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Perhaps Microsoft really does believe in Innovation, as it keeps innovating new ways to get your computer hacked into. Now a simple bit of XML code on a website is all it takes to execute commands on your computer. Even turning off ActiveX and scripting doesn't stop this one, it takes a registry tweak until Microsoft decides to release a patch.
Politicians are at it again, this time a canidate for California govenor used an "innovated way of using the internet" to email people telling them to vote for him. And not everyone who got emailed even lives in California, or were even US citizens. In a nice twist though, the webhoster for the campaign website took it offline for a while for violating the terms-of-use contract. Will people ever learn? I'd NEVER vote for any politician that ever spammed me.
Pioneer 10 turned 30 the other day. It's now 7.4 billion miles away, floating off toward Aldebaran which is the red star in Taurus, which is should reach in about 2 million years.
It has now been proven that a true obfuscating programs is impossible to make. There will always be some way to figure it out. This has major ramifications for software "protection" as that was one way in which companies would try to make their software tamper-proof.
And finally in a story that shows that technology isn't always the best tool for the job, a "Domesday book" that was put into digital format in 1986 is now unreadable because the hardware used to read it is now obsolete. However the original one, written in 1086, is still in fine condition. This is a concern for a lot of record keepers, as so much information today is stored electronically. But the ability to read the information depends on the programs and hardware avaliable at the time. 1,000 years from now, do you think we'll able to know how to open Acrobat files, or Excel 95 spreedsheets? It's a field of research that deserves a lot of study, as can you imagine the problems that would happen if the ancient civilizations used computers to put all their records on? We would have no idea how to extract the data, and millions of years of history would be completely lost.
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