The Undefended Airwaves... For more than a decade, cryptographers have possessed strong encryption techniques that could virtually guarantee that data falling into the wrong hands—through a stolen laptop, say, or an intercepted radio signal—would be impossible to decode. Unfortunately, these techniques have not made it from the lab into the mainstream.

J. Edgar's Finest At Their Worst... One family’s ordeal at the hands of the FBI, which fingered the wrong man in its quest to unmask a spy, upending the lives of the CIA officer and his three children for the next two years. The accusations leveled in August 1999 prompted the CIA to suspend the officer for 21 months. He remained under surveillance, and his daughter was denied a promotion. His ex-wife, two sons and two sisters were interrogated at work and at home by FBI agents who cast doubt on the man they thought they knew. Friends and colleagues whispered about the traitor in their midst.

BBC News | SCI/TECH | Universe at their fingertips,,, The Cosmology Machine, has 128 UltrasparcIII processors, 112 gigabytes of RAM, and 7 terabytes of storage and can perform 10 billion calculations per second. The machine is attempting to re-create the entire evolution of the universe from the big bang to the present.

ASCI White - World's Fastest Computer... Lawrence Livermore National Laboratoy showed of the world's fastest computer yesterday. ASCI White (from IBM) can perform 12.3 trillion calculations per second. Among other things it is being used to simulate nuclear reactions , 3D modeling of atoms, and genetic research.

Scripting News: Beasts of Burden...A very intriguing post from Dave Winer, "I don't remember where I heard this idea, it could have been in NY. It goes like this. We think of ourselves as creatures of free will, the only conscious beings on this planet. We wonder if we're the only conscious beings in the universe. But there's another view of who we are -- beasts of burden for our genes. We carry them and propogate them, or let others propogate into ourselves, only to create more beasts driven to propogate their genes. In that view of the world, the genes are a higher form of life than we are. Who knows what drives them?"

Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene

Big Blue places $1 billion bet on Linux ... BY DAN GILLMOR, Mercury News -- For about an hour at the start of the IBM Technical Developer Conference Tuesday morning, a casual listener might have been forgiven for thinking he or she was at another kind of event entirely: a celebration of the GNU/Linux operating system. IBM is investing a huge amount of money and talent -- a reported $1 billion this year, including the efforts of hundreds of employees -- into Linux, as the software is more generally known. And, as was evident at the San Francisco conference, IBM executives are roaming the globe to boost a technology their company doesn't own and can't possibly control.

Easy Magic for You! ... Here are some very easy, but highly effective magic tricks for you to perform, from your Magic & Illusion Guide. Have fun!

(Wired) "...Octavo Digital Imaging and Preservation... Octavo's advanced digital imaging technology allows average readers to access 500 years of religious, artistic and scientific works that have been essentially inaccessible. Historians can examine Renaissance-age etchings in Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius or Giovanni Battista Braccelli's Bizzarie di Varie Figure, which languished in near-total obscurity until being rediscovered in modern times. The digital editions are produced on CD-ROM in PDF format. Scholars can purchase digitized renditions of 400-year-old texts worth thousands of dollars for $20 to $75. Each book is laid in a custom-built cradle and carefully lit to minimize exposure to light and heat. High-resolution digital cameras capture as much as 750MB of digital data with every scan at resolutions up to 10,600 x 12,800 pixels..."

Joe Burns, Ph.D.... And Remember: College football is going to get underway soon and already people are talking about who will win the Heisman Trophy. I can't comment on that but I can tell you that the model for the trophy was Warren Mulrey of Fordham University. Frank Eliscu sculpted the face. Trouble was, the first sculpture showed a smile on the stature's face. Eliscu changed the face to a snarl because he felt football players were fighters. The uniform Eliscu used for the sculpture was taken from a photo of Jay Berwanger of the University of Chicago. Those of you who know football trivia might find that last fact rather interesting past the historical. Jay Berwanger was the first player to win the Heisman. Go figure.

Are You Trying To Find A Spammer?... Query the 200 top-level domain registries and Regional Internet Registries around the world, and returns information about Internet sites. Information available includes owner of domain name, and often owner's mailing address, email address, phone number, and fax number. AND IT'S FREE!

Netscape 6.1 - Software Reviews - CNET.com... The good: Much more stable than Netscape 6; finally launches nearly as quickly as Internet Explorer. The bad: No significant new features. The bottom line: Netscape 6.1 is the browser that 6 should have been, but nine months later. If you're running Netscape 6, upgrade pronto; otherwise, there's no reason to jump the IE ship just yet.

Signs suggest final IE 6 is near... Supposedl Microsoft has told beta tester, "Internet Explorer 6 sets a new level in terms of stability and robustness, providing a quantitative improvement from Internet Explorer 5.0," the e-mail reads. "Also, Internet Explorer 6 provides a high level of support for W3C recommendations, ranging from base technologies, such as CSS and DOM, to brand-new ones such as SMIL 2.0."

AOL launches new Netscape browser... Whether Netscape 6.1 can rally the Netscape faithful remains to be seen. While Netscape 6 encountered first delays and then scathing reviews, Microsoft assembled an overwhelming lead in the browser market.

Privacy: The ugly truth... If anything, privacy is more about the right to remain anonymous. It's the right to know we are not being watched as we walk down the street or attend a public meeting. It's the right to know that facts about our personal lives are revealed only as we decide to release them and that the facts are correct. Privacy is about massive databases, identity theft, and the access to information.

New Hope for Alzheimer’s?... Although the vaccine has shown potential in animal studies, it’s not yet clear how successful it will be in humans. NEWSWEEK’s Laura Fording asked Dale Schenk, the developer of the vaccine and senior vice president at Elan, to elaborate on the work that has been done so far.

Hmmmm? Bill Gates must read Gilmore too. Microsoft has given PC makers the go-ahead to ship Windows XP as much as one full month before the operating system's official Oct. 25 launch date, sources close to four major PC makers told CNET News.com

Feds should force Microsoft into showdown over Windows XP :Dan Gilmore... Perhaps it's beginning to dawn on federal and state antitrust officials that Microsoft is playing for keeps. The company's unsurprising decision Tuesday to appeal its antitrust conviction to the Supreme Court looks more like a stalling tactic than anything else. But it comes at a crucial time -- on the eve of the release of Windows XP, the linchpin in Microsoft's plan to extend its monopoly into new areas of commerce.

BadBlue Server Software... It's FREE -- Search other PCs. Share files with others. Serve live web pages on your PC. Turn your PC into a powerful, file-sharing web server. BadBlue is a tiny, free download that lets you share files, serve powerful web applications (like PHP) and search other PCs (see screen shots, take a quick tutorial or read user testimonials).

BadBlue Server Software... It's FREE -- Search other PCs. Share files with others. Serve live web pages on your PC. Turn your PC into a powerful, file-sharing web server. BadBlue is a tiny, free download that lets you share files, serve powerful web applications (like PHP) and search other PCs (see screen shots, take a quick tutorial or read user testimonials).

A Violent Sun Affects the Earth's Ozone... “A lot of impacts on ozone, like those caused by humans, are very subtle and happen over long periods of time,” says Jackman. “But when these solar proton events occur you can see immediately a change in the atmosphere.”

A Violent Sun Affects the Earth's Ozone... “A lot of impacts on ozone, like those caused by humans, are very subtle and happen over long periods of time,” says Jackman. “But when these solar proton events occur you can see immediately a change in the atmosphere.”

Upphafssíða... Check out the drop down menu on this site for a list of cams from all over Iceland. They offer a glimpse of a country that not many of us have seen.

NOVA Online... You can watch many Nova programs in full, right on their Web site. The episodes are divided into chapters so you can skip to the parts that interest you most.

AT&T Labs Speech Technologies -- has a demo of their speech software. It puts a whole ne spin on 'HELLO WORLD'.

PhysicsWeb Features - The physics of the Web... All previous Internet-related research concentrated on designing better protocols and faster components. More recently, an increasing number of scientists have begun to ask an unexpected question: what exactly did we create?

CNN.com - Study: Multitasking is counterproductive - August 5, 2001 -- Multitasking is a managerial buzz-concept these days, a post-layoff corporate assumption that the few can be made to do the work of many. But newly released results of scientific studies in multitasking indicate that carrying on several duties at once may, in fact, reduce productivity, not increase it.

PERCobol COBOL Compiler bridging capabilities of COBOL with Java technology for client/server and WEB... PERCobol is a COBOL compiler that bridges the strength and power of COBOL with the features and functions of Java. PERCobol is a full function COBOL compiler allowing programmers to make use of the existing skills and business logic to build applications with features only present in Java. It understands most HP COBOL II syntax. This means that it will allow you to continue to develop in HP COBOL on the 3000 for as long as you like with the knowledge that the code is portable. It also means that you will have to make minimal changes to existing code in order to use it on your target platform(s).

GM Tests Fuel Cell Power Generator — The same fuel cell technology the automakers are developing in hopes of producing pollution-free vehicles may also be the answer to preventing power blackouts, a General Motors Corp. executive said Tuesday. In a statement distributed to reporters at an industry conference here, Larry Burns, GM vice president for research and development planning, said for the past six months the automaker has been testing a stationary fuel cell-powered generator at its Rochester, N.Y. research facility. The fuel cell generator GM is testing extracts hydrogen from either natural gas, methane or gasoline. The hydrogen is then mixed with oxygen from the air and the fuel cell converts it to electricity.