Million Member Botnet

The Sandia National Laboratories have created a botnet containing a million elements that they intend to use to simulate the effects of DDOS attacks and other nasty cyber stuff. Nice to see supercomputers being applied to something more useful than thermonuclear destruction.

Apocalypse: Beasts With Two Heads

Rather worryingly I have read twice this week about creatures being born with two heads. Once here about a calf with two heads in Flamisoul , Belgium and another here about a baby in the Philippines with the same thing. I don´t hear any Nostradamus followers crying it´s the end of the world though.

YouTube Takedowns

You have to praise YouTube for doing their bit in removing copyrighted or terms of use violating materials, but for Calvin Harris it went a bit too far. Ars Technica reports on how Calvin had posted some stuff on YouTube himself, but that the British Phonographic Industry (UK equivalent of the RIAA) sent a takedown notice to YouTube to remove the material because of copyright violation. Calvin was obviously miffed; I love that Twitter post!

Killer Robot 50 Years Away

One of Harry Harrison´s stories War with the Robots predicted a future battlefield scenario, when both human sides retreated from a battle, leaving their robotic fighting machines in automatic. Each side never realised this until the commanders encountered each other during their retreat. Well now it seems robotic killers are being seriously considered, regardless of The Terminator say the BBC, who report that a debate has been called on the matter. The problem is robots do what they are told so any element of last minute human judegement that may avoid confrontations or potential mistakes goes out the window. The recent drone activity in Afghanistan/Pakistan and even the countless indicents of American friendly fire show that even our own soldiers sometimes can´t tell what the enemy is. Deploying robot death machines in a civilian area would be disastrous.

Apples Hot Deals

Seems like there are some serious issues with exploding iPods and incendiary iPhones. It is hard to tell how isolated these incidents are and whether a product recall is on the cards, but when I read this article from The Times online about a father who was told he would only be refunded if he did not tell the press, that was too much. I remember similar stories of people having trouble with Apple when it came to broken Macbooks, so this isn´t something new from Apple. Although their software may be well designed, their customer service needs a serious brush up.

Oldest Portable Clockwork Computer Even Older

The Greek Antikythera clockwork computer that modeled the motion of planets and predicted the times of Olympic games may be older than thought. New Scientist reports on how the device may be as old as 200 BC because it includes references to minor games that would not have been included on the calendar during the Roman period. I think it´s a wonderful piece of technology and another indication of how much knowledge may have been lost from that period before rediscovered in the latter half of the last millennium.

Exploding Power Cable

For a very short period my girlfriend´s home town was on the news, after an underground electricity cable exploded, leaving a 15 centimeter wide hole in the ground. The incident happened across the road from where Andrea´s father lives, under one of his neighbours front gardens and there was apparently a loud bang followed by a plume of smoke. The cable was probably disturbed by recent activity from workmen who are laying glass fibre cables for digital television.