Friday Tech News
Poster: Aron Schatz
Posted on June 3, 2005 at 2:35:15 PM
The weekend is almost here. Time to relax and enjoy it.
Catch the Comet Impact on July 4.
Apple settles iPod suit.
New Bluetooth hack.
Defining Spyware.
In lighter news, the .xxx TLD was approved. ase.xxx is taken already.
NASA seeks answers to life's mysteries.
Catch the Comet Impact on July 4.
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The Deep Impact spacecraft is expected to arrive near Comet Tempel 1 on July 4, one day before the comet reaches perihelion (its closest point to the Sun). It will have released its copper impactor about 24 hours before, while making a "deflection maneuver" to move off to a safe distance of about 300 miles (500 kilometers) from the comet.
Apple settles iPod suit.
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Under the terms of the settlement, Apple has agreed to extend its warranty from one to two years for newer-generation iPods that came with dock connectors and were purchased before May 31, 2004. If batteries in those devices fail within the extended warranty time, Apple will replace either the battery or the iPod for free--or provide a $50 credit toward any Apple merchandise from its online and brick-and-mortar stores.
New Bluetooth hack.
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Whitehouse showed in 2004 that a hacker could arrive at this link key without knowing the PIN using a piece of equipment called a Bluetooth sniffer. This can record the exchanged messages being used to derive the link key and feed the recordings to software that knows the Bluetooth algorithms and can cycle through all 10,000 possibilities of the PIN. Once a hacker knows the link keys, Whitehouse reasoned they could hijack the device.
Defining Spyware.
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Debate has gone on for years over spyware and adware, with manufacturers defending some of these applications as legitimate marketing tools. The terms are slippery, frequently used to apply both to the information-thieving software and the often-annoying advertising tools bundled with free software programs.
In lighter news, the .xxx TLD was approved. ase.xxx is taken already.
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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which oversees the management of top level domains such as .com, .org and .net, endorsed the creation of the new adult domain, .xxx, at an international ICANN meeting in Mar del Plata, Argentina on Wednesday.
NASA seeks answers to life's mysteries.
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From 2015 to 2025, NASA would deploy instruments to search for gravity waves and how they were affected by inflation. The Big Bang Observer would follow, looking for gravity waves produced by the big bang and quantum effects during inflation. Uncovering the enigma of dark energy is the third objective, starting with measuring properties of the cosmos that put limits on its nature. After 2025, the Big Bang Observer will precisely measure the distances to more than a million binary systems that include neutron stars and black holes. Pinning down the geometry of the Universe in this way will help reveal the nature of dark energy.