The Great Geek Manual News

The much touted flying car of the future will become a reality according to British inventor Sir Clive Sinclair. In an interview on Radio 4 Sir Clive said that “flying cars were technically entirely possible.” He continued that the vehicles would have to be powered by electricity, since petrol engines were too unreliable and said he would “love to be involved” with such a project.

“I’m sure it will happen and I am sure it will change the world dramatically, ” he said.

“It would need to be automatically controlled because we can’t all learn to fly. The vehicle would take off from your home and fly to wherever you want to go.”

Sinclair was a pioneer inventor of the computer age, developing an inexpensive pocket calculator and the eponymous sub-£100 home computer that made his fortune, before losing part of it with an attempt at the first mass market electric car, the C5.

In the interview he said the C5 “didn’t achieve the success I expected”.

“We did sell quite a few thousand. Looking back I can see why [we didn’t have success]. It was a bit daunting to go into traffic.”

Sir Clive also revealed that despite his computer background he does not use the internet.

“I don’t use it myself directly,” he said, explaining that as an inventor he tried to avoid “mechanical and technical things around me so they don’t blur the mind”.

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Source: iT News

Hackers have “compromised” pages on the US Sony PlayStation website, a security firm claimed today..

Sophos said that cyber-criminals used an SQL injection vulnerability to add unauthorised code to pages promoting PlayStation games SingStar Pop and God of War.

The malware claims to undertake an antivirus scan and displays a fake message stating that the visitor’s computer has been infected.

The visitor is then urged to purchase a bogus security product to clean up the ‘infection’.

Sophos warned that it would be “trivial” for the hackers who have compromised the web pages to alter the payload so that it became more malicious.

They could install code designed to harvest confidential information from users, or turn innocent victims’ PCs into botnet zombies.

“There are millions of video game lovers around the world, many of whom will visit Sony’s PlayStation website regularly to find out more about the latest console games,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos.

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Source: iT News

A study from researchers at Google, IBM and the Communications Systems Group in Switzerland found only 60 percent of Web users have safe browsers. The most secure is Mozilla’s Firefox, and the least secure is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The findings are similar to those by Sophos, which found 81 percent of corporate endpoints vulnerable.

Researchers from Google, IBM and the Communications Systems Group in Switzerland released a study Monday that shows only 60 percent of Web users are surfing with patched, updated browsers.

They estimated that only 576 million of 1.4 billion Internet users worldwide used the most secure browsers. The data Relevant Products/Services came from Google’s server logs between January 2007 and last month.

Mozilla users are most likely to be using the latest versions of their browsers, with 83 percent of Firefox users patched. By contrast, only 63.3 percent of Safari users and 56.1 percent of Opera users have the latest versions. Microsoft Relevant Products/Services Internet Explorer users ranked at the bottom with only 47.6 percent using the most secure version of IE7.

“We believe the auto-update mechanism as implemented within Firefox to be the most efficient patching mechanism of the Web browsers studied,” the researchers wrote.

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Source: News Factor

Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users’ names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday. Viacom wants the data to prove that infringing material is more popular than user-created videos, which could be used to increase Google’s liability if it is found guilty of contributory infringement.

Viacom filed suit against Google in March 2007, seeking more than $1 billion in damages for allowing users to upload clips of Viacom’s copyright material. Google argues that the law provides a safe harbor for online services so long as they comply with copyright takedown requests.

Although Google argued that turning over the data would invade its users’ privacy, the judge’s ruling (.pdf) described that argument as “speculative” and ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four tera-byte hard drives. The judge also turned Google’s own defense of its data retention policies — that IP addresses of computers aren’t personally revealing in and of themselves, against it to justify the log dump.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has already reacted, calling the order a violation of the Video Privacy Protection act that “threatens to expose deeply private information.”

The order also requires Google to turn over copies of all videos that it has taken down for any reason. Viacom also requested YouTube’s source code, the code for identifying repeat copyright infringement uploads, copies of all videos marked private, and Google’s advertising database schema. Those requests were denied in whole, except that Google will have to turn over data about how often each private video has been watched and by how many persons.

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Source: Wired Blog

Virgin Media has sent about 800 letters to customers warning them that they should not be downloading illegal music files via file-sharing sites.

It is part of a 10-week campaign it is running in conjunction with the BPI to “educate” users about downloads.

The BPI, the body which represents the UK record industry, told the BBC that “thousands more letters” would be sent.

Its stricter stance on illegal downloaders might result in some ISPs being taken to court, it told BBC News.

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Source: The BBC

Mozilla has set a new world record for the number of software downloads in 24 hours, after 8,002,530 people grabbed a copy of Firefox 3 on its release day.

“As the arbiter and recorder of the world’s amazing facts, Guinness World Records is pleased to add Mozilla’s achievement to our archives,” says Gareth Deaves, records manager for Guinness World Records.

“Mobilising over 8 million internet users within 24 hours is an extremely impressive accomplishment and we would like to congratulate the Mozilla community for its hard work and dedication,” he continues.

Within hours of releasing the software over 14,000 people a minute were downloading the 7MB file, placing a 13Gb/sec strain on the organisation’s servers which subsequently crashed for two hours.

“The outpouring of interest and enthusiasm around Firefox 3 has been overwhelming (literally!),” said a posting on the Mozilla blog at the time.

Despite this setback an impressive number of downloads were successful, although a record of some description was rather inevitable as no previous record existed.

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Source: PC Pro

Out with the old, and in with the new, Rhapsody has introduced an alternative to its WMA and RAX file formats. Starting today, Rhapsody will sell its entire catalog of 5 million tracks in the MP3 format - something that music stores should have done from the beginning. However, there’s a mighty presence to overcome, the Apple iPod.

With an iron clad grip that has yet to be shaken, Apple’s iTunes has dominated the online music store market. It has overtaken Wal-Mart as the primary music retailer in the United States, and the remaining digital stores such as Napster and Rhapsody have struggled to retain their relevance.

The major problem of the smaller digital retailers is interoperability. Rhapsody, until today’s announcement, only supported the RAX and WMA formats. Do you know someone with a portable RAX player? What about a WMA player? You could purchase a Zune with WMA support, but in an Apple dominated world, the Zune is lonely player with few friends. The portable music market is dominated by the iPod and its kin, the iPhone and the iTouch. Unfortunately for the rest of the digital music store market, the iPod doesn’t support RAX or WMA - but it gladly accepts MP3s. In fact, the end user can store hundreds, if not thousands of MP3s. But not RAX files and certainly not those dirty WMA files from Microsoft. With a near iPod domination of the MP3 player market, smaller retailers have found it next to impossible to compete with iTunes - let alone P2P.

This situation has pushed the smaller retailers into a corner, leaving them with little choice but to acquiesce. Starting today, Rhapsody is taking a big gamble by supporting DRM-free MP3s. Their entire catalog, according to Rhapsody’s press release, will be DRM-free and available in the MP3 format.

“Beginning today, consumers can purchase MP3 music from Rhapsody and its partners that is free of the digital rights management (DRM) software that restricts how and where people can play their music. Any song or album purchased at www.rhapsody.com/mp3 can be played on any MP3 player, even an Apple iPod.”

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Source: Slyck

Internet search company Google signed an agreement with Brazilian public prosecutors on Wednesday to help combat child pornography on its social networking site Orkut, an accord that the company believes is the first of its kind internationally.

Under the agreement, Google will use filters to remove and prevent illegal content on Orkut, which has about half its users in Brazil. The company will also facilitate evidence gathering under judicial order in suspected crimes against children and teen-agers on Orkut without the need for international legal accords.

Google will also preserve for six months access logs of users being investigated for illegal conduct.

Google said it was the first such agreement that the company had signed and the firm believes it is the first internationally. Alexandre Hohagen, president of Google in Brazil, told a congressional committee, “It’s an historic day not only for Brazil but for the Internet in the entire world.”

Initially, Google had refused to work with prosecutors, saying it was subject only to U.S. laws, said Prosecutor Sergio Suiama. The company denied this, saying it had always been willing to cooperate with Brazilian authorities.

Brazilian prosecutors say 90 percent of illegal Internet content being investigated in Brazil involves Orkut. The site has 60 million users, half of them in Brazil.

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Source: Reuters

Web search giant Google has enlisted Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane to create an original animated series that it will distribute on the Web via its AdSense advertising system, according to a report in the New York Times .

Google plans to use AdSense to syndicate the program–called Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy–to thousands of Web sites that are popular with MacFarlane’s target audience, according to the newspaper. Advertising will be incorporated via “preroll” ads, banner ads, or “brought to you by” ads, according to the report.

MacFarlane is also reportedly working with advertisers to create original advertising to run with the Cavalcade content, although neither Google nor MacFarlane would reveal any of the advertisers, saying only that the deals were among AdSense’s largest ever.

MacFarlane, who will receive a percentage of the ad revenue, told the newspaper that the two-minute episodes would be “animated versions of the one-frame cartoons you might see in The New Yorker, only edgier.”

Google, which launched AdSense in 2003, expanded its AdSense program last year so that Web site publishers could display and make money off embedded video clips from YouTube content partners that have targeted banner or text ads. Google has experimented with distributing video and video ads on its AdSense publisher network before, but with mixed results. The company has tested distributing in-stream video ads and in-stream video clips with bundled ads.

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Source: CNet via Yahoo! News

The internet provides many ways in which people can send a message, write about their lives or get connected. One 16-year-old from Ithaca, in New York State, has managed to harness the power of online social networking to try and break a world record.

Not only did Trevor Dougherty reach millions online but he physically gathered nearly 6,000 people together to make his point.

Trevor has been taking his exams at Ithaca High School. At the same time he has been campaigning for world peace and organising a huge event. Not something that every teenager attempts.

Last year Trevor put together a short video with the message: “People around the world are getting killed. We should end the violence and strive for world peace.”

The film was featured on the video-sharing website YouTube and was nominated for the “Most Inspirational” category in the YouTube Video Awards 2007. It encouraged 200 people to make their own short movies in response.

Trevor says, “I knew it was the best video I had ever made, but it was incredible to see it featured. It’s funny because I made the original video during my exams last year and I organised this event during my finals this year. It’s beautiful to be distracted from my ghastly final exams, by doing something righteous.”

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Source: The BBC

Today is the deadline for any business that accepts credit cards over the Internet to meet new security standards for their Web sites.

But not all businesses are expected to make the deadline, and for those that do, it’s not clear how much more secure their sites will be.

The new rule comes from the big credit card brands - Visa, MasterCard Worldwide, American Express, Discover Financial Services and JCB International - and is intended to protect credit card data from Web attacks, which are increasing. It is known as Payment Card Industry standard 6.6.

By today,