Hulleye Comes By!

A disgruntled city computer engineer has virtually commandeered San Francisco’s new multimillion-dollar computer network, altering it to deny access to top administrators even as he sits in jail on $5 million bail, authorities said Monday.

Terry Childs, a 43-year-old computer network administrator who lives in Pittsburg, has been charged with four counts of computer tampering and is scheduled to be arraigned today.

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The damage is still being assessed, but authorities say undoing his denial of access to other system administrators could cost millions of dollars.

Officials also said they feared that although Childs is in jail, he may have enabled a third party to access the system by telephone or other electronic device and order the destruction of hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents.

Authorities have searched Childs’ home and car for a device that could be used in such an attack, but so far no such evidence has been found.

As part of his alleged sabotage, Childs engineered a tracing system to monitor what other administrators were saying and doing related to his personnel case, law enforcement officials said.

what does it take to become batman in real life? scientific american takes a closer look.

radiohead is awesome. google is sometimes awesome. the better part of all of this is that, google recognizes that radiohead is awesome. from the google blog:

A few weeks ago we heard about a project Radiohead was working on. The band was making a new video, but they weren’t using any cameras, just lasers and data. As you might imagine, we were intrigued.

The song is called “House of Cards,” from Radiohead’s recent “In Rainbows” album. In this new video, there were no cameras on set. Instead, two scanning technologies were used to capture 3D images. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produced structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne LIDAR system that uses multiple lasers was used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In the video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.

Whether you’re a music fan or a developer (or both), we agreed with the band that it would be great to give you a deeper look into how all of this was done, and even a chance to play with the data yourself, under a license that allows remixing.

You can view the video, watch a short documentary about how it was made, interact with the video in 3D, download some of the data, and download an iGoogle theme and gadget - all at http://code.google.com/radiohead.

so not sure if i’ve ever mentioned this, but i’m a HUGE fan of the browser opera. recently i’ve realized how much behind any other browser is in it’s ability to be usable. customization of the browser, it’s plugins, it’s user community, it’s keyboard shortcuts, it’s mail client (more about this in a bit), is far superior than anything i’ve used previously.

you ask why you should download it. well…it’s about getting more out of the time that you spend on the internet. opera is designed to be much faster than other browsers, giving you powerful features that most other browsers lack. it has one of the best reputations in security as well. it pioneered and adopted a lot of features which are new to firefox and IE.

it’s mail client is nothing like i’ve ever used before. initially i hated it but then slowly after using it for a week, i adopted it like a fish to water. it indexes everything without any fussing and searches are instantaneous and it integrates with the browser perfectly. oh yeah, IMAP support for gmail rocks. the filters are incredible and it just works. if you’re used to evolution or outlook, this will just blow you away.

you can learn more about the browser at operawatch.com as well. if you’re a fan of keyboard shortcuts, then you won’t be disappointed. almost EVERYTHING in the browser has a shortcut and is completely customizable. in fact, there are so many shortcuts i have trouble keeping track of each one.

if you do one thing today, try out opera. and then keep using it.

Bell Canada Inc., accused last week by Google Inc. of breaking the law by slowing broadband connections, has fired back and said if anybody is acting as the internet’s gatekeeper and furthering its own interests, it’s the search engine company.

“If there is, indeed, any gatekeeping activity on the internet, which is questionable, the gatekeeping is being performed by the internet search engines, which are typically the users’ window to the near-infinite content available worldwide,” Bell wrote in a Friday submission to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission and made public on Tuesday.