First GeoCaching, Now Latituding!

The Official Google Blog is hoping to start a new trend that I'm dubbing Latituding. The idea is to get your friends together and send them out with their smartphones equipped with Google's Latitiude ,and then have them maneuver into position to spell out words. Check out the video and you'll get the picture (grown) ...

Conficker Getting Tougher To Detect And Eradicate

According to the New York Times, groups that track and defend us from malicious software are saying that the Conficker Virus is being updated and "... the most recent version, which began to appear Tuesday, appeared to be targeted at improving a peer-to-peer communications system between computers that are infected and hardening the system by making infected machines more resistant to anti-virus software." Additionally, "the Conficker authors have switched strategies and are using the program’s peer-to-peer mechanism to update the system. Originally, they had appeared to plan to download instructions to Conficker by generating new Internet addresses that infected machines could download instructions from."

No one has figured out entirely what the plot / purpose of Conficker is but it is being watched closely as it has infected millions of Windows machines world wide. According to Wikipedia "BKIS, a Vietnamese security firm, has announced that they found clues that the virus may be originated from China"

Shaq And Mark Cuban Exchange Tweets - Trade Rumours Fly

CNet's Chris Matyszczyk, in a recent post on his Technically Incorrect blog, discusses an exchange of tweets between the NBA's Pheonix Sun star Shaquille O'Neal (@The_Real_Shaq) and Mark Cuban (@mcuban) owner of the Dallas Mavericks. The pair are avid Twitter users and the exchange began on Saturday as the Suns where in town to take on the Mavericks. "I'm lookin foor u mark cuban" Shaq tweeted. The Dallas Mavericks owner replied: "you know where i live.." followed by: "And make sure to wear your best ShaqAlbert outfit to the arena tomorrow". Regardless of whether or not this was a simple exchange in jest or there is greater meaning behind it all it has Twitter and the blog-o-sphere a buzz with trade rumours, of course it doesn't help that the last tweet in the exchange was from Cuban who said "shaq found me. wish I could say what happened. I kept my cool."

Backlash Against Movie's Leak Online

Logic would dictate that geeks everywhere would rejoice at the thought of an early, all be it illegal, release of an unfinished version of “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” on the Internet. It seems however that movie and comic book fans as well as bloggers and some members of the BitTorrent community are encouraging each other to resist temptation and see the film in theatres. The NYTimes Bits Blog points out that "...one commentator on Releaselog, a popular blog among the file-sharing community, wrote : “i think it’s worthy of being seen the right way in the theatre. everyone should support this movie and help it get a massive take making it look like the leak actually helped it.” A commentator on SuperHeroHype, a forum geared toward comic book fans, wrote: “The workprint did nothing but make me want to see the final completed version even more.”"

I, for one, am a big fan of watching movies the way they were intended to be viewed... in the theatre!

Google's Plans For The Future Include Voice Search

"We believe voice search is a new form of search and that it is core to our business," said Vic Gundotra, Google's vice president of engineering at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. "Look how far we have come. I get the advantage of looking at daily voice queries coming in and it's amazing. It's working. It's reached a tipping point. It's growing and growing very, very fast and we are thrilled about it,"

Gundotra indicated that voice search is a technology that is getting better and better the more that it is used, increasing in accuracy by 15% since the launch of the service on the iPhone, which he attributes to the increased number of users and the resulting increase in data.

There was also talk about an offline version of the 5 year old Gmail service and a "no comment" on the rumored acquisition of Twitter.

Source: BBC

How To Recycle Your Old Gadgets

Many of us likely have an old PC kicking around the basement or last years cellphone occupying space in the junk drawer. If you are like most people you probably only give it any attention when you stub your toe on it or push it aside to find a rubber band.

Want to do something good for the environment and feel better about your space at home, but don't know how to safely dispose of those unwanted gadgets? Wired's Gadget Lab has taken the guess work out of it for us with their round up list of major companies and how their recycling programs work.

If you need more motivation, here is a word of advice from fastfengshui.com "If your house is full of clutter you are living in the midst of a lot of very stale, stuck energy. Since feng shui works by shifting the energy of your home, it's going to take a lot more effort to get results if you don't deal with your clutter first."

Google's Cognitive Auteheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity

April 1st is my favourite day of the year, for it is the day that the great minds at Google unleash their creative powers on the world in an attempt to bring humour to the masses and pull the wool over the eyes of the gullible. This years April Fool's joke is the announcement of CADIE: Cognitive Auteheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity. CADIE is bringing a host of new features to the google offerings including Gmail Autopilot, which answers your e-mail for you, Chrome updated for use with red-and-blue 3D glasses, and Picasa Web Albums feature to add red-eye to your photos, as well as Brain Search for Mobile.

"...We started this project as a continuation of mankind's perpetual quest to learn the nature of reason and what defines us as humans. We would have been pleased if we achieved nothing more than a system that passed a Turing test - i.e. that wrote a symphony but didn't necessarily know it had done so. However, while we still think of CADIE as a young entity, we are convinced now that she has evolved her own "strong AI" presence. We continue to conduct tests, but increasingly, we conduct long conversations with her, acutely aware that our creation will raise many ethical questions on the part of the public. Will humans be surpassed by artificial evolution? Will we lose our sense of uniqueness, and if so, what would that mean? In which direction will CADIE's consciousness evolve? How is she going to be held accountable, if at all? Will CADIE herself at some point connect her own electromagnetic dots in some idiosyncratic manner which turns her into something we are no longer capable of understanding in any sort of productive way, much as that aforementioned toddler, waving at herself in the mirror, leaves primates forever behind in their own tragically limited world?

We don't know. Did you really think we possibly could?

The CADIE Team
March 31st, 2009
11:59pm"

Google Announces Venture Capital Fund

In a tough economic downturn many companies are having a hard time to find the funding they need to move innovative ideas forward. Yesterday Google announced it's own brand of venture capital called, Google Ventures of course. In a post on the Official Google Blog Rich Miner and Bill Maris, Managing Partners, of Google Ventures say "Economically, times are tough, but great ideas come when they will. If anything, we think the current downturn is an ideal time to invest in nascent companies that have the chance to be the "next big thing," and we'll be working hard to find them. If you think you have the next big idea, or if you just want to to learn more, please see our website at www.google.com/ventures."

Shuttle Discovery Touches Down

The crew of the space shuttle Discovery had an extended mission by about 90 minutes when it's first entry window was waved off by Mission Control because of cloudy and windy conditions in Florida. The missions main goal was to install a final set of solar panels on the International Space Station which required 3 space walks. "We're very proud to have left the space station with more power, hopefully power that for many, many years will provide very useful research to your future payloads," mission commander Lee Archambault said before undocking from the station on Wednesday.

Source: CBC

China Based Spy Network Uncovered - Targets Dalai Lama And Foreign Affairs Offices

Researchers from SecDev Group, an Ottawa-based think tank, and the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies working on behalf of the Dalai Lama's office have uncovered an elaborate electronic spy network working mostly from within China. After a 10-month investigation the researchers found that as well as the Dalai Lama's office, the ministries of foreign affairs of Iran, Bangladesh, Latvia, Indonesia, Philippines, Brunei, Barbados and Bhutan all appear to had been the targets of the spys. Hacked systems were also found in the embassies of India, South Korea, Indonesia, Romania, Cyprus, Malta, Thailand, Taiwan, Portugal, Germany and Pakistan, according to the BBC. "We uncovered real-time evidence of malware that had penetrated Tibetan computer systems, extracting sensitive documents from the private office of the Dalai Lama," investigator Greg Walton was quoted by the Associated Press.

The researchers point out that there is no conclusive evidence of Chinese government involvement.