Cody Taylor

Tesladownunder writes “This huge LED is on steroids and then some. It is intended for use as a streetlight. It has a 7000 lumen output at 100W and will burn a hole in a CD case without focusing. And that’s without the infrared that a halogen or discharge lamp has. Very efficient and low maintenance. Stronger than HID car headlights or a 500W halogen. Hit the site for lots of data and pics of it in action including burning and irresponsible bicycle luminosity. You’ll want one to attach to your keyring, too.”

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Cludge writes “ZDNet has a story (and several related articles) about how Symantec has discovered evidence of an all-Mac based botnet that is actively involved in a DOS attack. Apparently, security on the exploited Macs (call them iBots?) was compromised when unwary users bit-torrented pirated copies of iWork 09 and Photoshop CS4 that contained malware. From the article: ‘They describe this as the “first real attempt to create a Mac botnet” and notes that the zombie Macs are already being used for nefarious purposes.'”

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Al writes “Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have created a remarkably low-power server architecture using netbook processors and flash memory cards. The server design, dubbed a ‘fast array of wimpy nodes,’ or FAWN, is only designed to perform simple tasks, but the CMU team say it could be perfect for large Web companies that have to retrieve large amounts of data from RAM. A set-up including 21 individual nodes draws a maximum of just 85 watts under real-world conditions. The researchers say that a FAWN cluster could offer a low-power replacement for sites that currently rely on Memcached to access data from RAM.”

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snydeq writes “Lawyer Jonathan Moskin has called into question the long-term impact last year’s Java Model Railroad Interface court ruling will have on open source adoption among corporate entities. For many, the case in question, Jacobsen v. Katzer, has represented a boon for open source, laying down a legal foundation for the protection of open source developers. But as Moskin sees it, the ruling ‘enables a set of potentially onerous monetary remedies for failures to comply with even modest license terms, and it subjects a potentially larger community of intellectual property users to liability.’ In other words, in Moskin’s eyes, Jacobsen v. Katzer could make firms wary of using open source software because they fear that someone in the food chain has violated a copyright, thus exposing them to lawsuit. It should be noted that Moskin’s firm has represented Microsoft in anti-trust litigation before the European Union.”

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The FNP writes “Time Warner has postponed their plans to test tiered data caps in Greensboro NC, Rochester NY, San Antonio TX, and Austin TX. This announcement comes shortly after the media started reporting on Eric Massa’s opposition and protests planned for this Saturday outside of Time Warner’s offices in Greensboro and Rochester.” There’s also a good piece at Ars on the fall of the current tiered-pricing plans.

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An anonymous reader asks “Is there a solution for online storage of encrypted data providing encrypted search and similar functions over the encrypted data? Is there an API/software/solution or even some online storage company providing this? I don’t like Google understanding all my unencrypted data, but I like that Google can search them when they are unencrypted. So I would like to have both: the online storage provider does not understand my data, but he can still help me with searching in them, and doing other useful stuff. I mean: I send to the remote server encrypted data and later an encrypted query (the server cannot decipher them), and the server sends me back a chunk of my encrypted data stored there — the result of my encrypted query. Or I ask for the directory structure of my encrypted data (somehow stored in my data too — like in a tar archive), and the server sends it back, without knowing that this encrypted chunk is the directory structure. I googled for this and found some papers, however no software and no online service providing this yet.” Can anyone point to an available implementation?

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Mike writes “If you buy a Kindle and some Kindle ebooks from Amazon, be careful of returning items. Amazon decided that one person had returned too many things, so they suspended his Amazon account, which meant that he could no longer buy any Kindle books, and any Kindle subscriptions he’s paid for stop working. After some phone calls, Amazon granted him a one-time exception and reactivated his account again.” Take this with as much salt as you’d like.

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