US Authorities Shut Down Spamming Operation

The Federal Trade Commission in the United States, with the help of security firm Marshal Software, have won over the courts in Chicago allowing the FTC to freeze the assets of HerbalKing group and promptly shut down the operations. The group is said to have ties to Australia, New Zealand, India, China and the United States and it's estimated that the group controlled 35,000 computers, in a botnet, and could send 10 billion e-mail messages a day. “This is pretty major. At one point these guys delivered up to one-third of all spam,” said Richard Cox, chief information officer at SpamHaus, a nonprofit antispam research group. HerbalKing e-mails have flooded the internet with the promise of cheap knock off watches and a variety of pharmaceuticals, including weight-loss drugs and male anatomy enhancers. According to the New York Times "The group was shipping drugs like Propecia, Lipitor, Celebrex and Zoloft out of India. The F.T.C. also said the group based its Web sites in China, processed credit cards from the former Soviet republic of Georgia and Cyprus, and transferred funds among members using ePassporte, an electronic money network."

Space Tourist Arrives At International Space Station

A 47-year-old computer game designer Richard Garriott, the son former NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, has arrived at the International Space Station after paying the $30m (£17m) fair for a 10-day trip to the ISS. "Mr Garriott will occupy some of his time taking photos to record how the Earth's surface has changed in the 35 years since his father's voyage." Garriot arrived at the ISS aboard the Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft carrying a new crew for the ISS, American Mike Fincke and Russian Yuri Lonchakov. I can understand Garriott wanting to follow in his father's footsteps but is there really that much money in designing computer games? BBC Story.

Text Messages From Dumbo

Game wardens and farmers in Kenya have been at odds over elephants that have been raiding villagers' crops, sometimes wiping out a half years worth of income at a time. Villagers used to beat pots and pans and light fires to ward off the massive animals and wardens where at times forced to put the animals down to save the lively hood of the farmers. A new project has collars with embedded cellphone SIM cards being placed on the perpetrators and virtual "geofences" created using a global positioning system. When an animal gets too close to the villages a text message is sent from the collar to the wardens who dispatch a team to divert the animals back to the conservancy. Though costly, the plan has worked and is changing the habits of the pachyderms. The technique is being employed in two Kenyan national conservancies. Besides stopping the raiding of crops the system also helps to track and understand the movement of the beasts and aids in the fight against poaching.

"Elephants are ranked as "near threatened" in the Red List, an index of vulnerable species published by the International Union for Conservation of Nature." CNN/AP story here.

US Military Charters Kite Powered Ship To Deliver Equipment

While I think the motivation here is strictly cost savings, I'll applaud the choice of the US Navy's Military Sealift Command (MSC) which has chartered the MV Beluga, a "kite-assisted" 400 foot cargo ship, to deliver Air Force and Army equipment from Europe to the US. MV Beluga uses a paraglider-shaped, SkySails-System, which supplements its conventional, internal combustion engines potentially reducing fuel costs by as much as 30 percent, or roughly $1,600 a day. The system utilizes a computer-controlled kite that flies from 100 to 300 yards into the air, using the wind to tow the ship. "MSC values innovation that leads to cost savings," said Captain Nick Holman, of Sealift Logistics Command Europe. CNet Story.

YouTube Goes Long Format, - Offers CBS Shows

On Friday YouTube announced that it would start offering full-length episodes of TV series like “Dexter,” “Beverly Hills, 90210” and “Star Trek” through a deal with CBS. The catch for users of the site is that these longer videos will include preroll, midroll and postroll ads in each episode. Senior product manager for YouTube, Shiva Rajaraman, said the company is trying to match “the right ad format for the right content experience.” NYTimes article.

Firefox To Help Websites Home In On Your Location

Mozilla has released a new add-on technology for Firefox that helps websites detect the physical location of computers. The Geode project uses technology from Skyhook known as the Loki system which works out a computer's location from nearby wireless networks and can determine the location within seconds with an accuracy of about 10 to 20 metres. "Geode is strictly controlled by the user. When a website requests a location, a notification bar lets users decide whether to give their exact whereabouts, the neighbourhood or city they are in or nothing at all." The system will enable sites to serve up information relevant to the users location, such as news, weather, and of course ads, but also could be used for website authentication allowing people to log in from certain locations only. It's an interesting concept with obvious applications but it seems to me that it will only be a matter of time before the knowledge of our exact location is used against us for nefarious reasons. BBC story.

Ford Addressing Parents Concerns With MyKey

Ford Motor Company has announced a new feature to be offered in the 2010 model of the Ford Focus. MyKey will provide safety features aimed at keeping teen aged drivers safe and responsible behind the wheel of the family car. With the MyKey feature installed the vehicle will alert the driver at various speeds ranging from 72 kilometres an hour to 130 kilometres an hour, the upper maximum the driver would be allowed to drive. The system also alerts the driver when the vehicle is running low on fuel and can limit the volume of the stereo. Not surprisingly, parents surveyed loved the idea while teens hated it... but then again who's paying for the car, the insurance, the gas, etc...

Sympatico / MSN story

Tongue Computer Interface

Researchers at the School of Computer and Electrical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology have created an input device that the user wears on their head and senses the movement of a small magnet that is placed on the tongue. The user moves his / her tongue in one of six positions to indicate their intentions similar to the movement of the mouse. Because the tongue is directly wired to the brain, by passing the spinal cord, the device is an excellent option for those with spinal cord injuries providing them with a method of controlling wheel chairs and computers. Sciencentral.com has the story here.

GMail's New Feature - Mail Goggles

"Google strives to make the world's information useful. Mail you send late night on the weekends may be useful but you may regret it the next morning. Solve some simple math problems and you're good to go. Otherwise, get a good night's sleep and try again in the morning." This is the description provided for one of Google's latest GMail features called Mail Goggles. Put Mail Goggles on and GMail will help to save you from the embarrassment of those late night e-mails to your ex or your boss! To activate Mail Goggles select 'Settings' on your GMail page and then locate the feature on the 'Labs' tab and enable. When acitvated goggles monitors the time of day that you press the send link and depending upon your configurable settings will prompt you to answer a number of mathematical questions, get them right and your mail will go through, get them wrong and you'd better sleep it off. Now if only someone would make such a device for your cell phone...

Election Humour Simpsons Style

No comments, just a good belly laugh...