now (between Safari and Firefox's excellent pop up killing powers,) I have been dismayed recently to see these ads appear again. Although I guess they are more 'pop under' than 'pop up'. The trick they have found to beat the blockers is to spawn the new windows using our old (*cough*) friend Flash. Ah, isn't Flash wonderful?

I don't know if Macromedia (Flash's parent company) is going to do anything about this. Or, it would be nice if the browser makers would let you keep Flash installed, but toggled off, and then let you activate it if you really want for a specific site through a menu item (I hear Omniweb can do this.) But until someone does something to fix this problem you will either have to live with some pop under ads once again, or, and I admit I am severely tempted, uninstall Flash. Thanks to Macromedia for at least providing these uninstaller programs (for all platforms.)
- jim 3-10-2005 6:51 pm [link] [2 comments]

Completely bizarre. Sony Ericsson launches the ROB1, a bluetooth wireless roving robot camera you can control from your bluetooth cell phone:

The ROB1 has a range of up to 50 meters (165') and streams what it sees back to your mobile phone so that you can control it properly. The ROB1 should be quite maneuverable, able to move forwards and backwards, and turn on a dime - literally. The ROB1's camera can be pivoted up to 70 degrees up or as far as 20 degrees down, so that you can frame the shot just perfectly. There is even an assist light up front to light up your way as you navigate.
Here's a flash demo from the Sony Ericsson site.
- jim 3-10-2005 6:45 pm [link] [add a comment]

Ping-o-matic is a meta pinging tool for notifying multiple sites that keep track of recently updated weblogs. I'm trying to get the XML-RPC interface to work from our posting script here. It is responding as if it is working, but I'm not seeing myself show up in anybodies 'recently updated' lists. I'll get it eventually though.

Rogers Cadenhead has a free PHP class that does all the heavy lifting.
- jim 3-09-2005 7:21 pm [link] [add a comment]

Newspipe

is an RSS/Atom aggregator with a difference: It allows you to keep track of your feeds through e-mail - you create an OPML file listing your feeds and Newspipe will collect them, convert them to e-mail messages and send them to your mailbox.

This means you can read, organize and archive news feeds using your current mail client (or even webmail), without needing to use a separate program. Newspipe can send you news items as plaintext or HTML mail, both as single items or grouped in a digest.
Obviously this would be a great way to read RSS/Atom feeds on your mobile device. For Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows; requires python 2.3 or above and access to an SMTP server.
- jim 3-05-2005 7:27 pm [link] [add a comment]

For my personal security efforts: Tunneling your email traffic over SSH on OS X.
- jim 3-04-2005 6:16 pm [link] [add a comment]

SAJAX

is a tool to make programming websites using the Ajax framework — also known as XMLHTTPRequest or remote scripting — as easy as possible. Sajax makes it easy to call PHP functions from your webpages via JavaScript without performing a browser refresh. The toolkit does 99% of the work for you so you have no excuse to not use it.
AJAX is the latest web development buzzword. Stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML. This is the technology that Google is using to create all the amazing UI interactivity in it's recent web application offerings.

Jesse James Garrett has a great overview article explaining this technology.
- jim 3-04-2005 6:04 pm [link] [add a comment]

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