Month: March 2005

The hybrid vehicle has moved out of the arena of the funky looking automobile that no one would ever want to drive, and several car companies, including Toyota and Ford, have decided it’s time to drop hybrid engines into normal cars and sell them to anyone and everyone who either cares about the environment, cares about their wallets (see: those steep and still rising gasoline prices), or cares about technology; and in this day and age, buying a hybrid car can get you everything from a tax break in most local jurisdictions (as well as on your federal income taxes) and a pat on the back from Homeland Security; you are helping reduce our national dependance on foriegn oil, you know.

But beyond that, let’s take a look into a company that’s looking for change the way we drive; to eliminate the myths around the real benefits and drawbacks of hybrid automobiles, and take some bold steps towards the next automobile revolution.

Toyota is lookingto make the combustion engine obsolete. And good riddance too. The Prius model was so warmly embraced by auto-buyers worldwide that Toyota dealers couldn’t keep them in stock, and Toyota couldn’t manage to produce enough of them. This year, they say, the 2005 model is going to floor us all, and there’ll be enough to go around. Enough to kickstart that revolution. Why? Wired News has the scoop.

[ http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.04/hybrid.html ]

This in-depth article examines how now that lawsuits are being filed against song swappers and sharers on peer-to-peer networks and the legal hammer is coming down on those networks (who are meanwhile, struggling to stay alive in their own right, both by spending money on their technologies as well as their legal fees), most song swappers and would-be downloaders are looking for new and innovative methods of downloading their favorite tunes for free on the internet.

Some herald back to a simpler time, pre-Napster, if you will, where ftp servers and IM file transfers reigned supreme, and others are upping the ante by using portable music devices like Apple’s iPod to trade music. The problem here though is that the legal battle between the music industry and peer-to-peer file sharing networks is still raging, and should the gavel come down on the side of the music industry, everyone may be at risk-even companies like AOL and Microsoft, who furnish instant messaging software that allows for file transfers.

Sound farfetched? I can see this-even though peer-to-peer networks have perfectly legal uses and in themselves are not illegal, the music industry claims that the only reason anyone uses those services is to trade in illegal files; what’s to stop them from making similar arguments (they don’t even have to say the only reason people use IM networks is to trade files, just that the use of IM networks to trade files is damaging to them) about instant messaging? Or perhaps FTP? Or maybe even portable music players? We may eventually see IM clients come out with built-in protection to keep users from transferring music or movies. Who knows.

Regardless, PCWorld has the scoop, read all about it:

[ http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,120178,tk,dn032505X,00.asp ]

A few months ago, if you weren’t paying attention, Apple filed suit against several websites that posted leaked information about Apple’s coming-soon revision to the Mac OS X line, Mac OS 10.4, “Tiger.” Apple won the rights to have the names of those sites’ sources turned over to them, so Apple could root out the internal mole who was leaking said information to the outside world. Now trust me, I know how fanatical Apple fans can be (I’m one of them) but I also know how fanatical Apple is about keeping it’s secret information very very secret. So Steve Jobs didn’t take this lightly.

Looks like there were additional lawsuits against each of the developers accused of leaking information, and one of them has fessed up to the crime, settled with Apple for some undisclosed monetary amount, and has made some quite amusing public statements apologizing for everything he’s done and for the damage he may have caused Apple, even though he admits to not wanting to hurt anyone in the process. Read all about it:

[ http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,120171,tk,dn032505X,00.asp ]

Ah, rootkits. They’ve been around for a good long while, but recently they’ve been getting more and more publicity and credibility as methods to effectively target and breach the security on everyone from individual to corporate networks, make their way into individual PCs, and gain complete control over systems and steal all manner of information. Rootkits are tools originally developed to be lightwieght and stealthy remote access applications, allowing an individual on one side of the world to control another computer with little to no intrusion to the end system.

But as with most tools like this, they’re being used in the wrong hands with the wrong intentions, and crackers and black-hat hackers around the world are using easily available rootkits to infect systems, steal information and identities, and install malware that’ll do everything from host illegal files and share them to relay spam. Now, it seems various security companies are sitting up and taking notice; a whole array of security firms are working to develop software and tools that will detect and remove rootkits from infected systems.

[ http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,120067,tk,dn031605X,00.asp ]

Looks like the Mozilla Foundation has finally decided to give up development efforts on the Mozilla suite of software, which was initially designed to be a lean, mean, and still fully featured take on Netscape Communicator, in favor of sleeker stand-alone applications like Firefox and Thunderbird. I have to admit, I was a Mozilla early adopter back in the pre-Firefox days, and used it for email as well as web surfing. It was the natural progression of a fast and sleek yet comprehensive browser/email suite from the old Netscape 4.x days, and I thought it was exactly what the web needed. The vulnerabilities of Internet Explorer and Outlook Express were already well documented, and I wanted to steer clear of them both. The newer Netscapes, 6.x and 7.1 were both memory-leaking, bloated footprint, poorly coded pieces of trash, and I wanted to steer clear of them as well. Mozilla was the perfect answer.

I’m unhappy at the decision by the Mozilla Foundation, but it was only a matter of time. Their energies and efforts are better spent focused on Firefox and Thunderbird as standalone web and email applications, which compliment each other but don’t need to come together, and thus easier compete with Internet Explorer and Outlook Express as other stand-alone applications. Regardless, Mozilla has been ebraced by much of the user community, and many organizations (including mine) have been touting it as the best thing since Netscape, and superior to Internet Explorer. Guess it’s time to start moving those people to Firefox, eh? I figure that’s exactly what the Mozilla Foundation wants. Read the full announcement:

[ http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,120012,tk,dn031105X,00.asp ]

Now let’s see what happens to Camino…