Author: Dr. Bill

Sigh… spammers just keep trying to get their junk in front of our eyes… and try to find ways to defeat the spam filters… no, it is ASCII art! Back “in the day” ASCII art was cool on old “green screen” terminals… now it is a spam threat!?!?

ASCII: An artful way around spam filters

“An old computer art form is making a comeback as a newer way to evade spam filters. For decades, computing fans have enjoyed a form of expression called ASCII art that shows pictures or messages as a low-resolution graphic, a grid made of numerous computer characters encoded with the venerable ASCII standard. With a photo digitized with ASCII art, for example, the ‘#’ character can represent a dark pixel and ‘.’ a light pixel. And there are large fonts constructed from an assemblage of individual characters. Now the technique has surfaced as a way to transmit information that’s hard for spam filters to detect–but that so far, at least, has proved relatively harmless beyond that stage. ‘There’s been an upsurge in ASCII spam in the last week…It’s quite effective in getting through filters,’ said Chris Boyd, director of malware research at messaging management firm FaceTime Communications. But earlier efforts to use ASCII art for spam have proven to be duds, he added. ‘The downside is that 9 times out of 10, it’s completely useless because it’s almost impossible to read, or it’s a really bizarre picture of a naked lady that’s not clickable,’ Boyd said.”

Remember “Star Trek: The Voyage Home?” (The one us Trekkers playfully call the “Save the Whales” movie!) One of the things that they mentioned about in that movie was “transparent aluminium.” Scotty was willing to give away the formula if the guy that owned the company would make some for him. Well, this is an old article, but my brother-in-law, Jon, sent it to me and pointed out that they ARE working on just that… transparent aluminium! Wow!

Military: New Aluminum Windows Stop .50-Caliber Bullet

“A new type of transparent armor made of aluminum could one day replace glass in military vehicles. The product is called aluminum oxynitride. It is being tested by the Army and the University of Dayton Research Institute in Ohio. The material is a ceramic compound with a high compressive strength and durability, according to an Army statement issued this week. It performs better than the multilayered glass products currently in use, and its about half the weight. It is virtually scratch-resistant. ‘The substance itself is light-years ahead of glass,’ said 1st Lt. Joseph La Monica, who heads the research. Glass is still used in the new process, being sandwiched between an outer layer of the polished aluminum oxynitride and a polymer backing.”

How cool is that?

I am a HUGE Star Trek fan, as you may know. And, Star Trek has been very “prophetic” already, predicting hand-held “cell phone” like communicators, pad computers, diagnostic beds in healthcare, etc. Well, how about warp drive? Scientists now believe that warp drive may, indeed, be possible as well! Way to go, Gene Roddenberry!

Star Trek warp drive is a possibility, say scientists

“Two physicists have boldly gone where no reputable scientists should go and devised a new scheme to travel faster than the speed of light. The advance could mean that Star Trek fantasies of interstellar civilizations and voyages powered by warp drive are now no longer the exclusive domain of science fiction writers. In the long running television series created by Gene Roddenberry, the warp drive was invented by Zefram Cochrane, who began his epic project in 2053 in Bozeman, Montana. Now Dr. Gerald Cleaver, associate professor of physics at Baylor, and Richard Obousy have come up with a new twist on an existing idea to produce a warp drive that they believe can travel faster than the speed of light, without breaking the laws of physics. In their scheme, in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, a starship could “warp” space so that it shrinks ahead of the vessel and expands behind it. By pushing the departure point many light years backwards while simultaneously bringing distant stars and other destinations closer, the warp drive effectively transports the starship from place to place at faster-than-light speeds. All this extraordinary feat requires, says the new study, is for scientists to harness a mysterious and poorly understood cosmic antigravity force, called dark energy. Dark energy is thought responsible for speeding up the expansion rate of our universe as time moves on, just like it did after the Big Bang, when the universe expanded much faster than the speed of light for a very brief time. This may come as a surprise since, according to relativity theory, matter cannot move through space faster than the speed of light, which is almost 300,000,000 meters per second. But that theory applies only to unwarped ‘flat’ space. And there is no limit on the speed with which space itself can move: the spaceship can sit at rest in a small bubble of space that flows at “superluminal” – faster than light – velocities through normal space because the fabric of space and time itself (scientists refer to spacetime) is stretching. In the scheme outlined by Dr. Cleaver dark energy would be used to create the bubble: if dark energy can be made negative in front of the ship, then that patch of space would contract in response. ‘Think of it like a surfer riding a wave,’ said Dr Cleaver. ‘The ship would be pushed by the spatial bubble and the bubble would be traveling faster than the speed of light.'”

What is amazing is that this is EXACTLY the way Star Trek described how warp speed travel was possible… a “warp bubble.” How totally weird is that!!?!?

To be fair, I have heard noted physicist and string theorist, Michio Kaku, talk about this on the Discovery Channel before this… but it was cool that is made news this week!

As you know, when I got my new laptop, I had to switch to PodcastStation from PodProducer because I needed a system that supported a USB microphone (PodProducer doesn’t unfortunately.) Now, the makers of PodcastStation are “throwing in the towel” due to development costs. That’s a shame! Here’s the e-mail owner’s of the software received:

“Dear Friends of PodcastStation:

Sales, development and support of PodcastStation has been discontinued and PodcastStation software is no longer available.

We appreciate the loyalty of our fans and hardcore users, but the simple fact is that the cost of maintaining the product far exceeded its ability to generate income.

For our registered users, we will be posting technical support FAQs on our PodcastStation site soon, including instructions for re-registration.

You’ll want to take down your links to PCS at the soonest opportunity.

We appreciate your support over the past two years with PodcastStation and helping us to get into the hands of those who really enjoy using it.

If you wish to contact us directly please send inquiries to info@audionlabs.com.

Best regards,

Kimberly Brown
Audion Laboratories, Inc.
206-842-5202 x 203”

It is awesome software, and they are an excellent company… it is a shame to see a product “die” like this. But, I understand that sometimes you have to make hard business decisions.

DVD shipments were curtailed at it’s distribution plants due to a computer problem… but they are working on it! I heard on NPR this morning that Netflix will return some of the monthly fee for this month back to customers due to this problem as a credit.

Netflix admits it’s experiencing shipping delays

“Netflix is currently experiencing “significant shipping issues” that are preventing the popular movie rental service from delivering discs. Affected customers have been notified by e-mail. The initial shipping delay was reported on Tuesday and reported in the company’s blog to have been mostly resolved on Wednesday.”

This has apparently NOT effected their “on-demand” streaming service, however.

This last “Patch Tuesday” brought some important fixes for Microsoft users. Especially Word and Vista IPsec users, take note!

Eleven major soft spots addressed by latest Patch Tuesday

“The full effect of yesterday’s round of patches from Microsoft is just now being felt. This time, it’s not the worldwide DNS flaw that’s the big issue, but the typical stuff that afflicts Microsoft products, including and especially Office. One of the ‘critical’ vulnerabilities addressed yesterday affects older versions of Microsoft Word, and was acknowledged by the company last month. It involves intentionally malformed documents that, when parsed by Word, cause it to crash but also leave memory corrupted. Within that corrupt memory can lurk remnant code that could then be executed to give a remote, malicious user unauthorized privileges. You’d think that perhaps an Office 2003 Service Pack would be the answer to this problem, as systems with that service pack loaded were reportedly unaffected, as were systems with Office 2007 with or without SP1. But this week, Microsoft did elect to address the issue with a separate fix. Another of the 11 issues addressed with this round includes a bizarre problem, rated just ‘important’ rather than ‘critical,’ having to do with IPsec: In Windows Vista, IPsec is a component that enables a fully encrypted connection, but with other systems that can host it (for instance, Windows Server 2008). It enables businesses to avoid having to deploy sophisticated, and often entangled, VPNs to secure their connections and open up file system access to privileged users. In Vista, IPsec is closely tied with the group policy system, which is also part of its Advanced Firewall. These group policy objects determine how and whether certain security features are employed; and in the case of this particular security hole, the policy system can be fooled, and network traffic that’s supposed to be encrypted, won’t be. This fix affects both Vista and WS2K8, both 32- and 64-bit versions. In a clear indication that no Windows component is, by design, safe if it can communicate with other systems, it was discovered that an old-style heap-based buffer overflow could be triggered by, of all things, the Internal Color Management (ICM) system. This is the part of Windows that manages color profiles for displays and printers, translating hues from image files into true representations for the screen, and in turn into equally true representations in print.”