Cody Taylor

matt4077 writes “For eight years, several hundred police officers across several European countries have been chasing a phantom woman whose DNA had been found in almost 20 crimes (including two murders) across central Europe. It now turns out that contaminated cotton swabs might be responsible for this highly unusual investigation. After being puzzled by the apparent randomness of the crimes, investigator noticed that all cotton swabs had been sourced from the same company. They also noted that the DNA was never found in crimes in Bavaria, a German state located at the center of the crimes’ locations. It turns out that Bavaria buys its swabs from a different supplier.”

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EFF’s stance is quite clear: DRM is harmful to consumers, it undermines competition and innovation, and unnecessarily preempts users’ fair uses of copyrighted content — all while making no appreciable dent in “digital piracy.” In fact, generally the only ones who are inconvenienced by DRM are legitimate customers.

Facebook says it will tweak its homepage in the coming weeks in direct response to user uproar over recent designs changes. The social network caved to customer feedback against the site’s recent improvements and says it decided to listen to the …

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says the San Francisco start-up is watching the outside initiatives closely as it prepares to launch its own fee-based services this year, but doesn’t view them as competition. “We want to work with those companies that are already making an effort,” he says.

gardel writes “Google appears to have fixed a significant security hole in its two-week-old Voice calling service though some vulnerabilities remain. Until about 7pm PDT Tuesday, an unauthorized party could use a SIP device to spoof a phone number attached to a Google Voice account to call the Google Voice number, giviing the spoofer access to greetings and voicemail, and the ability to make outbound calls, including expensive international calls. Though spoofing via SIP is no longer possible, continued existence of some vulnerability was still apparent Tuesday night. Voxilla was able to set the caller ID of a PBX extension to a mobile number attached to Google Voice account and call in, using a business VoIP trunk, to gain access.”

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crazipper writes “Tom’s Hardware interviewed Charlie Miller, winner of this year’s Pwn2Own contest and formerly with the NSA. He discusses the effort it took before the contest to be able to take down a MacBook within seconds, sandboxing, and the effectiveness of the NX bit and ASLR. His outlook on end-users protecting themselves against attacks? ‘Users are at the mercy of the products they buy.'”

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Lucas123 writes “The Internet Archive, the non-profit organization that scrapes the Web every two months in order to archive web page images, just cut the ribbon on a new 4.5 petabyte data center housed in a metal shipping container that sits outside. The data center supports the Wayback Machine, the Web site that offers the public a view of the 151 billion Web page images collected since 1997. The new data center houses 63 Sun Fire servers, each with 48 1TB hard drives running in parallel to support both the web crawling application and the 200,000 visitors to the site each day.”

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China has blocked the video-sharing network YouTube after Beijing denounced footage appearing to show security forces beating Tibetans in Lhasa last year as “a lie”.

If you use Last.fm and live outside of the US, UK, or Germany, you might need to get your wallet out. The online radio service has announced that users outside of those countries (their 3 most popular) will need to start paying €3.00 (about .40 USD) per month to continue using Last.fm.

This week, we’ve collected some really amazing tips from Web and our own experiences to present you 25 most wanted tips for iPhone 3G.