Here is something rather terrifying, the AP reports that a technology behind monitoring implanted defibrillators are vulnerable to hacking. Via wireless, they can be accessed, turned off or reprogrammed.

In the model that researchers studied, transmissions from the defibrillator to the bedside monitor are not encrypted, which means someone intercepting the transmissions could retrieve such data as the patient’s birth date, medical ID number and, in some cases, Social Security number.

As the technology spreads to more medical devices, including pacemakers, spinal-cord stimulators and hearing implants – and as the range of the devices’ radio signals increase – the researchers predict patients’ data will face increasing risks.

While the chance of such an occurrence taking place may seem remote - it would require a quite nefarious individual’s desire to wreak individual havoc - why should this risk be deemed acceptable? After all, is that expensive to encrypt? Me thinks not.

Moli lets you create a meta-profile that allows you to segment and sort various aspect of your personality. Essentially it lets you use one account to manage multiple profiles on social networking sites. Technology Review has a solid write up of the service:

Directed at users who are trying to balance personal and professional networks, Moli offers multiple profiles–with different privacy settings–within one account.

Users of Moli can set up as many profiles as they want, and they can choose to make them public, private, or hidden. Anyone, whether he has signed up for Moli or not, can search for and view a public profile. A private profile will show up on searches, but to access it, a user must be a member of Moli and must have approval from the profile’s owner. A hidden profile is invisible in searches and can only be viewed by people invited by the owner. Balint says that users are free to set up multiple profiles of various types, with the requirement that they must designate at least one public profile.

TechCruch reports that recent data indicates that there is a socio-economic divide between the frequent users of Google and Yahoo. They even have a graph!

The differences between the groups aren’t great, but the results do go some way in explaining the Yahoo conundrum. Although a distance second in search, Yahoo has remained the number one traffic destination online ahead of Google, so you’d think with more traffic Yahoo would convert that traffic into similar returns to Google. But alas we know that not to be the case, and that would appear in part to be related to people using Yahoo not spending as much online and being in poorer demographic categories than Google users, providing a lower return per user.

via Smart Mobs

Even though Adobe has recently released a security patch for Reader and its Acrobat products, PDF files are still susceptible to some nasty trojan horse virusing (I know that ‘virusing’ is not a proper word).

In this case, hackers use malicious banner ads as a host for an infected PDF. The PDF then installs the Zonebac Trojan, which sets to work deactivating antivirus products, modifying search results, and changing banner ads.

Adobe’s 8.12 update supposedly plugs the loopholes that the Zonebac delivery system exploited, but the company has declined to give any information on what, exactly, the update changed. The lack of information is disappointing (though not surprising), but Adobe’s failure to address the issue in a timely manner raises questions about the firm’s commitment to security. An 18-day gap between the appearance of a verified exploit and the release of a patch isn’t exactly impressive, and this particular issue had been on Adobe’s radar for months. iDefense Labs first reported the existence of this particular buffer overflow vulnerability in early October 2007.

The attack has raised some questions regarding the security of the PDF standard

via arstechnica

A fan of Facebook or just eager to attempt to monetize social networking? You could always make your Facebook application. Here is one primer on how you can do that.

Polaroid camera owners, like myself, better start stocking up on Polaroid film as the company is closing out production of its film as it is closing the production plants. The only way that the film may remain on the marketplace is if Polaroid is successful in its attempts to find a partner to license the technology to.

The BBC reports on an innovative green heating initiative in Stockholm:

In Sweden, the Jernhusen company, which owns Stockholm’s central station, is planning to channel passenger warmth to heat a 13-storey office block being built next to the station.

Heat exchangers in the station’s ventilation system will convert the body heat into hot water, which will be pumped into the heating system of the building.

It is not yet certain how effective the technique will be.

But Jernhusen engineers hope it will meet up to 15% of the heating needs of the building, which will provide about 40,000 square metres of space for offices, hotels, restaurants and shops.

Some existing buildings already recycle body heat from people in the building to contribute to heating requirements.

But this is the first time excess heat is to be transferred from one building to another.

Thanks to Dana

EBay is revamping its feedback system, arguably the essence of the service. The most significant change to come out of this overhaul is taking away the ability for sellers to provide negative or neutral feedback about buyers.

The Christian Science Monitor reports on a protest that started on Facebook and ended up on the streets of Colombia:

Hundreds of thousands of Colombians are expected to march throughout the country and in major cities around the world Monday to protest against this nation’s oldest and most powerful rebel group.

What began as a group of young people venting their rage at the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) on Facebook, an Internet social-networking site, has ballooned into an international event called “One Million Voices Against FARC.”

“We expected the idea to resound with a lot of people but not so much and not so quickly,” says Oscar Morales, who started the Facebook group against the FARC, which now has 230,000 members. Organizers are expecting marches in 185 cities around the world.

The event is another example of how technology – such as text messaging on cellphones – can be used to rally large numbers of people to a cause. Some observers say it’s less a response to the FARC’s ideology than it is global public outrage over kidnapping as a weapon.

via Smart Mobs

From Nature.org (via digg):

In fact, if you leave your computer on 24 hours a day, it could be responsible for releasing up to 1,500 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. The flying-toaster screen saver is cool…but is it that cool?

But if you have to leave your computer on, here’s a way you can make up for it: By joining a distributed computing network that models the effects of climate change.

Distributed computing networks harness the unused power of thousands of personal computers to perform complicated tasks.

For instance, climateprediction.net is a distributed network run by Oxford University and other partners that helps climate scientists run climate models on networked computers when those computers are on, but are not running at full capacity.

Wow - leaving a computer on to such a degree really does leave a heavy carbon foot-print for something that would just be sitting there otherwise. I say turn it off, but, yeah, if you do leave it on why have your CPU work away on something useful.

A 20-year-old ethnic Russian man is the first person to be convicted for taking part in a “cyber war” against Estonia.

Dmitri Galushkevich was fined 17,500 kroons (£830) for an attack which blocked the website of the Reform Party of Prime Minister Andrus Ansip.

The assault, between 25 April and 4 May 2007, was one of a series by hackers on Estonian institutions and businesses.

At the time, Estonia accused the Russian government of orchestrating the attacks. Moscow denied any involvement.

Read more from the BBC.

As the International Herald Tribune reports things are brewing in Israel to test not the electric car per see, but the mass consumption of the electric car.

The idea, said Shai Agassi, 39, the software entrepreneur behind the new company, is to sell electric car transportation on the model of the cellphone. Purchasers get subsidized hardware - the car - and pay a monthly fee for expected mileage, like minutes on a cellphone plan, eliminating concerns about the fluctuating price of gasoline.

“Because the price of gasoline fluctuates so much during the life of a car, it’s hard to predict the cost basis for driving,” Agassi said. “But electricity fluctuates less, and you can buy it in advance, so I can give you a guaranteed price per mile, cheaper than the price of gas today.”

Have you ever been curious about the history of the toothpick? All is revealed over here.

The plain wooden toothpick is among the sim­plest of manufactured things. It consists of a single part, made of a single material, and is intended for a single purpose, from which it takes its name. But simple things do not necessarily come easily, and the story of the mass-produced toothpick is one of preparation, inspiration, invention, marketing, competition, success and failure in a global econ­omy, and changing social customs and cultural values. In short, the story of the toothpick is a par­adigm for American manufacturing.

via Arts & Letter Daily

The International Herald Tribune explores the interesting subject of lighting. More specifically, the article discusses the various options for energy and not energy efficient lighting and how compact fluorescent bulb (CFL) is likely to be the future winner, even though it does not give off ‘nice’ light.

One designer has threatened to wage war against them. Another reckons they’re so depressing that we’ll be driven into psychotherapy. A manufacturer describes them as “very unfriendly” and, even, “a little violent.”

The objects of their derision are compact fluorescent bulbs, otherwise known as CFLs, the miniaturized versions of fluorescent strip lights, which are touted as energy-efficient alternatives to the incandescent bulbs that have lit our homes for over a century. The problem is the quality of their light. “It’s completely indifferent and boring,” said the German lighting designer, Ingo Maurer (the one who thinks they’ll be a boon for shrinks). “They make you feel as though you’re waiting for a bus or a train at a desolate station.”

I do not quite get it. While this virtual walk fund-raiser raises money for a good cause, breast cancer research and related groups, it is a walk-a-thon where you do not walk anywhere.

Supporters design their own avatar for a $3 donation, add clothes and accessories and a personal story and then watch themselves walk from Boston to San Francisco against a changing daily landscape.

Fitzmaurice said the idea was to help busy women, no matter what their physical condition, lend their help in a fun, creative way during October’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month. She hopes that 1 million walkers sign up.

Television manufacturers and broadcasters have produced what may be the world’s most boring TV program to measure energy consumption on new-generation televisions, an energy standards group said on Tuesday.

The aim is to have a standard way of measuring how much energy plasma and LCD TVs use…

Read a little more about it here.

The Associated Press (via the Globe and Mail) reports that there was a deadly mishap explosion at the development grounds for the crafts that will be used by Virgin Galactic for its space tourism offering. The explosion happened in the Mojave Desert back in July. I do not know about you, but I only heard about this yesterday.

…three technicians died and three others were critically injured while performing a routine cold-flow test of nitrous oxide that did not involve a rocket firing. The company, which has done the test numerous times before without a problem, uses the chemical as an oxidizer in its spaceship’s hybrid rocket motor.
…
Virgin Galactic did privately contact its prized customers known as founders, who have paid the full $200,000 to be among the first to experience four minutes of weightlessness.

Stephen Attenborough, Virgin Galactic’s astronaut liaison, reassured the founders in an e-mail that the accident’s impact on the first commercial spaceflights — expected in late 2009 or 2010 — will be “minimal” and that it was “business as usual.”

Space.com has a nice article on the two rovers that are still going strong on Mars.

Those peppy Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, continue to make tracks as they wheel about two diverse locales on Mars – far outstripping their original warranties of 90 days of lifetime and a target of roughly 2,000 feet (600 meters) of driving range when they landed on the planet in January 2004.

Both of the mechanized emissaries from Earth remain hard at work, said Steven Squyres, principal investigator for the NASA Mars Exploration Rover Project and astronomer at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Stephen Colbert did it and so did the Decemberists and Modest Mouse. Now Bill Cosby is getting in on the green screen challenge to the world-at-large to provide the backdrop for him. Cosby’s video is a fund raising challenge for every American to donate $8 to the U.S. National Slavery Museum. You can see some of the entries on youtube or visit the fund raiser’s site.

via pop candy

Yahoo, starting in May, will be changing it’s e-mail service to unlimited storage size. And yes, it will all be free.