Stony Stevenson writes "Vista is proving far less popular than XP did with new PC buyers during the earlier OS's first year on the market. This conclusion follows from statements by Bill Gates at this week's Consumer Electronics Show. Gates boasted that Microsoft has sold more than 100 million copies of Windows Vista since the OS launched last January. Based on Gates' statement, Windows Vista was aboard just 39% of the PC's that shipped in 2007. And Vista, in terms of units shipped, only outperformed first-year sales of XP by 10%, according to Gates's numbers, while PC shipments have doubled in the years since XP's release."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Engadget and Gizmodo are shoveling post after post on this week's CES (aren't they supposed to help us cut through all the noise, rather than adding to it?) and it occurred to me that it makes almost no sense for anyone to launch new consumer electronics products this week. There's no way to stand out against the zillion other product releases. Even if you can get a post on one of the gadget blogs, you're probably off of the front page in 30 seconds or so. However, one way to stand out and get some attention is to come up with what may be the most ridiculous combination of gadgets out there: a taser holster that includes a 1GB mp3 player. I'm not quite sure what this is saying? Are police officers supposed to be enjoying their tunes as they tase someone into submission? And I'm not even going to touch on the fact that the latest Taser devices are now available in stylish leopard print skins. There's been a ton of controversy over just how dangerous taser devices really are... and their response is to offer an MP3 player and more stylish devices? Seems like a bit of a disconnect.

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kRemit writes "The German hacker group Chaos Computer Club today sued the German State of Hessen to prevent the use of electronic voting machines (Google translation) in the upcoming elections on January 27. This comes as a follow-up to the Dutch initiative 'We don't trust voting machines,' which succeeded in banning the same type of voting machines in the Netherlands."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Charles Arthur: "You can meet Major Olmsted in death as you could in life. The blog, and his site, is still there."

Paul sends us word on a new exploit seen in the wild that attacks Windows systems completely outside of the control of the OS. "Unfortunately, all the Windows NT family (including Vista) still have the same security flaw — MBR [Master Boot Record] can be modified from usermode. Nevertheless, MS blocked write-access to disk sectors from userland code on VISTA after the pagefile attack, however, the first sectors of disk are still unprotected... At the end of 2007 stealth MBR rootkit was discovered by MR Team members (thanks to Tammy & MJ) and it looks like this way of affecting NT systems could be more common in near future if MBR stays unprotected."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We all know that various broadband ISPs are trying to get away from being "just dumb pipes," by providing "value added services" that most people ignore, such as customizable home pages and email, but we had no idea that broadband providers like Time Warner and Cox are both pushing their own car selling websites as well. Plus, it appears that Cablevision is doing something similar with home sales. It seems likely that all of these companies are merely putting their brand on someone else's car lead generation service, but it really does seem like an odd service for these ISPs to be offering. While broadband providers eventually are going to have to get comfortable with the whole notion of being a dumb pipe, you'd still think that if they want to offer additional value added services, they'd at least work on things that actually were somewhat related to the broadband they were providing.

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Geoffrey.landis writes "Microsoft apologized to rival software vendor Corel Corp. for saying that Corel's file format posed a security risk, and issued a set of tools to unblock file types that had been blocked by default in the December Office 2003 service pack. In his blog on the Microsoft site, David Leblanc says 'We did a poor job of describing the default format changes.' He goes on to explain, 'We stated that it was the file formats that were insecure, but this is actually not correct. A file format isn't insecure — it's the code that reads the format that's more or less secure.' As noted by News.com, 'it is the parsing code that Office 2003 uses to open and save the file types that is less secure.' Larry Seltzer at pcmag.com also blogs the story."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot points us to an interesting story that highlights the ongoing farce that is Hollywood's anti-piracy efforts. A guy named Davis Freeberg says he purchased a shiny new high-definition monitor, and discovered that one of the consequences of his upgrade was that he could no longer play movies downloaded (legally) from Netflix. After some further research (research that a lot of consumers would have neither the patience nor the knowledge to perform) and several tech-support phone calls, he concluded that the procedure for re-enabling Netflix would likely cause him to lose the ability to watch videos downloaded from other services such as Amazon Unbox. The really absurd thing about this is that all of these "security" features don't in any way prevent him from going to a peer-to-peer site and downloading illegal copies of the movies he wants to watch. It's only when he foolishly tries to obey the law and pay Hollywood for the movies he watches that he's cast into tech support hell.

This kind of problem is a predictable consequence of Hollywood's constantly-escalating demands for copy protection. Normal engineering principles dictate that devices should be designed for reliability, and should attempt to recover if it detects a problem. But DRM turns this principle on its head: if something appears to be amiss, it assumes someone must be trying to circumvent it and shuts down. So as DRM becomes more and more intrusive (and the copy protection systems in Vista are downright pervasive) it becomes more and more likely that something will go wrong. As a result, you end up with the absurd situation in which paying customers are punished with a never-ending stream of mysterious tech-support problems.

Tim Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tim Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Bonnie converts a dancing Geoffrey the Giraffe into a miniature dancing version of her husband. Both creepy and delightful. Link

At first glance, $15,950 might seems like too much to pay for animated car wheels, but when you watch this video of a clever man putting the Pimpstar's many exciting features to work in a high-speed campaign to win the affections of an otherwise hard-to-impress woman cruising down the Pacific Coast Highway, you'll be entering your credit card number into the website before the credits roll.

The PimpStar is a huge leap forward in the evolution of the wheel. With the PimpStar's built-in full color LED lights, microprocessor and wireless modem, you can display virtually any image, including text, graphics, logos, and even digital photos!

The included software allows you to create your own images and send them to each wheel individually or all wheels at the same time as you drive! You can even pre-load up to six images into each wheel and program them to change automatically at the time intervals you select. The wheels are environmentally sealed, so you don't have to worry about going to the car wash; and they are powered by the vehicle electrical system so there are no batteries to run out or change, ever.

Link (Via Neatorama)

coondoggie writes to tell us Network World is reporting that NASA will this month see the realization of a mission launched in 2004, sent to explore the planet Mercury. "MESSENGER, launched in 2004, is the first NASA mission sent to orbit Mercury, the planet closest to the sun. But on Jan. 14 it will pass close by the planet and use Mercury's gravity for a critical assist needed to keep the spacecraft on track for its ultimate orbit around the planet three years from now. Still, the spacecraft is also expected to throw back some never-before -seen images, NASA said. The flyby also will gather essential data for planning the overall mission. After flybys of Earth, Venus, and Mercury, it will start a year-long orbital study of Mercury in March 2011, NASA said. "

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For quite some time we've seen companies try to make bogus intellectual property claims against people reselling their products on eBay. For example, a company making shampoo once claimed that you couldn't resell its bottles online -- even when legally purchased. The companies always claim that only "authorized" resellers are allowed to sell their products, and they must do so at a specific price. Last year, when the Supreme Court changed rules about whether manufacturers could demand retailers abide by a specific price, it kicked off speculation that we'd see more such cases. In fact, that's exactly what happened. In one case, a company named Innovate! Technology claimed that someone selling their products on eBay violated their intellectual property (including patents, trademarks and copyright!). The real complaint, of course, had nothing to do with intellectual property, but that this seller was selling below the company's official pricing. This seemed pretty ridiculous already, but these types of cases are designed to scare off small time sellers who don't have big legal guns to back them up.

However, Innovate appears to have made a huge strategic error that has brought some big legal guns into the case, and they're clearly pointed at shooting Innovate's use of the DMCA down. Greg Beck writes in to note that while the case was directly between Innovate and the eBay seller, Innovate made the mistake of pushing to get eBay involved in the case. Normally, eBay just does what's required of it in DMCA cases and gets out of the way. However, now that eBay is involved, it got involved in a big way. It's fighting back against Innovate, claiming that Innovate has been filing bogus DMCA requests and so now eBay is seeking damages, attorney's fees and an injunction preventing Innovate from filing any more DMCA notices to eBay. In other words, it's trying to make an example of Innovate. Hopefully it works, and others pursuing this same strategy of trying to stop legitimate competition through bogus DMCA notices will think twice before continuing.

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In a new study, planetary scientists determined what extraterrestial aliens might see if they were peering at Earth through telescopes. The researchers, from MIT, the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, and University of Florida, based their analysis on telescope technology expected to become available in the next few years. Even with those systems, designed to find extra solar planet, Earth would be represented just by a single pixel of light when viewed from another world outside our solar system. From the MIT News Office:

According to their analysis, among other things E.T. could probably tell that our planet's surface is divided between oceans and continents, and learn a little bit about the dynamics of our weather systems.

"Maybe somebody's looking at us right now, finding out what our rotation rate is -- that is, the length of our day," says Sara Seager, associate professor of physics and the Ellen Swallow Richards Associate Professor of Planetary Sciences at MIT...

"The goal of [our] project was to see how much information you can extract" from very limited data, Seager says. The team's conclusion: a great deal of information about a planet can be gleaned from that single pixel and the way it changes over time...

Link

BoingBoing is covering an interesting piece of software called VideoTrace that allows you to easily create 3D models from the images in video clips. "The user interacts with VideoTrace by tracing the shape of the object to be modeled over one or more frames of the video. By interpreting the sketch drawn by the user in light of 3D information obtained from computer vision techniques, a small number of simple 2D interactions can be used to generate a realistic 3D model."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The notion that our reality is a simulation or "control system" of some kind has always intrigued me. Long before The Matrix, folks like Jacques Vallee, John Keel, Rudy Rucker, and Hans Moravec played with this idea in very smart ways. And recently, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom developed a mathematical argument to support the mind-bending theory. His work was even the subject of a New York Times column last year. My Fortean friend Mark Pilkington of Strange Attractor Journal pointed me to another new paper, "The Physical World as a Virtual Reality," written by Brian Whitworth and published by Massey University's Centre for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science in Auckland, New Zealand. From the abstract:

This paper explores the idea that the universe is a virtual reality created by information processing, and relates this strange idea to the findings of modern physics about the physical world. The virtual reality concept is familiar to us from online worlds, but our world as a virtual reality is usually a subject for science fiction rather than science. Yet logically the world could be an information simulation running on a multi-dimensional space-time screen. Indeed, if the essence of the universe is information, matter, charge, energy and movement could be aspects of information, and the many conservation laws could be a single law of information conservation. If the universe were a virtual reality, its creation at the big bang would no longer be paradoxical, as every virtual system must be booted up. It is suggested that whether the world is an objective reality or a virtual reality is a matter for science to resolve. Modern information science can suggest how core physical properties like space, time, light, matter and movement could derive from information processing. Such an approach could reconcile relativity and quantum theories, with the former being how information processing creates space-time, and the latter how it creates energy and matter.

Link to PDF of paper

Previously on BB:
• Hans Moravec on living inside a simulation Link
• NYT on the "simulation argument" Link

In the wake of various huge data leaks in the UK, TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson wrote a column telling people it was no big deal and revealing his bank account information -- insisting that the only thing anyone could do with that info was put more money into his account. It turns out (not surprisingly) that's not quite true... and Clarkson discovered that after someone used his bank details to donate £500 of Clarkson's money to a charity without his knowledge. To Clarkson's credit, he has apologized:

"I opened my bank statement this morning to find out that someone has set up a direct debit which automatically takes £500 from my account. The bank cannot find out who did this because of the Data Protection Act and they cannot stop it from happening again. I was wrong and I have been punished for my mistake. Contrary to what I said at the time, we must go after the idiots who lost the discs and stick cocktail sticks in their eyes until they beg for mercy."

Add this story to the one about the CEO of an anti-identity-fraud company whose advertisements published his social security number... until that social security number was used for identity fraud.

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nerdyH writes "A new Linux-based portable media player (PMP) features an eyeglass-like head-mounted display with 800 x 600 resolution. Dreamax's Indicube i-800 PMP provides an experience similar to sitting two meters away from a 54-inch screen, the vendor claims. It uses an 0.44-inch eMagin OLED display, claimed to offer the smallest pixel pitch in the industry."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today on Boing Boing Gadgets we looked at this curved monitor prototype from Alienware, more shots of that scooter clad in old appliance parts, mittens for smokers, some sort of zit-cooking heat gadget, an awesome tank with MiG turbines that shoots water at fires, a tiny climate control unit from Herman Miller that is not a space heater, a nice folding electric scooter prototype, an attractive lamp made from cups, saucers, and spoons, the confusion between audio compression and data compression, Sony BMG's ricockulous plan to sell MP3s via physical gift card, Guinness' take on videogame world records, a ghastly overpriced bed so advanced you'll never have to leave, an update to the handy Solio solar charger, a system that turns your mattress into speakers, why I decided not to go to CES, a man making a vacuum tube by hand, and technologically keen wireless headphones from Sennheiser that are way expensive. And one of our first round-ups of retro tech from our friends at Modern Mechanix, as well as a contest where you can win a $500 vacuum for sharing your suckiest gadget experience.