Cody Taylor

Venture capitalists, who have been uncharacteristically pessimistic for the past year, are seeing signs of hope, according to the latest quarterly Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist Confidence Index.

Time Warner Cable is expanding its test markets for paltry Internet data caps. Ars breaks down the obscene price per gigabyte that the company thinks is “fair.”

nk497 writes “Conficker seems to finally be doing something, a week after hype around the worm peaked on April Fool’s Day. It has now downloaded components from the Waledac botnet, which could contain rootkit capabilities. Trend Micro security expert Rik Ferguson said: “These components have so far been missing, but could this finally be the ‘other boot dropping’ that we have all been been waiting for?” Ferguson also suggested that people behind Conficker could be the very same who are running Waledac and created the Storm botnet. “It tallies with some of the assumptions people have made about Conficker — that the first variant was actively trying to avoid the Ukraine because Waledac was Eastern European,” Ferguson added.”

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Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of South Park, were given a very special gift by US marines: a signed photo of Saddam Hussein. During his captivity, the marines forced Saddam to repeatedly watch the movie South Park: Bigger, Longer And Uncut, which shows him as the boyfriend of Satan. Stone said, “We’re very proud of our signed Saddam picture and what it means. It’s one of our biggest highlights.”

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MJackson writes “Lord Carter’s interim Digital Britain report recently proposed a new Universal Service Obligation (USO), which would effectively make it mandatory for every household in the UK to have access to a broadband service capable of 2Mbps by 2012. Since then there has been much talk about Mobile Broadband (3G, 4G) services being used to bridge the UK Digital Divide, but is that realistic? The technology has all sorts of problems from slow speeds and high latency to blocking VoIP, MSN Instant Messaging and aggressive image compression … not to mention connection stability.”

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