One small consolation of worms like Sobig is that you end up having a large number of inadvertent penpals. It’s like a huge chainletter. Sobig ransacks address books and fires off emails to all and sundry, along with the worm (which then does lots of damage, I’m not contesting). While I don’t condone the … Read more
From the We Should Have Known This Dept comes news that CD-ROMs degrade in months, even at room temperature without sunlight. Dutch magazine PC Active tested data disks from 30 manufacturers that were recorded 20 months ago. Several data CDs developed serious errors, or became virtually unreadable, The Register reports. It’s perhaps too early … Read more
Japan is now seeling a car that parks itself. Reuters reports that Toyota’s new hybrid gasoline-electric Prius sedan uses electrically operated power steering and sensors that help guide the car when reversing into parking spaces. Rivals General Motors Corp and Ford Motor Co will launch their first hybrids later this year.
For those of you getting into the RSS feed thing (and for those of you who haven’t, a question: why not?) here’s another newsreader: Abilon from ActiveRefresh. RSS feeds are a way to pump content from websites that regularly update, such as news sites, or blogs like this one, and newsreaders are one way to receive … Read more
From the So The Conspiracy Theorists Were Right Dept it turns out the W32.Blaster worm may have contributed to the cascading effect of the Aug. 14 blackout in NYC and environs. IDG reports that on the day of the blackout, Blaster degraded the performance of several communications lines linking key data centers used by utility … Read more