There's an on-line service where you enter an Apple device serial number, and it tells you about the device.
Sadly, it didn't recognize my Apple ///+ or //c, but it should work for anything from the Macintosh era.
read more | digg story
University of Minnesota researchers have released a study with the headline "Atheists identified as America’s most distrusted minority."
Firefox 2.0 is ready for alpha testing. The major changes over 1.5.0.1 are:
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley put up a Pi Search engine that lets you look for words and hex strings in the first four billion binary digits of pi.
Cool, I'm there starting at the 1492283092th digit.
Thankfully, there's no goatse in pi.
Yesterday, BoingBoing posted about our company. Today, I saw John Battelle's article on us as well. It's an exciting week.
Here's a link to our site, and we're hiring.
The retro wood case trend - I should hate it. What is the point of wrapping plastic items in wood? But then I see something like this and I want to go out and carve my own.
read more | digg story
Xeni Jardin broke the story that Metaweb got funded. Great news! Particularly because Metaweb is my employer. We spun off from Applied Minds, which itself is a great company, and are building some really exciting things.
Oh yeah, and we're hiring.
Boing Boing: Metaweb gets meta-dough: $15 million financing round
The Telegraph featured an article on a driver whose BMW's accelerator stuck while he was on the highway. The driver phoned police from his car to say "the accelerator has jammed, the brakes have burned out and I'm trapped in my BMW doing 130mph". Just a typical commute. BMW's response to the incident? "We are unaware of any issues of that nature with that particular model."
Brian Dear of Eventful.com and EVDB talked at ETech about the platform and site for events, and then announced a new feature: Eventful Demands. It's a way for fans and performers to communicate directly, a la ebay, about events that should happen.
Here's an example of an event sticker that you can create around a demanded event, in order to promote it and make it actually happen.
Here are my raw notes from the SecondLife presentation at ETech 06 in San Diego. I'll update this with photos of the presentation later in the day.
Not a subscription model. Users pay from $0 to $16,000 per month.
In the past 30 days, 240k items sold
5m p2p transactions
US $6.5M internal economy
US $800k exchanged
75m IM messages
Average value per transaction doubling each year
Taxes - users didn't like them, began setting their property on fire in protest. So the new user experence? Seeing angry established users ... on fire. This puts a dent in customer retention. So they did away with taxes.
Approximately 25% of user online time is spent creating items.
Scripting is necessary to give objects behaviors. The scripting language has a C-Like syntax - it's very hard. Yet 15% of users in the past ... have written scripts from scratch.
2.5M lines of code a week.
SL itself is only 800k lines of code.
Tringo - SL game that has moved to the real world. When you create something in SL, you own the IP. The creator of Tringo is licensing it for the GameBoy Advance.
Demographics of SL - most users non-technical, median age 36, gender neutral by hrs of use.
According to multiple sources, Citibank is saying its ATM system has been compromised, and that the bank is locking out travelers who try to access funds from outside of the US.
The San Francisco Chronicle ran an article in February that may be connected to this. Some BofA clients find debit cards canceled. From the article: "Bank of America customers have had their debit cards canceled ... after an unnamed company experienced what appears to be a major security breach. BofA is refusing to identify the company.... BofA confirmed Wednesday that the breach in this latest case wasn't at a processing center used by the bank or any other affiliate."
Adweek has created a parody Citibank ad about the ATM fiasco.
New: The story continues:
TechWeb: The unfolding debit card scam that rocked Citibank this week is far from over, an analyst said Thursday as she called this first-time-ever mass theft of PINs "the worst consumer scam to date."
[R]etailers improperly store PIN numbers after they've been entered, rather than erase them at the PIN-entering pad. Worse, the keys to decrypt the PIN blocks are often stored on the same network as the PINs themselves, making a single successful hack a potential goldmine for criminals: they get the PIN data and the key to read it.
The victim of the hack attack isn't yet known, although some banks have pointed fingers at OfficeMax, which has denied that its system was penetrated.
Chiucago Tribune
A story in Wednesday's New York Times, citing unidentified sources, said it appeared that the Citibank debit card information was obtained through a security breach at OfficeMax Inc., the Itasca-based office supplies retailer.
OfficeMax said Wednesday that it had "no knowledge of a security breach."
ComputerWorld
Slashdot's take on the issue.
