Its reach is impossible to measure precisely, but more than 3 million vulnerable machines may ultimately have been infected. : The inside story on the Conficker Worm at New Scientist.
posted by The Whelk on Jun 15, 2009 - 84 comments

Beyond even the outrageously broad "state secrets" privilege invented by the Bush administration and now embraced fully by the Obama administration, the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S. Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls, emails and the like) and -- even if what they're doing is blatantly illegal and they know it's illegal -- you are barred from suing them unless they "willfully disclose" to the public what they have learned. - Glenn Greenwald. [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese on Apr 7, 2009 - 102 comments

Evidence of a Global SuperOrganism. "My hypothesis is this: The rapidly increasing sum of all computational devices in the world connected online, including wirelessly, forms a superorganism of computation with its own emergent behaviors." [Via]
posted by homunculus on Oct 26, 2008 - 67 comments

Google rolls out Mail Goggles, designed to prevent drunk or otherwise impaired emailing by forcing you to answer basic math questions. And no, it's not April 1st.
posted by mattholomew on Oct 7, 2008 - 67 comments

Attention Geeks and Hackers: Uncle Sam's Cyber Force Wants You! [more inside]
posted by homunculus on Jun 5, 2008 - 29 comments

Having trouble connecting to a site? It may be you and many others got too close to a network event horizon and the packets ...disappeared.... The internets has black holes, too. via
posted by Kronos_to_Earth on Apr 8, 2008 - 13 comments

Before RSS and personalized aggregators such as Personalized Google and NetVibes, there was CRAYON, a service that allowed you to "CReAte Your Own Newspaper" by providing a page with links to chosen sources. [mi]
posted by divabat on Mar 28, 2007 - 11 comments

Meet George -- 39, single, quirky sense of humour, looking for friends to chat with online. Last year, he won the Loebner Prize, to bots who can most successfully pass the Turing Test. More here from BBC. How long before we have our own Mefibots?
posted by amberglow on Sep 16, 2006 - 49 comments

They'll never piggyback on your wireless again Your router makes the computer look funny. (via MeTa)
posted by klangklangston on Aug 10, 2006 - 62 comments

Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing (Google video) A fascinating 30 minute documentary about ARPAnet - the precursor to today's Internet. (Can you spot the real ubernerd mover and shaker at BBN? Hint: He wears no tie!) (via: all over the place)
posted by loquacious on Mar 19, 2006 - 30 comments

Seen anyone on Google Earth lately?
posted by divabat on Feb 17, 2006 - 33 comments

NSA,FISA, and Privacy It is of course the president who finally approves of actions that may or may not be deemed legal but before 9/11, this is what he had been advised to consider "The largest U.S. spy agency warned the incoming Bush administration in its "Transition 2001" report that the Information Age required rethinking the policies and authorities that kept the National Security Agency in compliance with the Constitution's 4th Amendment prohibition on "unreasonable searches and seizures" without warrant and "probable cause," according to an updated briefing book of declassified NSA documents posted today on the World Wide Web. If this is the sort of reading you enjoy, then by all means dig about here: But then Windows allowed NSA to have a sure access to your machine . And by now we all know that Google will fight the government on making its search data base available in order to protect your privacy.(Reality: to protect Google stuff). And if you worry about search engines tracking you and making data available, then here is a workaround
posted by Postroad on Jan 20, 2006 - 16 comments

Interesting "New Yorker" article about online extortion via DDoS attacks. Call me naive and underinformed, but I had little understanding of how this works. "In the most common scenario, the bots surreptitiously connect hundreds, or thousands, of zombies to a channel in a chat room. The process is called “herding,” and a herd of zombies is called a botnet."
posted by dersins on Oct 7, 2005 - 34 comments

Internet Explorer 7 announced We've heard about it for a while and it's been discussed here before. Will the new version of I.E. be able to hold its own against open source browsers like Firefox?
posted by j.p. Hung on Feb 15, 2005 - 48 comments

Ain't this grand? Pop Goes the Gmail is a program that sits between the http://gmail.com web server and your email client, converting messages from web format into POP3 format that a program such as Outlook Express or Thunderbird can understand.
posted by sunexplodes on Jun 15, 2004 - 43 comments

Google To Start Selling Banner Adverts From the that-didn't-take-too-long-department, Google's ad sales VP Tim Armstrong says Google will now start selling graphical banner adverts. One concession to their old mores is that, for now, the banner adverts will only appear on affiliated websites running their AdSense referral program (as does MeFi), and there is an opt-out. However... "We have no plans to show images on Google.com", said Mr. Armstrong "but we are not opposed to it".
posted by meehawl on May 12, 2004 - 27 comments

Worldbuilder (no relation to the old Mac adventure game toolkit) is an excellent way to start off the week by completely crippling productivity. I've played many games from these guys before, and they're always great. I envy the independent game designer that gets to work with Lego so often. Via GTA.
posted by majcher on Mar 22, 2004 - 3 comments

Good weekend project: start your own Internet radio station with peerCast. Mentioned here, very cool.
posted by tranquileye on Feb 6, 2004 - 4 comments

A new MS Internet Explorer vulnerability is discovered. Most digerati already know about the spammer and lamer trick to publish URLs that look like legitimate hostnames to fool people in to trusting a malicious site. This trick is frequently used by spammers to steal people's PayPal accounts, by tricking them in to "resetting" their password at a site owned by the spammer but disguised as PayPal.com. Today's new IE vulnerability is significantly worse. By including an 0x01 character after the @ symbol in the fake URL, IE can be tricked in to not displaying the rest of the URL at all. Don't expect a patch right way, the guy who found the hole released it to BugTraq on the same day he notified Microsoft. (via Simon Willison)
posted by dejah420 on Dec 9, 2003 - 29 comments

Skype, a new P2P Telephony service from the people who created KaZaA. [more inside]
posted by davehat on Sep 23, 2003 - 16 comments

Community Memory : the world's first public computerized bulletin board system, set up in 1972 with an ASR-33 Teletype machine. Also, please welcome Benway, possibly the world's first net personality (beating Miguel and Quonsar by a couple of weeks). More on Benway in Steven Levy's book Hackers.
posted by nylon on Aug 18, 2003 - 7 comments

amibiosornot.com Read it again. Then click.
posted by armoured-ant on Mar 9, 2003 - 10 comments

Textfiles.com: Before the Web, before Google, we scoured Fidonet, absorbing the forbidden fruits of anarchy, occult and a lot of bad fiction. For better or worse, TEXTFILES are relics of that age.
posted by magnificentsven on Jan 23, 2003 - 12 comments

Lee Felsenstein, saving the world with wifi and a bike. This old school computer hacker built a human powered wireless internet station named as one of the best inventions of 2002. Now he needs to raise $25,000 to wire five villages of farmers to the web (to obtain weather info, pricing data) and to each other. This is another story that reminds me not all of this technology is for gadget geeks. It really can help improve peoples' lives, as shown by the varied projects coming out of the Tech Museum grant winners and groups like this.
posted by mathowie on Jan 2, 2003 - 42 comments

Happy 20th Anniversary, Internet!

We ought not to let pass unnoticed the... 20th anniversary of the Internet. The most logical date of origin of the Internet is January 1, 1983, when the ARPANET officially switched from the NCP protocol to TCP/IP.

Where were you two decades ago on this date? And does anyone actually have a "I Survived the TCP/IP Transition" t-shirt?

Also being discussed on /.
posted by tenseone on Jan 1, 2003 - 35 comments

The US government recently released a draft of the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, essentially it advocates ensuring security through consensus, with vendors, government agencies and consumers taking responsibility for the tools they use. That's not enough for Marcus Ranman who in the TISC newsletter advocates passing legislation mandating consumers and ISPs to install firewalls and anti-viral software. At what point does an individuals (corporate or consumer) chosen level of computer security become a concern for the federal government?
posted by cedar on Oct 17, 2002 - 7 comments

Information gods amongst mortals is the first in a series of three blog entries (so far, anyway) by Brad Wardell on the topic of the growing knowledge gap between the net-savvy and the non-wired. I found the link in a newsletter from WinCustomize today. They plugged all three:

1. Information gods amongst mortals
2. The Information Gods respond
3. Information Gods Srike Back

He explores the theory that those who are net savvy are quickly leaping ahead of the non-wired among us: "You know the situation. Someone has told you something you want to know more about and within a few minutes you have gotten yourself up to speed on it. You did it through the use of the Internet. A combination of search engines and helpful websites have educated you on that topic."
posted by tbc on Sep 27, 2002 - 12 comments

Is self-regulation a legitimate approach to protecting copyright on the internet? This question is being debated at Spiked online which has commissioned responses from a variety of sources and also welcomes comments from readers.
posted by anathema on Sep 23, 2002 - 5 comments

Bait and Switch? (Quicktime Movie) - One of the Mac Faithful at fury.com makes a funny (but true) statement about the new .Mac service charge that Apple recently announced. How far can Apple push their core consumer market with this type of thing? In a News.com report, Apple predicts losing up to 90% of their existing .Mac users. That's some public relations plan. They are indeed thinking differently.
posted by Argyle on Jul 26, 2002 - 27 comments

First JPEG virus discovered... "The W32/Perrun virus, as it is now being called, extracts data from JPEG files and then injects picture files with infected digital images. A fair warning to those individuals who are fond of sending multimedia files to friends and families." Is everyone's porn stash threatened now?
posted by darian on Jun 14, 2002 - 28 comments

Etherlinx, plans to offer high-speed wireless access to the Internet at inexpensive prices. (NYT) Without venture capital backing, in a garage just six blocks from the garage where Steven P. Jobs and Stephen Wozniak launched Apple Computer 26 years ago, Mr. Holt is making his clever and inexpensive radio repeater by modifying inexpensive Wi-Fi cards, the circuitry that sends and receives the signals. Their ambitious target: the cable and phone companies that currently hold a near-monopoly on high-speed access for the "last mile" between the Internet and the home.
posted by semmi on Jun 10, 2002 - 2 comments

Globe of Blogs lists weblogs by location (Portugal, anyone?), title, authors's name, sex, age or birthday (why?). Problem is, the list is scanty at best. Sign yourself up.
posted by rodii on Mar 17, 2002 - 22 comments

Ya gotta love interesting and useful internet directories.
posted by pheideaux on Oct 22, 2001 - 5 comments

Remember the scary-sounding Hailstorm that was set to prove how evil Microsoft's system is? Well worry no longer, because it's now called .NET My Services. How could something with such a cute, gentle name like that be bad for users?
posted by mathowie on Sep 25, 2001 - 15 comments

Netscape 6.1???? Have you tried it? Do you like it? Should we get Mikey?
posted by thunder on Aug 25, 2001 - 33 comments

Another "new economy" company bites the big one. A month ago Metricom filed for chapter 11. Tomorrow they're shutting down the Ricochet wireless network, leaving their subscribers high and dry. Employees are getting one week of severance pay. They're leaving behind $1 billion in debt. (It's Webvan all over again.)
posted by Steven Den Beste on Aug 2, 2001 - 19 comments

Seeing weird things in your website logs today? This will explain it... Running IIS and haven't patched it in over a month? Go here. 13,000 servers have already been affected.
posted by machaus on Jul 19, 2001 - 37 comments

Woohoo! Follow the link to a post at the beloved-by-all-metafilterians Jason Levine.

read the fourth paragraph: it seems that i'm not the only one highly ticked off by the recent slew of x10 pop-under ads.

Jason has kindly provided links that will set cookies to prevent them from appearing for 30 days, 1 year or 10 years.

I modified the url yet again to keep it from popping up ever again within my lifetime.
posted by o2b on Jun 2, 2001 - 40 comments

InfoBots are coming. I believe we've touched on this before, but now it seems to be moving from concept to reality: Instant Messenger "buddies" that are actually bots. You send them an IM with a question, such as "Hey pal, what's the weather in Thunder Bay, Ontario?" And it IMs you back with the answer, almost instantaneously. No waiting for messy web sites to load, no funky searches to run. ActiveBuddy has been the most, um, active in developing the technology, but they've been working on it forever without anything to show to the public. Now, it's out there, somewhere. CNET is reporting today that an ActiveBuddy beta bot has been live for a few months; you can play with it right now if you know its name. (And if you do know its name, a tip would be appreciated. I've been jonesing for this for a good while.) A more public version is supposed to be out in a few weeks. Here buddy buddy buddy...
posted by aaron on Apr 25, 2001 - 17 comments

"Ah, the vibrant interaction of electronic conversation. Isn't it beautiful? In a word: No." A pessimistic take on "community."
posted by maura on Mar 26, 2001 - 26 comments

Digital Divide or Dividend? Is the Internet killing unique local cultures or strengthening them?
posted by andrewraff on Mar 16, 2001 - 3 comments

One million credit card numbers stolen! News at 11! The FBI has gone public with a rather dry account of a huge organized attack on ecommerce sites, exploiting security flaws in NT which Microsoft fixed and offered patches for nearly two years ago.
posted by Steven Den Beste on Mar 9, 2001 - 5 comments

Vatican might name Saint Isidore of Seville the patron saint of Internet users and computer programmers. The world keeps getting weirder, doesn't it?
posted by christian on Feb 6, 2001 - 24 comments

The year is 1995, and GE Information Services is looking to sell off its unprofitable online service GEnie. (Here is a rate sheet.) GEnie Lamp Apple II offers some thoughts on the sale, and here is a synopsis of the big online services after GEnie's demise (choice quotes abound!)
posted by hijinx on Jan 25, 2001 - 8 comments

Maybe I spoke too soon. A lot of semipro tech-zines, sort of like blogs except with specific subject matters to cover, are financed by ad networks. In the recent past a bunch of them have lost their funding when their ad networks went out of business. Now one of the biggest networks which remains is changing their terms to the detriment of the web sites. I gather that a lot of the ad networks were running at a loss, and of course new funding has dried up. [more inside]
posted by Steven Den Beste on Jan 5, 2001 - 6 comments

Blast from the past
Oh, those halcyon days of text-based real-time chat, before there was a Web. (I'm catching up on my link quotient....)
posted by rschram on Dec 10, 2000 - 11 comments

Misguided Brazilian script kiddies defaces Netherlands AIDS Fonds (Foundation). And what's even more bizzare is that it appears their "message" roughly translates as "Let us not forget World AIDS Day." Duh... go deface a denialist, idiots.
posted by bkdelong on Dec 1, 2000 - 1 comment

The Background image is a little off, but.... here's a page created entirely on a Commodore 64. Nice to know that everyone's in the web design loop.
posted by Cavatica on Aug 7, 2000 - 8 comments

"Dear Senator, As a user of the Internet and a fan of music, I am extremely concerned with the issues currently facing the digital music community, particularly those affecting my rights as a consumer to listen to the music that I have purchased. Your hearing has helped the public to understand my concerns."
posted by ericost on Jul 14, 2000 - 1 comment

Any server can read all your IE cookies. From any domain. Anyone. I was just explaing to my folks that the reason cookies are (generally) safe is that this was NOT possible. Well, it's possible now.
posted by ericost on May 11, 2000 - 32 comments