As Eolas Technologies moved a step closer to sliding half a billion or so US dollars into its back pocket, courtesy of its so-far successful patent infringement case against Microsoft, reports emerge of company founder Michael Doyle having friendly chats with the "Linux community".

Mr Doyle is one of the named inventors on U.S. Patent, number 5,838,906, a "distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document."

EWeek reports that Doyle told them he has been: "in discussions with major players in Linux world and working on plan to resolve '906 patent issue with entire Linux community." Any solution, Doyle added, "Will be supportive of open-source community."

Once Mr Doyle has the half-a-bill firmly wedged in his back pocket, he'll do a deal to allow open sourcers to use the technology freely, we imagine. And, sticking with our imagination, it seems Doyle, conscious of his public image, wants to be seen as a Robin Hood figure, redistributing, by legal means, the massive wealth accumulated through the Sheriff of Redmond's Windows tax.

WASHINGTON Jan. 14 — President Bush beckoned the nation "forward into the universe" on Wednesday, outlining a costly new effort to return Americans to the moon as early as 2015 and use it as a waystation to Mars and beyond.

Bush said he envisioned "a new foothold on the moon...and new journeys to the world beyond our own," underscoring a renewed commitment to manned spaceflight less than a year after the loss of the space shuttle Columbia and a crew of seven.

The latest installment of the CodeCon trilogy has been unveiled, as the coders DIY technical conference brings a mix of old hands and bedsit coders to San Francisco next month.

Highlights of CodeCon 2004 include FunFS, a low latency, userspace file system; the in house source code management system that's been used by DEC/Compaq's microprocessor design team for the past five years, Vesta, and a presentation from Roger Dingledine on a second-generation anonymizing overlay to TCP/IP. "Freely available unpatented Onion Routing code has been a cypherpunk goal for more than a decade," note the organizers.

The event takes place over a long weekend (February 20 to 22) and registration is $95, with a $20 early bird discount. For value for money, it's one of the highlights of the calendar. Highlights of previous CodeCons have included the Peek-A-Booty anonymous browser, and Alluvium "swarm radio", a peer to peer broadcasting infrastructure that reminds the RIAA that their problems have only just begun.

I avoided the big story of the last week or so concerning the fact that many image manipulation programs, including Photoshop, were now including technology that's only purpose was to stop people from scanning images of major currencies. However, this latest article on the topic brings up two interesting points. First, and most importantly, the system they're using is so weak, that just about everyone has figured out a way around it. This is just like many copy-protection systems found on entertainment offerings.

The other disturbing part about this revelation is that Adobe admits that they don't even know how the blocking software works. They were given the code by by the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group without details on how it works or what it really does. In other words, the software could do a lot more than blocking images of currency.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Lots of people wish they could jack their brain directly to their computer and toss out those annoying keyboards and joysticks -- especially people who can't use keyboards or joysticks.

Five quadriplegic patients might be months away from testing a brain-computer interface created by Cyberkinetics, a privately held company in Foxboro, Massachusetts. The company's system, called BrainGate, could help patients with no mobility to control a computer, a robot or eventually their own rewired muscles, using only their thoughts. If the trials go well, a product could be on the market by 2007.

"It looks a lot like the Matrix," Surgenor said, referring to the sockets in the backs of the movie characters' heads that allowed them to log into the Matrix grid.

"Daphnia blue-crested fish cattle, darkorange fountain moss, beaverwood educating, eyeblinking advancing, dulltuned amazons...."

This is not a failed attempt at free-form prose. It's a snippet of a spam message intended to promote a sexual stimulant, a deliberate crack at sneaking past and spoiling some of the most popular antispam filters.

By throwing a hundred or so random words rarely used in sales spiels into each e-mail missive, spammers hope to thwart Bayesian filters by making the spam appear to be personal correspondence.

The strange strings of words, which usually appear at the bottom of spam and sometimes in the subject line, are automatically added by spammers' mass-mailer software, according to Steve Linford of Spamhaus, an antispam advocacy organization.

"This random noise is technically known as a 'hash buster,'" Linford explained. "Hashing" is a technique used by some spam filters to quickly compare incoming mail to known spam.

Police in Germany have arrested a shopper who tried to get a refund on two computers after allegedly replacing the working parts with potatoes.

Staff at the department store in Kaiserslautern called detectives after the man complained that a machine he'd bought only hours before did not work.

When they opened the computer they found it stuffed full of potatoes. The Guardian reports bemused shop assistants gave the man a new machine free of charge.

But they became suspicious when the customer returned a short time later with another computer - again filled with potatoes.

A spokesman said: "The second time he said he didn't need a computer any more and asked for his money back in cash."

Computer technician Roman Zukoan said: "It is hard to imagine how the potatoes could get into a computer's casing. When computers leave the factory they are packed in plastic to prevent damage from condensation.

If they are running for a long time they get hot and in theory it would be possible to cook a potato in a computer, but who would try that?"

Burger King customers visiting a drive-through restaurant had to run a gamut of abuse after pranksters succeeded in hacking into the outlet's wireless intercom system.

Investigators believe teenage practical jokers are behind the insults delivered to Burger King customers at an outlet outside Troy, Michigan over the last fortnight.

Officer Gerry Scherlink told reporters that one customer was told "You don't need a couple of Whoppers. You are too fat. Pull ahead."

A spurious mail claiming to be from Citibank has started appearing in inboxes everywhere, again.

The emal purporting to be from the bank, claims that Citibank had to block accounts because of "money laundering, credit card fraud, terrorism and check fraud activity".

Also, over the weekend, a rash of other fraudulent emals purporting to be from Paypal and Barclays started tipping up in inboxes.

To amend section 1464 of title 18, United States Code, to provide for the punishment of certain profane broadcasts, and for other purposes.

December 8, 2003
Mr. OSE (for himself and Mr. SMITH of Texas) introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary

A BILL
To amend section 1464 of title 18, United States Code, to provide for the punishment of certain profane broadcasts, and for other purposes.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That section 1464 of title 18, United States Code, is amended--

(1) by inserting '(a)' before 'Whoever'; and

(2) by adding at the end the following:

'(b) As used in this section, the term 'profane', used with respect to language, includes the words 'shit', 'piss', 'fuck', 'cunt', 'asshole', and the phrases 'cock sucker', 'mother fucker', and 'ass hole', compound use (including hyphenated compounds) of such words and phrases with each other or with other words or phrases, and other grammatical forms of such words and phrases (including verb, adjective, gerund, participle, and infinitive forms).'.