newscientist.com:

Wireless subway cards cracked

Riders of Boston's T and London's Tube take note - the prepaid cards you use to pay subway fares have been cracked.

Karsten Nohl, a computer science researcher at the University of Virginia, claims to have broken the encryption used by the RFID (radio frequency identification) chip found in the Charlie Card on the Boston T subway system and in the Oyster Card on the London Underground.

To make surfing the Web a more social and lighthearted experience ... designers are grafting a massively multiplayer online game on top of ordinary Web browsing. Players rack up points as they visit sites, devise themed missions that lead other players through sets of websites, and leave notes for one another--all of it invisible to nonplayers. GameLayers calls its game PMOG, for "passively multiplayer online game," because "we're layering games on top of things that are already there," says CEO and cofounder Justin Hall...

Anyone who uses an iPhone will soon reap the benefits of the phone's new capabilities--from accessing business e-mail, to running familiar desktop programs, to exploiting the built-in accelerometer for new gesture-based interfaces.

"The entire un-conference movement started from the frustration with terrible interviews and terrible panels," said Chris Heuer, a social media consultant in San Francisco who has run his own un-conferences, such as Web 2.1, which he runs for free during the high-priced and exclusive Web 2.0 conference. "People finally feel empowered to take control."

It's been over 12 hours with no response from my hosting service 1and1.com's support people.

I've been searching the web all day for others with this problem. Just now I found this note from a user who had a similar problem 3 years ago.

...my .htaccess was giving a lot of 404 errors, and none of the mod_rewrite rules were working. It turns out that 1and1 (without telling me) enabled the apache Multiviews setting, which plays havoc with the rewrite rules... The solution? Disabling MultiViews in this directory by adding this line to the .htaccess file:

Options -MultiViews

I added that line to my htaccess file, and it started working again immediately.

I think the time is coming to leave 1and1.com behind.

Now it's doing it all over again with Jason Calcanis.

BTW, TWIT #135 "Zuck This" is the best ep of TWIT that I've heard in a long time.

First impression is that it's pretty good.

Supports the dev of all sorts of apps.

One thing I'm a little iffy on is the requirement to distribute apps through the new Apple "App Store". The good news is it seems pretty open. Apple will distribute most apps (no porn, no hacker apps) in return for 30% of the price. Price determined by the developer. Free apps distributed at no charge by Apple.

Apps for the iPhone will also run on the iTouch device too.

Since I'm on the verge of becoming an iPhone owner, I'm sure I'll have more to say about this as time goes on.

The video quality is fuzzy. The frame rate is choppy. The screen blacks out on a regular basis. Murphy's Law: the image will skip frames at just the moment you want to see a pitch cross the plate, or a player reach for a challenging play.

I'm tempted to cancel this thing right away and try to get my $$ back ($20 per month), but I'll probably give it another chance and see how it works with one of its own games. This one is from ESPN.

Once derided as a white elephant, the U.S. Marine Corps' tilt-rotor aircraft, the V-22 Osprey, is proving its mettle in Iraq, military officials said.

The Osprey, which takes off and lands like a helicopter but flies like a plane, was designed to replace the Corps' aging and less-capable helicopter fleet.

...

Last September, Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 263 left for Iraq's western Anbar province on the first deployment of the V-22.

Since then, the planes have logged more than 2,000 flight hours, initially doing routine cargo and troop movements from base to base in an area about the size of South Carolina.

In December, commanders gave the planes a more risky mission called "aero-scout" in which a group of V-22s flies into a relatively unsecured location and drops off Marines for a search mission.

The planes sit on the ground until the Marines load up and then fly off to somewhere else for another mission.

Notable:

* Remembering how truly revolutionary the bit-mapped graphics were.
* Monochrome screen
* "insanely great"
* Programming example was in Pascal. The "cool" language back then.
* It took awhile for text-to-speech to get much better than that.
* Steve said, "all the images will be generated" I'm assuming the audio is from another source.
* The audience response is a little ove-the-top. It was a crowd of mostly Apple employees, but still.
* Steve had hair and a bow-tie. I used to have hair too, but never a bow-tie.

Ah memories. ... When I was a boy we didn't have no internet. You had to walk to the computer store, uphill, both ways.

My response has always been: five years from now it's still gonna take petroleum to make gas, but we'll find new ways to make bio fuels.

Here's a great example:

From an article in Wired.com:

A biofuel startup in Illinois can make ethanol from just about anything organic for less than $1 per gallon, and it wouldn't interfere with food supplies, company officials said.

Coskata, which is backed by General Motors and other investors, uses bacteria to convert almost any organic material, from corn husks (but not the corn itself) to municipal trash, into ethanol.

"It's not five years away, it's not 10 years away. It's affordable, and it's now,"...

Nanoptek, a startup based in Maynard, MA, has developed a new way to make hydrogen from water using solar energy. The company says that its process is cheap enough to compete with the cheapest approaches used now, which strip hydrogen from natural gas, and it has the further advantage of releasing no carbon dioxide.

Many people claim that the fatal flaw in using hydrogen as the replacement for gasoline is that is also uses petroleum and natural gas to make hydrogen. But you have to remember that, while that may be true today, in five years you'll still be making gasoline from petroleum, but we'll have come up with all sorts of other ways to make alt fuels like hydrogen and biofuels.

The concept of storing my data in "the cloud" is very appealing to me from a tech viewpoint. The security of professional backups. The fact that it's accessible from anywhere. The potential for multiple-host backup. All these things are appealing.

But I worry about how assertively these hosting services, even (especially?) Apple, will protect my data from interlopers. Pirates and governments.

If I keep my data on my own local drives, I can do what I think is reasonable to keep bad hackers from breaking into it and abusing it. I can firewall the drive from the net, encrypt it, or just hide it in the closet.

And if the government decides it wants to see my stuff, I can decide how aggressively I oppose that attempt. I fear that a hosting company would routinely accede to any subpoena for access to my data, even a frivolous one.

So I'm not yet comfortable with the idea of letting someone else keep my data.

But it is very tempting.

DailyMail.co.uk:

An experimental helmet which scientists say could reverse the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease within weeks of being used is to be tried out on patients.

The strange-looking headgear - which has to be worn for ten minutes every day - bathes the brain with infra-red light and stimulates the growth of brain cells.

Its creators believe it could reverse the symptoms of dementia - such as memory loss and anxiety - after only four weeks.

Alzheimer's disease charities last night described the treatment as "potentially life- changing" - but stressed that the research was still at the very early stages.

Wear it daily, right after the 15 mins in your tin-foil hat.