According to this story on MacRumors, Apple's much-rumored music service is nearly ready to go. Reports indicate that 5 major labels have signed up to provide their tunes for a fee to Apple for use in the service. This accompanies recent stories that Apple may be buying Universal Records from …

An article on SlashDot sites the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) as the primary cause of the chilling effect going on for the technological investigations of flaws in security technology. One unfortunate side-effect of the DMCA is that it provides cover for companies that release flawed security technology. The article …

SpaceToday.net has an article stating that Russian president Vladamir Putin announced the consideration of additional funding for the ISS on the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's historic first flight.

According to a news release, EPIC (the Electronic Privacy Information Center), has announced that they have established the Privacy Threat Index, a color-coded graphical depiction of how under threat our privacy is due to recent government changes.

Adding to their existing Borders and Starbucks locations, T-Mobile has signed an agreement with Kinkos to provide HotSpot access points inside of their stores. This agreement1 will provide an additional 1500 locations for T-Mobile's HotSpot system, bringing its total to nearly 4,000. Original link (http://www.kinkos.com …

The CDC has extensive information online about SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), including a press release announcing that they have completed sequencing the coronavirus that is at the heart of the disease. There is actually a PDF of the nucleotide sequence and more detailed information of the other universities and …

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, designed to increase potability of health insurance also includes provisions that are aimed at increasing the privacy of health care users. An article from Wired describes some of the confusion surrounding these provisions.

According to reports from CNet, the new P4 (talked about on this site this morning) has been delayed due to a "glitch" in its production or design.

From the "deeply cool, but questionably usable" file, comes a report from Brighthand.com1 about virtual keyboards to be released later this year. The devices use lasers to project the keyboard onto "any" flat surface and then pick up your "keystrokes" from that surface and feed them into the …

A report from CNET discusses a 38-year old nationalized US citizen (with a wife and 3 kids) that has been detained in solitary confinement since March 20. Mike Hawash is an employee of Intel. He is being detained as a "material witness", which means that (unlike someone charged with a …

If you're among the people (you know who you are) that were absolutely mesmerized by the Iraqi Minister of (dis-)Information, the end is not at hand. Although he has not been seen since US troops seized Baghdad last Wednesday, a new web site, We Love the Iraqi Information Minister …

Apple released Beta 2 (v73) of Safari today. It fixes a ton of stuff and adds a bunch of heavily requested features. Go get yours at the Safari download page

A new review on Tom's Hardware gives the once-over to the new chips from Intel that have an 200MHz (quad-pumped to 800MHz) bus. The article's conclusion is that you see some substantial gains for data-heavy apps, but many others see only marginal gains from the new FSB. I found the …

As promised when I did the initial review of my new 17" AlBook, I flew on an airplane yesterday. Not only was it a plane, but I was in coach and it was a Canadair Regional Jet (about the smallest plane that is large enough to use a laptop on …

An article on SlashDot describes an emulator for HP calculators that is actually being supported by HP with ROMs. However, the site that it points to has been slashdotted, so we won't be able to fill in more info for a little while.

Hong Kong is getting rid of their new tourism slogan, "Hong Kong: It'll take your breath away!" due to its central role in the in spreading SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome). The new slogan: "Hong Kong: There's no place like it". I'm not sure it is that much better.

This is pretty much old news, but the comments1 are interesting. Link no longer available. ↩

Lucent Technologies (formerly Bell Labs) is the object of a lawsuit by Microsoft to nullify some of its patents for audio and video conferencing technologies. The dispute apparently started when Lucent sued Dell and Gateway over infringement of these patents. The two companies asked Microsoft for cover, since the technologies …

There is a new site (on the UIUC campus) that details the $97.8B cases against 4 college students filed in the last few weeks.

Apple released 10.2.5 (client only, Server is in test, but doesn't appear to be out yet) updates yesterday. There were a ton of security-related fixes (many for things that were only made public in the last week), along with performance increases and some other fixes. I was particularly …