Japanese geek trio blow up mice
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The inflatable input device For the traveller, a mouse's bulk makes it a difficult peripheral to pack. Now some Japanese designers have come up with a flat-pack design.â¦
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The three titans of Japanese animation are all about to unleash monster new films. Watch your back, Shrek. By Charles C. Mann from Wired magazine.
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SAN JOSE, Calif.) - Phreaks, spoofers and spammers want to invade your home computer, and the tricks of their trade include airsnarfs, wabbits and fork bombs.
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Japanese scientists say they have tackled one of the last frontiers of semiconductor technology, environments where electronic devices have to run at high power, in fierce heat or at lethal doses of radiation.
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Everyone knows that Microsoft is probably the single most powerful software company in the world. How strange it is therefore, to discover that the mighty giant is being shamed by a group of geek-like programmers
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Bot software that turns PCs into zombies spreads via holes in Symantec and Microsoft products.
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The pair mimic the design of the company's popular line of laptop optical mice.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft Corp. has clarified the identity of the mysterious trio on the installation disks for the business version of Windows Vista. And no, you can't play the installation DVDs backwards and hear the devil talking, either. The tiny photo of three grinning men -- less that 1 mm in size -- is one of several images incorporated into the hologram's design intended to make it harder to replicate a Vista DVD, according to Nick White on Microsoft's Vista team blog. The men in the photo worked on the team that designed the hologram. The disks also have images of art works now in the public domain. Magnification is required to see the images. "The real story is interesting, but conspiracy theorists will be disappointed to learn that it is not the result of a deliberate attempt to deceive," White wrote. Microsoft never intended to make the images impossible to find, White said. Holograms are hard to reproduce, he wrote, but the inclusion of photos adds another level of complexity to thwart piracy. Various blog postings speculated the image was the work of a rogue trio, reminiscent of when Microsoft and other software vendors used to plant images or games within other programs, a practice known as adding an "Easter egg." Nonetheless, pundits couldn't pass up the opportunity for a bit of humor at Microsoft's expense. "Apparently a blogger named Kwisatz has uncovered a 'secret' photo embedded into the hologram that encompasses the Windows Vista Business DVD," wrote Paul Miller on the tech blog Engadget. "This being Microsoft, the photo naturally depicts three total nerds grinning excessively at their own cleverness."ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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Gallery: The Japanese have been making mechanical men for a long time, from medieval clockwork dolls to modern-day marvels both real and fictional. It's all on view in a Tokyo art exhibit.
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Ingenious hacks abound for the game console's input device. Plus: The
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The hunt for teenage geeks who illegally download music has moved across the pond, blokes. Only this time, the culprits are a wee bit older.
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Joe Grand has never really thought of himself as an artist, but on Saturday night, he&#39;s having his first gallery opening.Grand is a hardware hacker: He&#39;s at home with a soldering iron in his hand and&#160;the guts of some electronic device opened up in front of him. A former member of the L0pht Heavy Industries hacker collective, he designed the programmable conference badges used at this year&#39;s Defcon 15 hacker conference and a cheap RFID reader, soon to be on store shelves at Radio Shack.His show, called &quot;When Electronics Become Art,&quot; is happening at the 20 goto 10 gallery, on the fringe of San Francisco&#39;s notorious Tenderloin district. It&#39;s the kind of place where you&#39;d expect to see a hacker art exhibit: It&#39;s populated by junkies, liquor stores, and dive bars. Gallery owner Christopher Abad says the space was filled with old TVs and other junk hoarded by &quot;dumpster-diving meth heads&quot; before he moved in earlier this year.Abad, a noted hacker in his own right, says that Grand&#39;s work is good enough that it deserves the kind of attention you get in a fine-art gallery setting. &quot;A lot of the stuff that I&#39;ve seen him work on is pretty interesting, and it&#39;s rare for hackers to get any kind of credit outside of that community or any exposure at all,&quot; he said. &quot;At best you get to see some movie where it&#39;s all completely embellished.&quot;Though 20 goto10 also has the typical fine-art exhibits and book readings you&#39;d expect from a gallery, it&#39;s a bit of a hacker experiment. Abad featured another technology-themed installation in the gallery&#39;s first show this past February: a system that could be used to spoof caller ID, check other people&#39;s voicemail and launch unsuspecting man-in-the-middle attacks.Abad says he wants 20 goto 10 to be a venue that goes beyond the standard hacker conference. The gallery environment lets people gather information at their own pace.&quot;When Electronics Become Art,&quot; includes the Defcon badges Grand has designed as well as a &quot;Curtain of Shame&quot; of malfunctioning badges, a Marquee sign with the word Kingpin (Grand&#39;s hacker moniker) cut into Nintendo and Atari circuit boards and a modified searchlight from a US Army M-60 Patton tank.There will also be an interactive RFID exhibit and what Grand calls his Lichtenberg Lighting Frame -- a large acrylic block he picked up at a Boston flea market with a tiny multi-color LED&#160;display in the middle.But one of Grand&#39;s favorite pieces is a hacked up Atari computer called Atari K-9. While visiting his family, last Thanksgiving, Grand found a floppy disk containing a program that he&#39;d written for the Atari when he was eight. He created a custom display for the machine to &quot;make it look like it was created by Atari in the 80s&quot; and got his old program to run on the Atari. It&#39;s a silly graphic of K-9, the robot dog, from the 1970s TV series Dr. Who, but Grand sees it as a kind of collaborative project with his eight year-old self. &quot;It&#39;s basically to pay tribute to my past. I grew up with an Atari 400 computer,&quot; he said.Grand makes his living running his design company, Grand Idea Studio, and he&#39;s currently filming an engineering TV show, due to air next year on a popular science cable channel,But does he consider himself an artist? Maybe electronics aesthete would be a better description.&quot;Engineering and electronics does have this simple, beautiful way about it. If something is done in a really elegant fashion, then it could be considered art,&quot; he said. &quot;Sometimes I&#39;ll open up a product to see how it&#39;s made ... and there&#39;s a lot of beautiful design work that goes on.&quot;&quot;It&#39;s hard for me to consider myself an artist, because what I do to me doesn&#39;t seem like art,&quot; he added. &quot;People can call me an artist. I still consider myself an engineer and a hardware hacker.&quot;&quot;When Electronics Become Art,&quot; runs through Nov. 8 at 20 goto 10, 679 Geary Street, San Francisco. The show opens on Saturday, from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m., and gallery hours are 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Thursday and Friday; 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. on weekends.
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Hobbyist hackers use Nintendo's motion-sensing controller to play Half-Life 2 and bang virtual drums. What's next? By Chris Kohler.
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By MAY WONG    SAN JOSE, Calif.  -- Forget about a better mousetrap...
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The age-long animosity between cat and mouse could be a thing of the past with genetically modified "fearless" mice that Japanese scientists say shed light on mammal behavior
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Eric Bauman made big bucks posting other people's gross-out videos to his website. Now the geeks whose clips he swiped on the way up are trying to knock him down. By David Kushner from Wired magazine.
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Tokyo has played host to an exhibition showcasing the latest attractions for gamers.