Cody Taylor

Cell phone users have long been able to shield their originating number from display by dialing *67 before placing a call. However, cell calls placed to 800-numbers have been immune to this technique because the toll-free number is paying to receive the call. TrapCall takes advantage of that arrangement and shows you the Caller ID.

In the light of the global shitstorm, Facebook has decided to go back to the old Terms of Service. Phew, now we can all safely go back to sending each other digital cupcakes without Big Brother watching us.

illectro writes “A study on site availability by monitoring service Pingdom shows that in 2008 Twitter greeted users with the ‘Fail Whale’ for more than 84 hours, almost twice as much as any other site. At the other end of the scale imeem and Xanga managed less than 4 hours of downtime for 99.95% uptime. Myspace, Facebook and Classmates.com were the only other sites studied which managed to stay up more than 99.9% of the time.”

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An anonymous reader writes “Anne Loucks built a device which, when her cat steps on it, can click the ‘I Agree’ button of a EULA. Who knows what the lawyers will make of this sort of madness. Can a cat make a legal agreement? Does it need to be of legal age? She lures the cat onto the device, and the cat steps on it of its own free will. Anyway, folks who hate EULAs now have another tool to make the lawyers freak out.”

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lamaditx writes “The book Collective Intelligence in Action shows you how to apply theory from Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Data Mining to your business. The goal is to create systems which make use of data created by groups of people — i.e. social networks — and abstract from these to gain new or additional information. Some of you might think “just another kind of Web 2.0.” This is one application you might think of, but the input and output format do not matter that much. You can use these methods anywhere as long as the amount of data is big enough. You will find some examples related to the latest web technologies to explain methods, but the code is rather generic. Also, you won’t find a lot disturbing details about HTML, HTTP and the like.” Keep reading for the rest of Adrian’s review.

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CWmike writes “Microsoft has denied that it makes money when users ‘downgrade’ Windows Vista to XP, as a lawsuit filed last week alleges. The lawsuit, submitted last week, stems from the .25 fee that a California woman was charged in mid-2008 when she bought a Lenovo laptop and downgraded from Vista to XP. In fact, it’s computer makers, not Microsoft per se, that charge users the additional fees for downgrading a new PC from Vista to XP at the factory. For example, Dell Inc. adds an extra to the price to downgrade a PC. However, Microsoft may profit from the way it structures downgrade rights.”

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CWmike writes “Attackers are already exploiting a bug in Internet Explorer 7 that Microsoft patched just last week, security researchers warned today. Although the attacks are currently in “very, very small numbers,” they may be just the forerunner of a larger campaign, said Trend Micro’s Jamz Yaneza. ‘I see this as a proof-of-concept,’ said Yaneza, who noted that the exploit’s payload is extremely straightforward and explained that there has been no attempt to mask it by, say, planting a root kit on the victimized PC at the same time. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised to see this [exploit] show up in one of those Chinese exploit kits,’ he added. The new attack code, which Trend Micro dubbed ‘XML_Dloadr.a,’ arrives in a spam message as a malicious file masquerading as a Microsoft Word document.”

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First-person shooters comprise one of the most well-developed video game genres in existence. The number of high-quality games and franchises practically demands that any new entry must have an interesting concept and a rock-solid engine. Otherwise, it will quickly get buried under an avalanche of award-winning titles. When the original F.E.A.R. came out in 2005, a well-crafted horror theme, the AI, and a few gameplay innovations allowed it to succeed despite direct competition from established franchises, such as Quake 4 and Call of Duty 2, among others. F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin draws on the strengths of its predecessor and adds a few improvements. The question that now remains is whether or not the additions make up for the fact that the game’s concept is no longer new and unique. Read on for the rest of my thoughts.

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mir writes “It looks like if you use CPAN to install modules, Apple’s latest security update might just have broken your Perl. According to Tatsuhiko Miyagawa ‘The Security Update brings (old) IO.bundle with version 1.22 but your IO.pm has been updated to the latest 1.23 on CPAN shell. (But hey, 1.23 was released in 2006…Why do you bring that ancient version back, Apple!?)’.”

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