robipilot writes "Mac stolen, Mac comes online, owner connects using 'Back to My Mac,' owner takes picture of culprit, and viola, criminal caught. OK, it wasn't quite that simple, but here's an interesting story of using some built-in technology on the Mac to recover a stolen laptop."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scott Beale reminds us that...

Roboexotica USA, a celebration of cocktail robots, takes place from 8pm-2am this Saturday, May 10th [that'd be today] at Space, 354 5th Street in San Francisco.

I won't be there myself, but I'll look forward to the tweets, vloggage, and flickr coverage likely to pour forth like so many mecha-margaritas.

Premiered recently in SF and NYC. Snip from description:

Faubourg Tremé is arguably the oldest black neighborhood in America, the birthplace of the Civil Rights movement in the South and the home of jazz. While the Tremé district was damaged when the levees broke, this is not another Katrina documentary. Every frame is a tribute to what African American communities have contributed even under the most hostile of conditions. It is a film of such effortless intimacy, subtle glances and authentic details that only two native New Orleanians could have made it.

Link, trailer. (thanks, Clayton James Cubitt)

monoface
feed the head
floating head (shown above)
pipe cleaner dance
ptikobj
gamegame
globe salesman
tom's tales of brilliance
green porno

previously on web zen:
ummm...oookaaay...zen
wha? zen

Link, Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)

Glenn Fleishman says,

Two alleged thieves were found with stolen computer and A/V gear taken from three roommates in White Plains, N.Y., because one of the victims is a Mac expert. She used the notoriously hard-to-get-working Back to My Mac feature in Leopard which allows single sign-in to .Mac for remote, secure access to all computers on which you've signed in. (It uses UPnP/NAT-PMP, wide-area Bonjour, dynamic DNS, and IPsec's IKE coupled with IPv6 tunneling. Any surprise it's wonky? It's cool when it works, though.)

The unnamed victim in question was able to use remote screen sharing to capture a picture of one alleged burglar via the machine's built-in iSight camera, and copied photos on the computer that apparently were of the other alleged thief.

One of the other roommates recognized the two alleged perps from a party at their apartment (they were friends of a friend), told the police, who tracked them down, and made the arrests, finding all the stolen gear in the process.

While I've heard of plenty of Webcams-lead-to-capture stories, this is the first story that ties in IPv6 and recovered gear that I know of.

Link.

sveard writes of a little problem Google is having that has Gmail acting like an open relay. Compounding the issue is the fact that services such as Hotmail and Yahoo trust Gmail as a source of mail. "A recently-discovered flaw in Gmail is capable of turning Google's e-mail service into a highly effective spam machine. According to the Information Security Research Team (INSERT), Gmail is susceptible to a man-in-the-middle attack that allows a spammer to send thousands of bulk e-mails through Google's SMTP service without fear of detection. This attack bypasses both Google's identity fraud protection mechanisms and the current 500-address limit on bulk e-mail."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie are listed as inventors of the Guardian Angel, which is described in a most unusual Microsoft patent application that should intrigue privacy advocates. In addition to protecting you from possibly diseased people, by detecting body temperatures, the Guardian Angel's 'monitoring component can take note of the number of conversations occurring in a room (and more specifically, a breakdown of the types of people in the room accompanied by a warning for dangerous persons, based on sex offender registration, FBI most wanted, etc.).' The versatile Guardian Angel, Microsoft notes, can also recommend restaurants, advise you on the appropriateness of your jokes, detect that your heartbeat has stopped, display targeted ads on billboards, and block spam."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Future of Things covered the introduction last month of HP's DreamColor display, with 30 bits/pixel, developed in conjunction with DreamWorks Animation. The display is aimed at the video production, animation, and graphics arts industries. HP promises blacker blacks and whiter whites — though TFoT quotes one source who notes that if they deliver this, it will be due to the back-lighting and not to the number of bits/pixel. No word on the size of the displays that will actually be delivered, or on the price.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Flickr's Joe D! has a laugh-out-loud set of 75 "refaced" US bank-notes, in which the various dead presidents are reinvented as a series of ever-funnier defacements. Link (Thanks to everyone who suggested these!)

Oh the political debate is getting interesting!

Assuming the Democratic nomination is actually decided, then what is Hillary Clinton's future role?

Last night on Larry King I heard Carole Simpson, a black woman, supporter of HRC, say that it's white men calling for her to withdraw. (Transcript.)

Stephanie Miller chimed in "I have ovaries."

Even so, it seems to me that people of all genders are conspicuously not asking Clinton to withdraw out of respect for her power, which she has a lot of. What she does with that power now will have a lot to do with what happens next. I know that's pretty waffly, but I don't know how else to say it. She could blow something up. She could ask women to get angry. If she does, it seems there will be some angry women. Maybe many very angry women. Scary thought. No sarcasm.

Perhaps her role will be analogous to Al Sharpton, sharp-tongued rallier of specialized anger.

HRC is potentially a political leader of women unlike any leader we've ever seen. There have been some powerful women politicians -- Bella Abzug, Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, Nancy Pelosi.

But what will Hillary do with her power?

An anonymous reader writes "A Seattle Times editorial notes that the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal will put author Mark Steyn on trial for his book 'America Alone,' which has angered Muslims in Canada. Steyn is a columnist for the Canadian magazine Maclean's. According to the editorial, British Columbia bans all words and images 'likely to expose a person... to hatred or contempt because of race, religion, age, disability, sex, marital status or sexual orientation.' Steyn is unapologetic, and is advertising his book as a 'Canadian Hate Crime' and daring the tribunal to 'pronounce him bad.'" The Canadian tabloid the National Post has coverage of what it calls "a media storm."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Science News reports on recent research indicating that any kind of multitasking while driving is dangerous. Not just the obvious distraction of juggling a cell phone, but even talking to a passenger or listening to a book on tape. The researchers used a driving simulator inside an MRI machine to measure brain activations. "Attending to what someone says galvanizes language-related brain areas while simultaneously reducing activity in spatial regions that coordinate driving behavior. This finding suggests that people who combine relatively automatic tasks, such as speech comprehension and car driving, exceed a biological limit on the amount of systematic brain activity they can accommodate at one time, the researchers propose. As a result, the less-ingrained skill — in this case, driving, which is learned long after a person grasps a native language — takes a neural hit."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A St. Petersburg, FL TV station reports on a family with a 3-year-old boy who has a rare medical condition that prevents him from sleeping. His parents must watch him around the clock, taking turns to sleep during the day.

Rhett has never taken a nap or gone to sleep at night, forcing his parents to keep watch day and night.

"(My husband) has the day shift and I kind of have the afternoon shift," mother Shannon Lamb said. "We share the night shift because no one can sleep in the house when he is up anyway."

Lamb said she is working extra to pay for Rhett's large medical bills. She also said her husband, David, has given up his job to care for their child.

In Nancy Kress's novel, Beggars in Spain, there were kid genetically designed not to sleep. Link

A number of readers are sending word that the blogosphere and Twittersphere are alight with reports of Microsoft's new block on messages containing YouTube URLs . Both MSN Messenger and Windows Live Messenger reportedly implement the block. One blogger sniffed the network to discover that such messages receive a NAK from Microsoft's servers. Microsoft has been blocking messages by keyword, as an anti-phishing measure, for some time, but *.youtube.com would not seem to provoke much worry about phishing. Instead, as B.E.T.A Daily speculates, "This block seems to be related to the recent launch of Messenger TV in 20 countries which allows for sharing video clips from MSN Video on messenger." Hard to get away with in an arena where you don't enjoy a monopoly.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mashup artist Rench has released a free album of "gangstagrass" music -- hiphop mashed with bluegrass. The mixes are really good, in that, "Hey, who knew those two really different flavors worked so well together?" way that makes mashups so much fun to listen to.

Introducing block rockin' honky-tonk, New American music for the 21st century, built with love in a little studio, hand crafted, running on inspiration and imagination and duct tape, calling on the spirit of Gram Parsons and Otis Redding and KRS-ONE and Dolly Parton and Nina Simone and Willie Nelson and Missy Elliott and Johnny Cash, to write about what we feel and play what our hearts tell us, because to make it happen is reason enough, and to share it with the world is all the reason you need, because we tell the truth with music and the truth is beautiful.

Link to Gangstagrass album download, Link to information about Rench (Thanks, Brooklyn Twang!)

e5rebel writes "Microsoft is launching a program to promote the use of its Windows OS in ultra low-cost PCs. It is an effort to stop Linux dominating this market but Microsoft is insisting on limiting the hardware specs of these devices."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's a game being played on Twitter that goes like this.

"When Obama wins..."

The game is to fill in the blank creatively. .

Here are some examples.

Here's my entry.

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft still has not adopted Silverlight, and uses Flash all over it's websites. "Despite all the controversy over Microsoft using Silverlight to take over the rich internet market from Adobe Flash, the software giant seems to be not even trying. In fact, even most Microsoft web sites are using Flash instead of Silverlight."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.