Cory Doctorow: EFF's got a sweet new t-shirt as a premium to donors. EFF's new designer, Hugh D'Andrade, has really been turning out some sweet-ass EFF schwag lately. Link (Thanks, Hugh!)

We've had stories about the world's angriest eBay seller, but perhaps now we've found the world's worst eBay seller. A kid in England won an auction for a Playstation 2 for 95 pounds, but when it was sent to him, it also included 44,000 pounds in cash. The kid's parents have turned the money over to police, who are investigating the matter. The PS2 was also supposed to come with two games, though they weren't included -- but somehow we imagine that, even in the UK, 44 grand should be enough to pick up a few replacement copies.

An anonymous reader writes "According to this report by IT PRO, scientists working at the University of California have discovered the main reason of hard drive failure. According to researchers, some materials used in hard drives are better at damping spin precession than others. Spin precession of magnetic material effects its neighbors' polarity and this can spread and cause sections of hard drives to spontaneously change polarity and lose data. This is known as a magnetic avalanche. So next time Windows fails to start, you'll know why!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The software space has seen quite a bit of consolidation over the last few years, with Oracle's aggressive acquisition spree standing out. Just today it announced the purchase of yet another company, this time in the security space. IBM has made a number of deals as well, as it looks to bolster its high-margin software business, the unit that's largely responsible for its continued profit growth. Yesterday, the company announced the purchase of Data Mirror, which will bolster its business intelligence offerings. The purchase is not so much about growth, but about adding functionality to its existing offerings. But as Rick Sherman points out, there's a downside to these small, "tuck in" acquisitions: they create complexity. It's not so simple to just buy a line of software and meld it into an existing product, as any major enterprise software vendor can attest. Therefore, it's entirely possible that the customers of Data Mirror (or any company in a similar boat), could look for another simple, lightweight solution that isn't tied into some larger, behemoth.

smooth wombat writes "Travelling to a time in the past is, as far as we know, not possible. However, Einstein postulated a faster-than-light effect known as 'spooky action at a distance'. The problem is, how do you test for such an effect? That test may now be here. If all goes well, hopefully by September 15th, John Cramer will have experimented with a beam of laser light which has been split in two to test Einstein's idea. While he is only testing the quantum entanglement portion, changing one light beam and having the same change made in the other beam, his experiment might show that a change made in one beam shows up in the other beam before he actually makes the change."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What does it take to avoid the wrath of the US government and its war on online gambling? In the case of NETeller, the online payment service that helped many US citizens fund online gambling accounts, it only needed to pony up $136 million, before being let on its way. By forfeiting that money and admitting guilt, NETeller can now resume business, provided it doesn't facilitate online gambling any more. Unfortunately, the company's founders weren't so lucky, as they'll be doing time for the crime of running the business. The settlement is also good news for customers in the US who have seen their money frozen on the site. With the settlement, NETeller is now clear to disburse the money back.

orgelspieler writes "NPR is running a story on a safe way to reproduce sound from ancient phonographs that would otherwise be unplayable. The system, called IRENE, was installed in the Library of Congress last year. It can be used to replay records that are scratched, worn, broken, or just too fragile to play with a needle. It scans the groves optically and processes them into a sound file at speeds approaching real time. IRENE is great at removing pops and skips, but can add some hiss. Researchers are also working on a 3D model that is better at removing hiss."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nick Gonzalez at TechCrunch explains that Plaxo is creating an open identity system with an API that others can build applications on.

He calls this "open source" -- but that's neither accurate nor does it explain why this is so significant.

If anyone at Plaxo is listening, I'd like to find out more about what you're doing so I can explain it in the context of other identity systems. It sounds like it might be the open identity system we're waiting for.

David Pescovitz: Every so often, an authentic Enigma machine, turns up on eBay. The Enigma machine, introduced in 1923 by the Chiffriermaschinen Aktien-Gesellschaft (Cipher Machines Stock Corporation), was used by the Germans to encrypt messages during World War II. With eight days left in the auction, the current bid on this specimen is $10,100 and the reserve has not been met. According the auction listing, this Enigma is in "museum condition" and includes extra lamps. Here's a description of the Enigma that I wrote for a 1999 article in Wired:

German soldiers issued an Enigma were to make no mistake about their orders if captured: Shoot it or throw it overboard.

Based on electronic typewriters invented in the 1920s, the infamous Enigma encryption machines of World War II were controlled by wheels set with the code du jour. Each letter typed would illuminate the appropriate character to send in the coded message.

In 1940, building on work by Polish code breakers, Alan Turing and his colleagues at the famed UK cryptography center Bletchley Park devised the Bombe, a mechanical computer that deciphered Enigma-encoded messages. Even as the Nazis beefed up the Enigma architecture by adding more wheels, the codes could be cracked at the Naval Security Station in Washington, DC - giving the Allies the upper hand in the Battle of the Atlantic. The fact that the Allies had cracked the Enigma code was not officially confirmed until the 1970s.

Link

Previously on BB:
• Enigma machine spotted on eBay Link (via Neatorama)

davecb writes "A California judge is likely to order a Berkeley city initiative back on the ballot because of local officials' mishandling of electronic voting machine data. A recount was not possible because the city failed to share necessary voting records, a violation of election laws. In a preliminary ruling Thursday, Judge Winifred Smith of the Alameda County Superior Court indicated she would nullify the defeat of a medical marijuana proposal in Berkeley in 2004 and order the measure put back on the ballot in a later election."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A teenager in Washington state got sentenced to 90 days in juvenile detention this week, after he plead guilty to making some bomb threats via e-mail to a high school. It turns out that the FBI nabbed him with a piece of spyware called the Computer and Internet Protocol Address Verifier, or CIPAV. The FBI used the spyware after it had obtained server logs from Google and MySpace, which gave them an IP address that led to an infected computer in Italy. This isn't too surprising, really, but what makes it a little more intriguing is that it's not clear how the FBI slipped the program onto the kid's computer, nor how it evaded detection by anti-virus software. The most likely possibility is that they took advantage of some unpatched vulnerability on the kid's PC, with a browser or plug-in hole exploited by a MySpace web message. The question of evading security software looms larger, though, with CNet's Declan McCullagh wondering if the government persuaded security software vendors to whitelist CIPAV. He said that some vendors said they'd comply with court orders to ignore government or police spyware, and that McAfee and Microsoft wouldn't say if that's what had, in fact, happened here. Meanwhile, Kevin Poulsen over at Wired says that a more likely (and less controversial) explanation is that without ever seeing CIPAV, security software vendors can't make a signature for it, so their systems can detect it.

Mark Frauenfelder: R.U. Sirius says: "10 Zen Monkeys received the following document from a friend who works as an aide to Republican Louisiana Senator David Vitter. It is the handwritten draft of the statement Senator Vitter planned to give before the press conference about his involvement in the "D.C. Madam" scandal."

The point is -— I'm a pretty good looking guy and I've got money and power. I don't have to pay for it. But the nice thing about hookers: you don't have to please 'em. You know what I mean? I mean, it's nice to make a lady cum, but as you get older, you really just want to be serviced by a pro. And Deborah Palfrey had her a full stable of fine mares, if you know what I mean.

I got into politics because a friend of mine who is a big time corporate attorney thought I'd be good at it. He said I should be a Republican. He explained to me all about crony capitalism and told me I'd make great connections and scads of money. And all I had to do was represent the interests of my friends and donors. They'd tell me what to do.

It was a totally sweet deal. But he didn't tell me about the moralism part —- about how you've got to be all about family values, and you've got to be for teen abstinence and against the queers and porn and abortion and Janet Jackson's nipples. And that's because the common Christian folks down in Louisiana don't care that much about whether my financial supporters make butt-loads of money or not. They care about pretending to hate sex -— like it tells you to do in The Bible.

Note: It's a parody.

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Cory Doctorow: Urban Medium -- the folks who made the striking Che Trooper image -- have just shipped this swell, limited edition tee that shows Uncle Sam dispensing fear. Link

David Pescovitz: Salon has a profile of "wizard rock" bands, musicians inspired by Harry Potter. BB pal Vann Hall asks, "Are these the grandkids of Hawkwind?" From Salon:

"We're the Hungarian Horntails! Are you ready to burn this place down into a fiery wreck?" yells 8-year-old Darius Wilkins, onstage with bandmates Rayn Feeney, 9, and his younger brother, Holden, 5. They're in the middle of sound check on a muggy Saturday afternoon in June at Pete's Candy Store in Brooklyn. Seconds later, there's another high-pitched yelp from Darius: "We're the Hungarian Horntails, and we're going to blow this place up with fire and rock!"

The Hungarian Horntails are not just a rock band whose members are kids. They're a wizard-rock band, one of a growing worldwide cohort -- currently numbering 183 bands -- that emerged from the tight-knit, do-it-yourself community rooted in Harry Potter fandom. These bands use MySpace for publicity, produce and release their own music, and book concerts at libraries. The Horntails are named after characters from "The Goblet of Fire," and their songs have titles like "Kill the Basilisk" and "Which Witch Is Which?" Their first album is called "Burn Voldemort's Butt."

Link

amigoro writes "A 'true' random number generator that relies on the unpredictable quantum process of photon emission has gone online providing academic and scientific community access to true random numbers free of charge."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ScaredOfTheMan writes to mention that, as expected, companies are utilizing the decision in Leegin Creative Leater Products v. PSKS to force the take-down of auctions on eBay because auctions are priced too low or even stating the auction itself is an infringement of their intellectual property rights.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When companies move part of their operations to India, it's usually for something like back office support or software development. Creative work is typically not the first thing that companies would think to move there. But Chinese computer maker Lenovo has announced that India will be the home of its advertising operations, and that the unit will be tasked with designing advertising campaigns for a global audience. It may be too early to call it a trend, but this should be worrisome to the advertising industry's New York-based stalwarts. One advantage that Indian advertisers have is that they're used to building campaigns that play well in multiple languages, simply due to the various languages within India itself. For them, advertising to a global audience is a natural next step. And, of course, there are cost advantages. It's sill much cheaper to hire advertising professionals in India than it is in New York. While incumbent advertising agencies are likely to stick around for some time, it wouldn't be a surprise to see them move more of their own operations to the country, a la other services firms, like IBM.

David Pescovitz: Developed in the 1940s, Stratovision was a system to rebroadcast TV and FM radio signals via transmitters mounted on airplanes. Westinghouse radar engineer Charles E. Nobles invented the technology to bring media to "small town and farm homes" that he believed terrestrial transmitters atop city buildings couldn't reach. A 1948 demonstration fueled hype that Stratovision had the potential to transform media deliver. Two years later though, it was obsolete. From Air & Space Smithsonian:

(On June 23, 2948, a) B-29, orbiting 25,000 feet above Pittsburgh, rebroadcast the Republican convention directly from WMAR-TV in Baltimore, 9 to 10 p.m. EDT. The bomber was outfitted with an eight-foot mast on its vertical stabilizer to receive programs; the signal was sent from the antenna to the cabin, and on to the broadcast antenna. The antenna, stored horizontally in the bomb bay, projected 28 feet down when operating.

After the convention transmission, Martin and Westinghouse representatives trumpeted Stratovision’s future. They foresaw a nationwide Stratovision network, with programs beamed from one airplane to the next. Fourteen airplanes could bring TV and FM radio to 78 percent of the population; a comparable ground installation network would require more than 100 relay points, Westinghouse estimated. A fleet of 60 Martin 202 airliners would suffice...

In 1949, AT&T set up a coaxial cable network to connect the East Coast with the Midwest, largely through underground wiring. Westinghouse dropped Stratovision in 1950.

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