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One day, your computer will be a big-ass table…

The Business Software Alliance is offering up to $1 million to whistle blowers who report software piracy and organizations are paying record fines for noncompliance. From initial fines to further audits from individual vendors, being found in noncompliance can be costly. So what help is there out there?

Centennial License Manager is a web-based software license compliance solution that helps you quickly reconcile license entitlement to software usage on your network. Not only can it help your licensing position, it can help you save money as well by showing instances where you may be over licensed.

For more details, visit the License Manager products page at Centennial Software.

Ariel Shamir and Shai Avidan have come up with a method for “retargeting” photos. An algorithm is used to detect horizontal and vertical seams of pixels with the least gradient magnitude. This path of pixels can then be removed from the photo, shrinking it in size, but preserving the rest of the photo. To increase the size of the photo, pixels are added along the determined seam.

You can view a higher resolution movie at Ariel Shamir web site. There is also a pdf available, however server speeds prevented me from actually downloading it.

http://8bitboy.popforge.de/

Karsten Obarski invented 1987 - twenty years ago - the MOD format for his Ultimate Tracker running on Amiga computers. Since then, countless songs are created, especially for the demoscene.

MODs have special attributes. All samples are stored in 8bits and the number of voices is limited to four. To have something similarly to chords, the three notes of it are repeated very fast. This makes MODs sound so freaky.

Finally 8BitBoy brings those songs back online.

Pretty sick. The applications are endless!

Helping the handicap and assisting astronauts is cool and all, but what about as a TV remote? Just think, you’d never have to waste your precious energy pushing those remote control buttons any more. If the consequence of sloth is only a pit full of snakes, bring it on.

Security researchers claim they have found a hack to get confidential data from the iPhone.

By creating a malicious html page, and then pointing the phone’s Safari web browser at it, the hackers were able to access all sorts of private information from the phone. Not good news for private individuals - but even worse for organizations when you consider that recent research estimates that more than 50 percent of staff regularly copy files from the corporate network to their personal storage devices.

Read the full article here

(from watchyourend.com)

Panda Labs has detected a new trojan named BotVoice.A Trojan. Users who get infected will hear the phrase, “You have been infected. I repeat, you have been infected and your system files have been deleted. Sorry. Have a nice day and bye bye.”

The virus deletes systems files, modifies the registry to block attempts to undo the damage and takes control of Windows text reader. It is spread through peer-to-peer networks, external storage devices and malicious Web sites.

You can read more about the virus from their Web site and you can hear a sample of the voice here.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was interviewed by RU Sirius this week about being a prankster and ethical hacking.

From excerpts of the interview posted on 10 Zen Monkeys:

I have these professionally printed stickers that I’ve had made. They’re done with this sort of foil-type stuff in the exact OSHA style and the OSHA colors. And it says, “Danger: Do Not Flush Over Cities.” And I put ‘em in the bathrooms on airplanes…They’re red with a black-shadowed airplane picture. The bathroom has a little seat fold-down. I fold that up and there’s a sign in the middle of it saying, “Don’t throw trash here.” And I put my two little stickers behind it, so the stewardesses won’t notice it right away. If they notice it right away they might realize that somebody put that there. But after a while, if they slowly get used to it, they’ll stay on for years…

Hahaha. Go Steve.

Jon Lech Johansen, aka “DVD Jon,” claims he has activated an iPhone without service through AT&T. Although the phone function doesn’t work, everything else does. Johansen says the purpose of this little exercise was for people that don’t wish to enter into a 2-year contract with AT&T and would rather just use the iPhone as a pimped out iPod.

Visit Jahansen’s blog for more info and downloads

There’s other ways of doing this too, which involves purchasing and then canceling a prepaid plan from AT&T.

Just stop. Please.

It’s always been a slight pet peeve of mine. I understand that back in the days of mono-spaced fonts on typewriters it was necessary, and that some still have those old bad habits. But this, my friends, is the future. OK, we still don’t have jetpacks and kitchens of the future, but we do have variable width fonts that aren’t meant to have double spaces after periods (or full stops if you’re in other parts of the world).

I’m not one to cite style guides, but single spaces after punctuation is considered proper according to the MLA, APA, and the Chicago Manual of Style. So neener-neener.

The Business Software Alliance has just increased their reward for whistle blowers who report software piracy to $1 million. Although the initial campaign is target towards the U.S., it’s expected to expand internationally.

Read more