Free Republic

For PM's third annual innovation celebration, we honor eight bold inventors (with video from the lab) and 10 cutting-edge products with one big, IQ-packed party and three important discussions for our future. * PLUS: 10 Most Brilliant Gadgets of 2007 * UPDATE: Where Are Past Winners Now? Some neat stuff and interesting links: vibrational wind generator, do-it-yourself 3-D 'inkjet' printer prototyper, length morphing helicopter rotor, etc. http://www.popularmechanics.com/breakthrough07Enjoy

"Microsoft Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP (no SP), XP SP1 "These no-longer-supported versions of Windows should use the tzedit.exe utility to reset the Daylight Time change dates for your time zone. Here are the instructions, and also links to download tzedit.exe in case you can't find it on your Windows installation CD. Versions of tzedit are available for all levels of Windows, from 95 to XP. Tzedit is compatible with all application software. The alternative timezone.exe utility should not be used, because it is not compatible with some applications such as Lotus Notes. "Using tzedit.exe avoids the need...

For those of you complaining justifiably about the RIAA and the record company's miserable business plan: there is at least one company that gets it right. This is Linn Records which offers high quality non-DRM CD's and downloads from excellent artists. FWIW, here is what they have to say about their business plan:: There are lots of reasons for a record label to enter the download market directly. Our reasons include; Increase our distribution globally - by making our catalogue available for download the entire world that has access to computers can enjoy our music without having to rely on...

A New Mexico jury recently awarded Shawn Carpenter $4.3 million in a wrongful termination lawsuit against his former employer Sandia National Laboratories. The former network intrusion detection analyst was fired in January 2005 after he shared information relating to an internal network compromise with the FBI and the U.S. Army. Sandia alleged that Carpenter had inappropriately shared confidential information he had gathered in his role as a security analyst for the laboratory. Carpenter said he had done so only for national security reasons. He said his independent investigations of a May 2004 breach had unearthed evidence showing that the intruders...

OK folks you can't make this stuff up. The patent office is going crazy! First, obvious software patents, and now this: "As the American tax law gets more and more complicated, lawyers have come up with one more way to make life difficult for taxpayers: Now you may face a patent infringement suit if you use a tax strategy that someone else thought of first.".....

Allegheny County is already choking on its day-old smoking ban. Allegheny County's smoking ban heads toward veto. Citing state exemption of casinos including those planned in Allegheny county, County Executive Onorato says he won't sign bill.

The Wal-Mart You Don't Know The giant retailer's low prices often come with a high cost. Wal-Mart's relentless pressure can crush the companies it does business with and force them to send jobs overseas. Are we shopping our way straight to the unemployment line?

Like other computer scientists who have studied Diebold voting machines, we were surprised at the apparent carelessness of Diebold’s security design. It can be hard to convey this to nonexperts, because the examples are technical. To security practitioners, the use of a fixed, unchangeable encryption key and the blind acceptance of every software update offered on removable storage are rookie mistakes; but nonexperts have trouble appreciating this. Here is an example that anybody, expert or not, can appreciate: The access panel door on a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine — the door that protects the memory card that stores the votes,...

Man in the Shadows: Inside the Middle East Crisis with a Man Who Led the Mossad (New book by Halevy, recent head of Mossad as well as Israeli diplomat) Includes timely discussion of U.S. trends and the depressing terrorism future! Here is a somewhat excerpted review from Amazon: Written with the dispassion of an intelligence report, Halevy's memoir turns out to be a 20-year political history that includes much secret maneuvering but little skullduggery. Born in London in 1934, Halevy joined the Mossad in 1961 and quickly moved up to become a deputy division chief. His book opens in 1988-89,...

I've noticed that there appeared to be more postings to go through on weekdays. So I got the Alexa Daily Reach graph and used Excel to overlay weekends as red bars for Saturday and Sunday. The resulting graph is below. (Postings would have been better but I didn't know where to find that data.)

Abbie Hoffman, a 1960s radical-cum-trickster, said most pranks fell into one of three categories: “good” pranks were amusingly satirical, “bad” ones gratuitously vindictive, and “neutral” ones surreal and soft on the victim (if there was one). An example of the first is the time Mr Hoffman and his fellow “Yippies” showered the floor of the New York Stock Exchange with dollar bills in 1967, thereby managing to stop the tickertape for six minutes while traders scrambled to pick up the notes. Examples of the third are many and delicious. A master of the art in the early 20th century was...

Eliot Spitzer is taking on the music industry again, this time over the pricing of digital downloads. Warner Music Group disclosed Friday that it had received subpoenas. A source at Sony BMG said the company also received a subpoena and said it was cooperating as well.

...The 20th century saw the invention of dozens of much-loved toys as well. Still-popular board games like Tripoley, Sorry and Monopoly have been around since the 1930s, and Crayola Crayons are more than 100 years old! Twister, made by a division of Hasbro, sold more than 3 million games within a year of its release in 1966. With the help of our friends at the Toy Industry Association, we've put together a slideshow of some of the best-selling and best-loved toys of the past 100 years. Click here for some fun facts about these fabulous toys.

Her testimony will be live on the Internet at www.katrina.house.gov according to Shreveport Times.

A Case Western Reserve University research team from physics and statistics has recently created innovative statistical techniques that improve the chances of detecting a signal in large data sets. The new techniques can not only search for the "needle in the haystack" in particle physics, but also have applications in discovering a new galaxy, monitoring transactions for fraud and security risk, identifying the carrier of a virulent disease among millions of people or detecting cancerous tissues in a mammogram.

Company Should Repair Damage to Customers Caused by CD Software The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), along with two leading national class action law firms, today filed a lawsuit against Sony BMG, demanding that the company repair the damage done by the First4Internet XCP and SunnComm MediaMax software it included on over 24 million music CDs.

A quick summary of whats happened today with links:......... Sony's other DRM has serious security flaw if their uninstaller is used. ........... Sony's other existing DRM installs code before user accepts EULA and it also phones home............Sony stole code used in their DRM............ Best article today on impact on DRM and on the net.

Sony’s other CD DRM technology, the SunnComm MediaMax system, automatically installs several megabytes of files without any meaningful notice or consent, silently phones home, and fails to include any uninstall option. SunnComm will provide a tool to uninstall their software if users pester them enough but it opens up a major security hole like the one created by the web-based uninstaller for Sony’s other DRM, XCP. In fact, the the SunnComm problem is easier to exploit than the XCP uninstaller flaw.

Sony BMG Music Entertainment has recalled its XCP-encoded CDs and is offering exchanges to disgruntled consumers whose PCs using Windows operating systems could potentially be hacked as a result of playing the albums in them. The company has drawn widespread criticism for the hidden copy-protection software it embedded in 52 CDs to limit the number of times they could be copied. As a result, Sony BMG is recalling the 4.7 million XCP-encoded CDs that it shipped to stores. Of those, 2.1 million have already been purchased............ You may want to check out the list below. It is not all modern...

"Tool is worse than original infection" "SONY PULLS OFF ANOTHER blatant stupidity in the 'cure is worse than the disease' category. No, not the DRM infection itself, not the security compromising removal agreement, but the removal tool itself. Yes, this one appears to put you in MORE danger than the original rootkit..... According to Freedon To Tinker, the web based installer is a worse vulnerability than the original rootkit. ............. the 'cure' from Sony involves downloading an ActiveX control ........ that lets just about anyone download, install and execute arbitrary code on your machine. To make matters even funnier, the...